She lets Yew know that she's doing so, and then surfaces. These people have a thing against AI, so she slips out of virtual space and re-builds herself a body. And one of those inflatable lounge-chair things, so that she doesn't have to tread water.

She debates putting out a locator signal for them, but Seeker seems confident enough that they know where she is, so she doesn't.

Sea water is fine; I'll stand by to greet them.

As for the Witchbane Shakles ... picture this: you are dropped, with no preparation, on a foreign planet where nobody speaks your language. Just as you are starting to be able to talk to people, you learn that representatives of the government are coming to get things sorted out, and you think "great, those are exactly the people I need to talk to about this". And then they arrive, and tell you not to speak, and to do something you literally cannot do.

So you try your best to explain, and they're understanding, but they still won't let you speak any more. So you can't tell them that you're perfectly willing to cooperate, but not to die, just because they say so. And then they put a device that you not only don't understand, but that is obviously and bizarrely alien to your senses — that uses chaotic principles that you haven't even begun to understand.

Remember — you nearly died ten minutes ago. You have already been torn apart by energies you don't understand once today. You have no local allies, and attempting to communicate again will make them shoot the people behind you who haven't been cleared out of the line of fire.

What would you do?

There aren't really good answers. I chose to do my best to jam the parts of the device I didn't understand — something that I would have explained my reasoning for once they were actually in position to listen to me.

Only it didn't work, for some reason, and so they started shooting anyway.

With the benefit of hindsight, do I wish that I hadn't temporarily suppressed some of the internal components of the shackles? Yes, I think I do. But at the time, I didn't really think it through — I was trying to quickly pick the best option, with very little time to tell what the manacles actually did.

Now that I have had a chance to look at their internal mechanisms, I do agree that they wouldn't have caused a problem for me. If it helps, I'd be perfectly willing to recreate them and provide them to the person you have coming to evaluate my fabricator — I do feel bad that they got destroyed.

 

I get the feeling that the Imperium doesn't really take feedback. But, just in case I'm wrong and you know who to forward the message to, one piece of feedback for you: if the Arbites hadn't insisted that I remain silent, I could have explained, and avoided the waste of life and ammunition that followed. And I could have been having a conversation like this days ago.

She broke the Warp artifact because she feared the Warp.

(In the background, one of the soldiers flips the chess table (that is not actually for chess but for it's distant descendant). The pieces clang on the metal floor of the spaceship.)

(He can't hear that, he's too concentrated.)

Second order of business: Weeping Cherry does not understand the Warp, enough to fear it.

"Jora! Contact Filoneus on Titan in Sol. Give the code words - Rainbow Salamander Rain - and tell that Lupa calls a favor from Ieloin and needs at least ten extreme-ranged psyker combat specialists, Grey Knights or otherwise, on the orbit of Dix Impera, as soon as possible, for five days at most, and that it's a Lambda-situation but worse, and that Lupa isn't sure if 10 is enough."

This will take time. By the Emperor, this might take days.

Why is there no assassin temple that does this?! There's an assassin temple that does the exact opposite. There's shapeshifters and snipers and poisoners and coincidence-engineers and drugged psycho killers, but no psykers that could simply make heads blow up from orbit. Someone should have pitched the idea to the Grand Master of Officio Assassinorum seven millenia ago.

I bet Craftworlds know how to do that. I bet they don't, because of some fucking Eldar bullshit.

Time to contact the army, have them mobilize the psyker choir again. Maybe they can even actually do something if they work together with mine.

Wait a second.

Now that I have had a chance to look at their internal mechanisms, I do agree that they wouldn't have caused a problem for me.

Third order of business: Weeping Cherry, possibly the most powerful person currently in existence (apart from The Emperor and the Ruinous Powers and the Hive Mind), has begun to research Warp mechanisms, while not understanding Warp.

Strongly recommend to suspend any experimentation with and research of Warp mechanisms and energies, IMMEDIATELY. Rest of reply will follow. 

Xanthoceras blinks at the emphatic reply, a little nonplussed.

That is ... that looks like someone who is genuinely concerned. And although the Imperium is not exactly giving the impression of being trustworthy, it is still possible that they're scared of the Warp for good reasons.

She flags the message for Yew's attention, and mulls it over. A constantly-changing, unpredictable region of space, sitting unseen just adjacent to normal space, that has — for some bizarre reason — direct interactions with human minds ...

Yeah, okay, she can see why they would be nervous about experimenting with that.

She won't stop forever — she can't just not know how the universe works for the rest of her life — but she can certainly stop for now, until she learns about whatever their procedures for safe experimentation are.

Alone in the virtual pillow-nest, Yew catches up on the conversation, and reaches much the same conclusion.

"I'm okay with putting things off," she tells her other self. "If we wait a little while we can build a proper remote operations center."

