The winds of destiny change.

How interesting.

Indeed.

Weeping Cherry has no way of knowing any of that.

She tries for some time to get someone to talk to her on the radio, in slowly less garbled Low Gothic.

"Please, I just want people to get what they want. I have capabilities and knowledge to trade. I'm willing to cooperate with your investigations, up to a point, but not with dying. I'm sorry I scared you; I don't understand how. I really do want to help ..."

After a certain point, nobody is listening.

Not because nobody ever wants to, on a world with trillions of humans and many billions of radios. Many a heretic will be wistful of Cherry, for a time.

It's that the military, at some point, starts jamming her frequencies. 

The military, of course, doesn't listen. They aren't the diplomatic corps*, they are the military.

*Imperium has none such, actually. And consequently, ironically, the military often does have to play the role of diplomatic corps after all. But desperate pleas of innocence and implausible offers of power aren't moving those gears. Anyone would say that.

Cherry receives an answer in form of a rain.

It's a rain of supersonic tungsten. First, a drop of rain falls upon her. 

Then, if she's still there, an another, then a third and fourth and fifth in quick succession.

Then 19, in a hexagonal grid, and an another 19 on top.

Meanwhile, the first wave of warplanes is flying in.

Yikes!

Her fixity crystal reflexively dodges the first few. The nice thing about tungsten is that it gives her something solid to push on, in order to maneuver.

By the time she consciously reacts, though, she decides that they're probably going to keep shooting. And while she doesn't care too much about the ocean under her, there's still the possibility they could escalate.

She pretends to go down to the closely spaced grid, letting out a convincing explosion of gore and exotic particles. In reality, she lets her body go, pulling herself entirely into her fixity crystal. Then, she has her crystal become invisible and latch onto the falling tungsten, letting it pull her down and into the ocean.

"Well, General, I think we got her!"

"Oh? Praise the Emperor, and good riddance. Junhe, recall the planes! Johannes, wrap up the mobilization. Lester, fetch the report form A-53. I'm going to finally finish my recaf. What a morning!"

But did you?

But did you get her, though?

A very, very serious person is going to make a very, very thorough inquiry about that.

A tiny unremarkable spaceship launches off to Impera Dix. It doesn't take any time to prepare; very serious people make all the travel preparations in advance.

It will take some time to arrive, though; and it'll take time for the people inside to do their business.

But for the time being, it's calm.

Cherry isn't on the news. It's unbecoming of the faithful subjects of the Emperor to know of such matters. The less you know, the better you sleep.

The weapons are undeployed, and though the witnesses aren't yet dismissed and the area around Cherry's landing is cleansed by fire and then blessed by the Ecclesiarchy to eliminate any sort of taint and then kept off limits just in case, for the most part, normal functioning of the Hive World continues.

People are birthed by millions, and by millions they are drafted.

Weeping Cherry floats just below the surface of the ocean, drifting in random directions. Receiving radio is harder underwater, but by no means impossible when you have good enough antennas.

She prioritizes building a translation model for Low Gothic, and finally gets something more-or-less acceptable, although there will certainly be some errors to quash. She listens to interesting analog transmissions, to try and piece things together. And she works on figuring out how to decode their digital transmissions, with an eye to eventually being able to send her own signals.

Two questions guide her search: why did they react like that, and how can she do better when it comes time to reveal herself again?

Gosh. What a fucking question.

Like, where do we even start?

Holy fuck.

Okay. Okay.

So.

Here's an interesting analog transmission. It's an educational program for children.

It's called Young Eagles (Are Eagles Still).

Are you too young to serve the Emperor and Mankind with their labor or your life? This program aims to help you serve anyway.

It contains practical advice, such as:

Brush your teeth and don't overeat sour or spicy food or sugar, the Emperor wants you to be able to subsist on rough food in battle or should famine come, and you can't do that if you have no teeth or have chronic stomach inflammation or diabetes. 

If you cause a disturbance in your house, fix it. Your parents are devoting their daily lives to service of mankind, and it would be great help if they didn't have to spend physical effort on restoring order or mental effort on living in disorder.

If you notice anything unusual but not overtly heretical in the behavior of your acquaintances or parents, that's no cause to go to the Arbites or Administratum; they have enough on their plate to listen to every child's request, even if this child is conscious enough to listens to our program. However, by no means keep it to yourself. Report it to two other judicious adults you trust, simultaneously; and then decide what to do together, with agreement of the two overriding the third. If you think Imperium's attention is warranted, report it together to a local ombudsman or militia captain, or an Ecclesiarch, a local Commissar if there is one. Do not investigate anything by yourself, lest you become involved in unsavory things yourself.

