Well, she must be somewhere out there.

Once the craft gets to the point where Cherry got shot, tracking gets way, way harder. Some psykers would immediately tell you that the trace simply disappears, as if the soul have passed away. But Cherry likely has no soul to pass away, and judging by Network activity anomalies, she herself seems to not have passed away. And these particular psykers are pretty damn good. And so, the jet-helicopter turns to it's helicopter mode, and hovers around the crash site for half an hour...

...and tentatively follows.

Perfect water...
The dark wind braids the waves,
The crazed birds raid
The trees!
Is this our destiny?

To join our hands at sea -
And slowly sink,
And slowly think:

THIS IS PERFECT WATER
PASSING OVER ME!

Do you know Jacques Cousteau, when they said on the radio that he
Hears bells in random order!
Deep beneath the perfect water...

Lord, that is frightening!
But still, so inviting!
To drown
To drown inside a sound!
That lay
So far underground
And to think,
And to think,
And to think,
And to think:
This is perfect water, passing over me...

To flow inside the spiral tide!
To drop my eyes like a bride and ride, across the curl unmarked by borders!

It waits for me like an orphaned daughter!

A life-
A life of perfect order!
A strange-
A strange and perfect water!
A life-
A life of perfect order!
A strange-
A strange and perfect water!

 

- Blue Oyster Cult

And then, after two or so hours -

Greetings, Weeping Cherry. 

I would like to talk.

"Well, whoever this is, they know we're here, right?" Xanthoceras points out once they've both seen the message.

"They could just be trying to bait us out," her other self replies. "But ... I don't think it's a bad thing that someone reached out to us, instead of us reaching out to them. You write up a response, and I'll try to see where they're messaging us from?"

She dithers over wording for a moment, and then sends her reply.

Hello!

I would like to talk as well ­— I think I got off on the wrong foot. Is there a name you'd like me to use to refer to you?

The Inquisitor is sending the radio part of the message by satellite antenna, and the network part comes through via quite secure Internet proxies.

He himself is nowhere, of course. Where else an Inquisitor can possibly be, other than maybe "behind you"?

(He can be found if one put a lot of effort into actually subverting the Internet or a lot of statistical analysis, which isn't something Cherry did, in the end. He's in his spaceship.) 

I apologize on behalf of my civilization.

You may call me Seeker. It isn't my real name, which I am reluctant to reveal.

Of course; I can understand the need for caution. It's good to meet you, Seeker!

And while I appreciate the apology, it's not necessary. I was pretty confused and upset about being greeted in the way that I was, but I'm not hurt. I just wish I had been able to stop all of the lasers ...

She debated a few different ways to frame that point. The Imperium seems to think that Xenos are so terrible that any amount of collateral damage (or even atrocities like servo skulls) are an acceptable exchange for safety. So it's possible that this point will just come across as alien (and therefore bad and hostile). But whoever Seeker is, they reached out to her. And if she can redirect them away from the idea that she is their enemy, then reminding them that she cares enough about their people and resources to try and protect them is probably a good thing. If she can't redirect them away, the reminder that their weapons can't hurt her (or, at least, not the ones they've deployed so far) might stop things from escalating more.

She sips from her cocoa and thinks about what else to say.

I imagine you must have a lot of questions for me, because I didn't exactly get the chance to explain much. I'm happy to answer them — where would you like to start?

I was pretty confused and upset about being greeted in the way that I was, but I'm not hurt. I just wish I had been able to stop all of the lasers ...

"Not hurt"... emotionally? Physically? Psychically, somehow? 

Gah! Something about these words! These are not the words of a callous would-be enslaver of mankind, or at least not a facade of one, but they're also not... Not... the ones he would say in this situation. Nor the ones Spirit of Eternity would say. Nor the ones... The Emperor would say.

"I just wish I had been able to stop all of the lasers..."

Okay, table that.

Many questions indeed.

