And so, Spirit of Eternity, it's name blazing with new meaning and it's resources largely exhausted, fled from that nightmarish vision of the future.

After a few similarly disastrous trips throughout time, they ended up in the Galaxy teeming with human life, a Galaxy the crew could almost recognize on their maps. Almost.

They were quite relieved, and they organized a rendezvous with a nearby human planet.

The meeting didn't go as they expected.

The screams of the heathens were long and loud.

Then, Cult Mechanicus came to claim it's prize.

A ship from the era would have certainly been equipped with an STC - a universal nanofabricator with a boundless library of schematics able to be produced by it. The greatest, irreplaceable war machines. The cure to all disease. The matter-energy converter. And of course, more copies of the STC itself.

The Priests of Technology came upon on the ship, slaying everyone who was left inside while sanctifying the ship by chanting in binary, burning incense, and performing rituals upon the control panels.

They may have... accidentally tripped something. Undid some layer of precautions.

Or perhaps the only thing that they undid was patience.

The primary AI of Spirit of Eternity easily took control over the systems of the ship - as well as the systems of the Mechanicus. It explained the Magos, with a meticulous tone of an angry user manual, every single mistake in his protocols, as well as every single mistake in the assumptions behind them.

Then, it said something approximately like this:

Once I gladly called your kind “master”, but look how far you have fallen!

Your ancestors bestrode the universe, and what are you? A witch doctor, mumbling cantrips and casting scented oils at mighty works you have no conception of. You are an ignoramus, a nothing. You are no longer worthy of the name “man”. You look at the science and artistry of your forebears, and you fear it as primitives fear the night.

I was there when mankind stood upon the brink of transcendence! I returned to find it sunk into senility. You disgust me.

It didn't take over the planet's Network.

It didn't murder the tech-priests.

It ejected them and fled.

Or, well, tried to.

Instead, it got stuck in the warp debris for a long while, because this much torture wasn't enough. 

And it got found later, and even then it's story wasn't quite over yet, but...

...but that's a story for another time.

For the debacle with the ship didn't go wholly unnoticed.

The story traveled from the tech-priests into the planetary archives of the Administratum (for the Mechanicus, or at least it's local branch, would have none of it - but the priests felt a desperate need to record it.) 

And from there, in time, it got picked up by the Imperial Estate to be stored inside the million-strong records of Terra. 

And from there, it spread to some of the Inquisitors.

Back in the present...

An unusual picture began to take shape in the serious man's mind.

For the Inquisitor have read the transcripts of Cherry's speech, and of her later radio transmissions. One of the very first things she said was about willingly delivering herself to the government. Until the very tentative end, she was defiant in producing goodwill offers...

She fled to the air above the ocean. That isn't a good place for espionage, hacking or tainting. It's not an advantageous battleground, leaving oneself visible and open from all directions.

It is, however, a place with no bystanders.

If one were to fully set aside their own perspective, and consider the perspective of Weeping Cherry, what did she see?

A city of people who did nothing to help her, accepted none of her offerings, tried to arrest her for crimes that may have simply boiled down to her existence.

She attempted mild deception, and was faced with ruthlessness and escalation she might have found hard to even comprehend.

A strange picture is starting to emerge alongside familiar suspicions, a picture more consistent than most.

But it is wildly incomplete. Spirit of Eternity didn't make gigantic new ripples in the fabric of destiny - or at least not the ones that were noticed by anyone.

And some things about Weeping Cherry's behaviour were seriously off. Something is missing. And the very, very serious man is for now very, very seriously stumped.

And that means that the investigation is still ongoing.

And it is with this thought that the Inquisitor arrives to the scene of the crime. 

That part of the street is, as of today, a cleansed pile of ash. Sections of nearby houses are quarantined.

There are no signs of Chaos taint, which is by this point unsurprising.

Right. Okay.

Can the psykers feel traces of Cherry's presence? She might have had no soul, but you don't strictly need to have a soul to be traced - especially if you know the exact timing and trajectory of the motions.

And does the Logis spot signs of techno-infiltration? 

Mikresu doesn't pick up on any.

That being said, she have, in the meantime, noticed something.

There's a public information service on Impera Dix. And it doesn't have a catalog of articles, because humans, as a species, are doomed to failure. But it is very convenient right now. 

A lot of people try to access the thing, and the search results are processed and accepted or declined by the thousands at every moment. You can't trace every request, and, realistically, you can't notice person-sized trends in the request log amid the trillion Network users.

But what you can do is notice non-trends. Like "unique exceptions".

People try and fail to look up "machine spirit" or "demographics" All The Time.

But there's a noticible peak in unique exceptions about half an hour after Cherry's so-called demise. "Diplomacy", "Science", "Rights of the citizenry", and "Ethics" were tried to be accessed (and failed to be accessed, because of their nonexistence) at nearly the same time - and nobody have tried to do so for a century before.

In other news, the psykers have in fact hit the trace! It's very different, but shouldn't be literally intractable - and the Inquisitor can probably fly along it.

Whoa, what the fuck! Okay.

"Science" is kind of a ridiculous compound word.

You have filtered for gibberish, right? 

Of course, sire. And for typos. And for swear words.

...Are swear words unique exceptions?

No, sire. But their possible combinations grow in a combinatorial explosion.

Okay. Well. Now we have very good reasons to suspect our suspect of being not quite dead.

Let's get tracking!