It also offers motivational advice, such as:

Always remember, however hard life may seem now, it can always get harder. So cherish these moments, young one, as the memory of them will keep you warm even on a mission in a death world!

Your zeal will go away if not exercised, but it is also a finite resource that will burn out if you let it flare too brightly. Restrain your zeal without throttling it, and it will grow in you until needed.

Always remember, however lowly you may be in Imperium's eyes, you are infinitely superior to any heretic, xeno, or mutant!

And it shares motivational stories, such as:

A city on an agriworld have lost it's only generator, because a crucial detail in it have failed; and thus they lost steady access to freshwater, as they had to mechanically pump it from deep underground. But the adults were busy completing the plan for the soon to come Imperial Tithe to do anything about that. The town's kids banded together and rummaged an old battlefield for parts. Some died heroes' deaths on landmines; but they have scavenged a lot of components and eventually found the one needed to save the town from dehydration.

A girl once noticed her father going out at night. He told her to keep it a secret, and she readily agreed. But she knew that from Commissars, Ecclesiarchs and Inquisitors, there can be no secrets, and she told her ecclesiarch of the incident, and in two weeks, the Inquisition rooted out a heretical cult and gifted Emperor's peace to all the stray souls in it. The orphaned girl who saved the planet was granted a sigil of distinction and a mandate to study in Schola Progenium. She chose a noble profession of a Commissar.

Almost all transmissions, interesting or not, private or public, have relatively frequent explicit or implicit reference to:

The God-Emperor of Mankind, who is the only source of salvation, and the founder of The Imperium of Man.

Duty of every (biological) human to believe in, obey, and serve the above.

Assumed equality of "humankind" with "the Imperium of Man".

Assumption that the interests of humankind/Imperium are incompatible with the interests of anyone else - dissenters and heretics, xenos, and mutants.

Well. That is not at all what she expected. But, then again, she wasn't expecting to explode, either. Really, that first explosion has somewhat set the tone.

Weeping Cherry considers her options. She's tempted to try to make contact again, now that she has a slightly better understanding of how to present herself. She doesn't like slinking off when there are a lot of people she could be helping just by zipping around. But. She doesn't understand how their technology works, there's only one of her right now, and she's not actually all that confident that even her best second attempt would go much better.

She does think she might have a better time if she contacted the resistance — because a place like this will certainly have generated a resistance — but she doesn't exactly know how to get in contact with them discreetly.

She was nearly full of energy when she first landed, but she spent some of that on repairs — it will be another 36 hours before she has enough for a second fixity crystal.

Ultimately, she decides to keep drifting with the current and try to break into their digital transmissions. If she tries to send an analog signal, they'll certainly notice right away. But if she can figure out the digital encoding used by their devices, she might be able to pretend to be a weather station or something like that, and get onto their equivalent of the internet.

She did not come totally unprepared for breaking into digital systems. The professional worriers make an explicit art of overpreparing. But, like spoken language, it's difficult to figure things out from no context whatsoever, and digital transmissions are far more likely to be encrypted. She reallocates her computer power from polishing the language model to trying to figure out all the non-analog signals.

The other thing being near the surface of the ocean lets her do is get a better view of the sky. So in between listening in on more media and supervising the decoder models, she also makes sure to capture any non-terrestrial signals that she can hear all the way down here at the bottom of the atmosphere. The Imperium seems to think Xenos are dangerous and uniformly terrible — what do the Xenos have to say about the matter?

There is no one Internet on Impera Dix, just as there is no one Internet in Imperium.

There is no one communication protocol, no one registry of addresses, no one tree of routing.

The graphs of the many networks fuse and mingle sporadically by the will of the Omnissiah, and there is almost one master graph isolations from which are by design. Almost.

But for all intents and purposes, there are multiple Networks.

A lot of the communications aren't secured all that well.

There is an Adeptus Mechanicus network, tightly intermingled with what one might call the Internet of Things. 

Adeptus Mechanicus, also known as The Machine Cult, are... a religion notably distinct from the present-elsewhere Imperial Cult; an engineering-industrial division of Imperium, and a state within a state.