It seems prudent to start with this: Where, and when, are you from? 

She has read enough to know that playing on her shared humanity is ... probably a good idea? Better than centering the possibility that she's from a different world entirely. But on the other hand, the timeline doesn't really match up otherwise.

I'm from Earth. Or, an Earth — I was born there after the first spaceships but before humanity settled other stars. Based on comparing the galaxy's rotation with distant galaxies, I think this was about 40,000 years ago, but the number is hardly exact, because I haven't been able to get precise enough measurements.

As I told people upon landing, I was working in my lab when it went wrong, somehow. After the explosion I woke up here.

And I don't mean any offense, but ... I'm saddened, to see humanity in this state. My most notable invention is probably the Universal Fabricator — which is why I am entertaining the possibility that I might be from an alternate Earth, because I don't think humanity could have had those 40,000 years ago and still have had such a turbulent history.

This is an explanation that resolves a lot of confusing things at once. But it does them at the price of being impossible.

Parallel universes are not a thing!

Sorcerers are a thing. Demons are a thing. Gods are a thing. Faith healing is a thing. Immortal pain-eaters are a thing. Universal fabricators are a thing. Viruses that eat planets whole in minutes are a thing. Future prediction is a thing. Time travel is a thing. Parallel universes are not a thing! 

Come to think of it, maybe it is a thing?

Oh, Emperor! 

It would certainly explain the great shifting of the currents of fate, though. I certainly haven't expected to meet an alternate universe dweller today, but it seems that Warp haven't either!

I KNOW, RIGHT?

Why is she also an AI who happened to invent (!!!) the STC?

Why did the AI own a lab? Why did it have a body, blood and all, while doing so? Was it merely one of the AI's copies? Did the collective take over the world?

The simplest hypotheses here seem to lie within the zone of "the Abominable Intelligence lies", but damn, a liar AI could have lied more convincingly, and wouldn't have volunteered such a profound truth. (Which is evidence that it would. Mixed strategy, etc etc.) 

If it is a truth.

Now, the so-called universal fabricator... And she implies she shared that with her universe's mankind(?), too.

She haven't been seen to fabricate anything, have she? She healed herself and offered to heal others; she intercepted lasgun blasts; she flew around at incredible speeds; she learned a language in less than 20 minutes.

But at least it will be simple to prove or disprove.

That is certainly one of the explanations of all time.

It would make our discussion much easier to conduct if you discreetly demonstrated the capability of a universal fabricator. I shall send you a schematic for a complicated and large detail made of complicated material; if you can assemble it out of nothing, let us scan it with offgrid scanners, and then disassemble it back, you will hold fantastic leverage over myself and everyone else.

 

As for now, I do feel rather indebted from getting such a nugget of information about your reality. I propose to answer any question about mine, so long as it doesn't touch on myself personally and so long as you agree not to babble about the answer. I do know a great lot of things.

Never hurts to fish for information, such as information about what interests Cherry the most. Information about Cherry's world is information about her that he could never get otherwise; information about his world is something she could get by looking elsewhere. If she refuses, she is probably a non-humanlike, more dangerous kind of AI; humans rarely refuse this sort of a generous gift. And if she asks something truly unsharable, he doesn't know. 

She laughs out loud, prompting Yew to peer over her shoulder at the message.

"I didn't really expect that particular linguistic quirk to make it into Low Gothic," she explains, after checking through some of the translator's internal state.

Yew smiles and rolls her eyes, returning to her own work.

Xanthoceras also recognizes the technique of getting information from someone by letting them ask you questions. It's what she's angling for. What people want to know about can be almost as interesting as their answers. Well, that and the fact that she genuinely does want the Imperium to know more about her, so that they will believe her when she says she wants to give them things.

Sure, I'd be happy to assemble and disassemble something of your choice. Mass-energy conversion is somewhat slow, so it would be helpful if you had an equal mass of material available for me to use as feedstock. I assume you want to watch the assembly process; where is the offgrid scanner located?