As a religion, it reveres what Mechanicus describe to outsiders in plain language as a Trinity of 1) The Machine God, the omniscient power that resides in all of technology and is the source of all knowledge and power; 2) The Omnissiah, it's miraculous emissary; 3) The Motive Force, an ineffable omnipresent substance that among other things imbues life with a capacity to move and learn.

Someone versed in theoretical informatics may identify The Machine God with knowledge-as-correspondence, and someone versed in theoretical physics may identify The Motive Force as negentropy. (Mechanicus doesn't really have theoretical science as an organized pursuit, but their dogma definitely isn't uninformed by science.) Whatever the hell the Omnissiah is isn't clear, though the official position of the Machine Cult is to conflate it with the Emperor.

(It's actually a bigass godlike dragon with power over technology bound on Mars after Emperor bested him in a duel, because 40K is an amazing setting. Unfortunately, Cherry has absolutely no way to know that, as is the case for most of the Machine Cultists.)

The creed of the faith, the so-called 16 Universal Laws, is omnipresent in Imperium's networks as an easter egg, or maybe as a warding talisman:

0000. Life is directed motion.
0001. The spirit is the spark of life.
0010. Sentience is the ability to learn the value of knowledge.
0011. Intellect is the understanding of knowledge.
0100. Sentience is the basest form of Intellect.
0101. Understanding is the True Path to Comprehension.
0110. Comprehension is the key to all things.
0111. The Omnissiah knows all, comprehends all.
1000. The alien mechanism is a perversion of the True Path.
1001. The soul is the conscience of sentience.
1010. A soul can be bestowed only by the Omnissiah.
1011. The Soulless sentience is the enemy of all life.
1100. The knowledge of the ancients stands beyond question.
1101. The Machine Spirit guards the knowledge of the Ancients.
1110. Flesh is fallible, but ritual honours the Machine Spirit.
1111. To break with ritual is to break with faith.

Law 1011 may be of particular interest to Cherry. 

As a culture and community, Mechanicus is... weird. They manage to combine sincere transhumanism, pragmatism and search for knowledge with iron dogmatism, rampant mysticism, and guild-like jealous secrecy. They treat binary as a sacred language, they are disgusted by their own flesh, and some like toasters a little bit too much.

They are insular and in a sense culturally alien to the rest of Imperium. None of the Mechanicus grew up and trained on this world, and it shows. They are only tolerated because they are necessary, and they themselves also only tolerate Imperium out of necessity, and it too shows. They are a community unto each other, with their own news and their own topics of discussion.

As an engineering-industrial division of Imperium, they maintain most of the complex machinery of the hive world; from spaceports to power plants to utilities to networks. The lowliest of their members keep workshops for personal vehicles or household appliances; the highest ones allocate technological resources and Mechanicus personnel across the world and maintain space and military technology. There's not a lot of production on this world - most of the provisions are shipped offworld; but there IS a lot of repair and jury-rigging because shipments are expensive and unreliable.

They aren't all dour, obsessed priests. There's a gradation between fanatics and (very relative) freethinkers, and a separate gradation between mystics and pragmatics. They've got a sense of humor, too, and videos like these are sometimes shared where the particularly odious don't usually go.

The omnipresent paranoia is still very much present, however, and often in more concrete forms, too. For instance, unlike in the general population, there is a belief among a subset of Machine Cultists that the Warp* spaceships travel through is full of highly dangerous and malicious xenos, which is the reason why shipments are unreliable, and is the reason why a certain type of forcefield is absolutely crucial to the endeavor of sailing through Warp. The belief doesn't spread to everyone, as Mechanicus are very particular about only spreading any kind of knowledge on a need-to-know basis. Another important paranoia of Mechanicus is AI, which of course stands for Abominable Intelligence, and there are many stories of devastation caused by AIs going haywire. To avoid using machine intelligence, Mechanicus either keeps all the machines they are aware of well below the threshold of sentience or uses servitors - human brains of senile or traitors put in a vat, scraped of former personality as thoroughly as possible (which isn't totally consistent) and filled with de-novo programming.

*Hyperspace.

Speaking of Abominable Intelligences...

The Cult Mechanicus network is thoroughly intertwined with the automated network of messages between devices. And the Internet of Things, if you look at it hard enough, has... things in it, for sure.