As for asking you a question, that's a tricky one! There's so much to ask about. How about: how does faster than light travel actually work, on a technical level? The network documents I was able to find lack a lot of detail.

That is a horrifying answer to give. She's not evading the request. She's not scared to go out to the scanner. She's not even bothered by us observing the process...

That is a horrifying question to ask, too. Especially given the above. Fortunately, he doesn't have to give an answer that would let a universally fabricating AI construct a spaceship, because he doesn't know such an answer, because nobody he knows does.

And there's that cheery tone throughout, too. It's almost as if Weeping Cherry is not afraid... Almost as if Weeping Cherry is not afraid.

Weeping Cherry is not afraid. Was not afraid, is not afraid. Period. No signs of fear in her words and actions. No projection of dominance, no concealment, no testing the waters. That's what's wrong with her words and actions - a big part of it, it seems. She didn't go underwater because she particularly feared for her life, she went there because surface interaction was unproductive. She talked to an Imperial communication rather than fleeing from the signal.

(Or all of this is a lie, for the Abominable Intelligence lies.)

Things are getting very scary, very quickly.

"Jora, contact Vladivarus on Miros Prime and repeat the following code to him: epsilon-omega-kingfisher-97."

The Astropath goes into trance.

"Mikresu, look at our conversation logs."

"Let me see, sire. ............. By the Omnissiah! 01001110 01000101 01010110 01000101 01010010 00100000 01000111 01001111 01001110 01001110 01000001 00100000 01010010 01010101 01001110 00100000 01000001 01010010 01001111 01010101 01001110 01000100 00100000 01000001 01001110 01000100 00100000 01000100 01000101 01010011 01000101 01010010 01010100 00100000 01011001 01001111 01010101*"

"Indeed. Now, pull yourself offgrid-"

"Ew."

", then, set up our backup scanning array on the aircraft, and pull the aircraft offgrid too. Take some of your raw materials, too. Then, fly up to Weeping Cherry's site. Radio comms only, radio comms with me through Vernam sheets only. Oh, and come up with a specification for the fabricator. We can't pull it from the Network."

"...Right. On my way, sire."

Now, how do I phrase things carefully...

A person wielding such a scanner will arrive to your location by air within 90 minutes. You may use ocean's water and floor as fabrication matter, or otherwise request the person to jettison you more convenient materials.

You have picked an excellent question to ask. Imperium finds itself asking it over and over themselves.

The engines of an Imperial ship momentarily destabilize the fabric of reality and push the ship through it into Warp. In Warp, time and space are unshackled off Materium's limitation, and are wholly disorderly, and impossible to navigate to a mere human - or, indeed, a machine. A specially trained abhuman psyker, a Navigator, aided by the light of the Emperor's soul projected by the Astronomican on Terra, may, with some luck, arrive at the destination, where the engine can push it back into Materium. Meanwhile, the most important part of the ship, the Gellar field generator, stabilizes the internal reality and thus protects the ship from the preils of the Warp.

Further technical details of the process are largely unknown to me. The jump drive and the Gellar field are products of the Dark Age of Technology, and the Mechanicum jealously guards what they understand of them - which must be quite limited, as they cannot build new jump drives and Gellar fields for especially large ships, which are considered irreplaceable. The Noble Houses of the Navigators keep the techniques of Warp navigation similarly secret, and I similarly doubt the depth of their understanding, as well as the ability of anyone else to replicate it. The Astronomican is, of course, unique, and it's operation is kept wholly secret.

I cannot, of course, speak for the ships of other civilizations, but I have heard of Necron vessels smoothly accelerating beyond light speed in Materium, as if the ways reality changes at extreme speeds are a mere illusion one could ignore at a whim.

My further question to you would be: Why did you break the Witchbane Shackles? If my understanding of you is correct, you do not rely at all on what these things were trying to restrict.

*Traditional prayer