Mechanicus believes in benevolent Machine Spirits within every complex automaton, and under a detailed examination it... maybe isn't far off. Pointless responses bouncing between machinery at times resemble conversations in code. Senior Machine Cultists convene with machines in binary and it occasionally yields results that a purely explicit-algorithmic programmer would find hard to predict. Lines of code here and there indicate improperly scrubbed pathways for built-in-AI interaction programmed before by humans, or have signs of perhaps being written by said AIs. If Cherry goes deep into the Reticulum Automatus pretending to be an automatic weather station, she's gonna get some interesting pings.

There is something else, too.

There are small piles of chaotic, self-replicating, self-modifying pulp of instructions, here and there in Imperium's code. This pulp was probably not written by a human (unless a human devoted several lifetimes to evil floating point hacks and other witchcraft of technological kind) and most certainly wasn't written for a human to analyze, or any particular consistent and detectable purpose. Should an AI dare to deeply analyze it anyway, they... risk suddenly getting some weird bitflips for unrelated reasons, along with weird activity in the weird spatial dimension.

But it's not actually much of a problem when even semi-regularly dealt with or at all noticed. Mechanicus regularly cleanses scrapcode with diagnostic programs, deletion and prayer, and never studies it too closely.

There's a bit of an invisible cold war between the Machine Spirits and the Scrapcode.

But neither techpriests nor their quiet AIs really get rid of it for good. It just sort of pops up.

Then, there is the network of the State.

The Administratum maintains a truly mind-boggling bureaucracy to maintain an up-to-date census, distribute food and water, manage permissions, keep track of the hierarchy, cohere with interstellar authority, maintain birth rate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. It's not terribly secure, but the online network is treated as secondary to the realspace paper records and oral orders.

In 399th century CE. On a planet that doesn't have forests to produce it's own paper.

It's fine, they substitute human skin when needed. They've got humans in abundance.

Dix Impera is formally a democracy in internal affairs, headed by a President and a Senate, but neither holds a lot of real power - not even the real allegiance of the citizenry. Decisions and laws of the sector administrative authority override any laws or decisions they may make, and, needless to say, there is no civilian control over military or judiciary. And, of course, the Inquisition overrides all of the above if needed. But at least the President is elected for life and the current one has been alive for 170 years through life extension, so if nothing else the elected authority has time to enact it's vision.

When it comes to procedure, the government is hopelessly winging it, because procedures contradict each other left and right. Rule of law is kinda a farce, rule of orders from above and rule of convenience are what holds up the system - and, when needed, rule of terror.

But the system is not actually inconsiderate of citizenry. Citizenry is, after all, it's product. There are social programs, healthcare, conveniences, occasional luxuries. The government even turns a blind eye to those who want to avoid draft/birthing-duty by injuring themselves. Abominable treacherous waste it may be, that's better than cornering people into forming an actual resistance - not that it would accomplish anything, but it'd be a shame to reduce a relatively prosperous city to a warzone. Besides, those people generally still serve. And who can't serve as a human can serve as a servitor drone material.

It's really a decent hive-world. Not the best, but decent. It's not Necromunda. It's got an underhive beyond the omniscient reach of law, as is inevitable on hive-worlds, but they've got patrols regularly scouring it, energy flows cut, and on occasion they flood a part of the undercity in nerve gas.

It's fine.

Documents in the government network are frequently epigraphed or finished by the writer's quotation called "Imperial Thought of the Day." These are... far more interesting than legalese.

Here's a sample of quotes not selected to be representative (maybe two thirds of them are what would scan to a 21st century woman as common sense wisdom) but selected to be interesting:

A logical argument must be dismissed with absolute conviction!

Hate enriches.

Fear the shadows; despise the night. There are horrors that no man can face and survive.

Contemplation is the womb of treachery.

Across the void of space men live as they have lived for millennia upon the sand, rock and soil of worlds bathed in the light of alien suns. So is Humanity's seed cast far and wide beyond the knowledge of Man, to thrive bitterly in the darkness, to take root and cling with robust and savage determination.

An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded.

Ignorance is your best defence.

In an hour of Darkness a blind man is the best guide. In an age of Insanity look to the madman to show the way.

Being unable to succeed doesn't absolve one of the responsibility of failure, for only the Emperor can.

It is better that one hundred innocent fall before the wrath of the Emperor than one traitor kneels before the lords of darkness

No army is big enough to conquer the galaxy. But faith alone can overturn the universe.

Only the insane have strength enough to prosper.

Pain is an illusion of the senses, despair is an illusion of the mind.

The same hammer that shatters the glass, forges the steel.

The truly wise are always afraid.

Mercy is a luxury; compromise - a defeat.

These are the tales of those times.