Xanthoceras gives her a thumbs up. "I'll let Seeker know."

Sure; I have suspended all planned experiments involving the Warp.

I do want an explanation of why, preferably accompanied by an explanation of your procedures for safe experimentation, but I understand that it can take time to draft these things. Please feel free to take the time you need.

And, of course, if they attack her with Warp-based weaponry after stalling her this way, she'll be pissed. But that would be a bit hostile to point out, and should be perfectly obvious.

Your reason for destroying the shackles is the best possible reason I could have hoped for. You have seen a Warp artifact of an unknown purpose, and you have feared it, so you destroyed it. Imperium ought to commend you for prudence. It was quite idiotic of the Arbites to expect someone who could see it's effects to calmly accept it.

Idiotic, but inevitable. The Arbites fear the Warp, and cannot see it; this artifact was one of the very few possible ways for them to restrain a psyker - a person with Warp powers. Silence is another way - to prevent the psyker from chanting incantations or using a compelling voice - but it isn't nearly as effective, ultimately, because incantations are merely an aid for the mental processes of sorcery. I could direct your proposed feedback to them; but the alternative to the demand of silence is shooting on sight.

Rogue psykers are extremely, extremely dangerous. Which means that suspected rogue psykers are highly dangerous. Justice here plays second fiddle to caution.

Non-rogue psykers are dangerous, too, if inevitable. If the Imperium could simply destroy them all, it would, but it relies upon psykers for communication and navigation, for defense, and for other things besides. Rigorous training can reduce the chance of failure, but not it's magnitude, which remains planetary in scale. With vanishingly rare exceptions, sanctioned psykers wear remotely controlled explosive collars or analogous internal implants. So are the ships of Imperium rigged to fall apart or annihilate when the Gellar Field fails, and it is an unfortunate day when such failsafes fail.

 

Psykers are this dangerous because of their connection with Warp. This isn't mere superstition of the Imperium. The Dark Eldar murder practicing psykers on sight, the Craftworld Eldar, all of them psykers, subject themselves to human lifetimes of discipline training and bind their souls unto crystals before starting active use of their powers. The Eldar, who have reigned the Galaxy before Imperium's rise through their awesome command of the Warp! Now, the Eye of Terror, a cosmic wound in reality stands where the capital of their empire once stood, a portal to endless horror. [Coordinates in the Galaxy attached. Indeed, there's a huge red cloud there, with the stars sparser than they should be and shuffled in disarray. Light shouldn't even have traveled as fast as it did from there!] I could try to direct you to them, should you seek external confirmation. 

 

There's a reason the information you have read on the Warp is so sparse. To know of the perils of the Warp is to subject oneself to them. It is an abyss that gazes back upon it's beholder! Oh yes, as a Silica Animus, you may have no soul to be subject to the Warp directly, but you have a mind and a body still, and no substrate or material is absolutely immune to the perils of the Warp. If you have scoured the Networks thoroughly enough, you have seen the effects of the Warp upon machinery - undulating blobs of spreading malice that appear from nowhere, no matter how often deleted, plague upon the works of the Omnissiah. Tell me that you require knowledge of the perils to be convinced to halt, and I shall give it to you, but every bit of this lore is a bit to risk for the holder of the most powerful technology in the Galaxy!

 

There are no safe protocols for the matter. There are safe traditions and tools devised by the knowledge-seekers of the past, and there are smoking ruins where their citadels of knowledge once stood - or worse.

Well. That is a lot, all at once.

She thinks for a moment about how to formulate her reply, her inflatable chair drifting serenely with the gentle ocean breeze.

Her fixity crystal is, not to toot her own horn, very robust. After all, what is the point in having a personal fixity device, in which her entire self is stored, if you cannot be nearly certain that it is safe? She and her forks (well ... mostly her forks, she was focused on physics) have spent thousands of person-years on imagining what could go wrong and making it less likely.

The crystal itself, apart from being very durable due to its construction, is also designed so that the internal components form an aperiodic tiling, so that it's harder to cleave. And if you did cleave it, both subsections would be perfectly capable of operating independently, since computation, data storage, energy generation, fixity field projection, and so on are distributed throughout the device. When the CPUs are in contact, clusters of them run the same computations and check each other, resetting any malfunctioning units to a known good state. The crystal is perfectly capable of detecting alterations to its own physical structure and reversing them, and the distributed storage uses error correction codes with varying levels of redundancy depending on how important the data is.

On the software level, it uses a custom stack, from the CPU architecture up, that is designed to make common security problems impossible. The lowest levels have formal proofs of correctness (and didn't Elm love to bitch about how much of a problem those were to adapt). The upper levels have sophisticated type systems, but also have chaos testing to shake out bugs. The networking protocols run in an isolated area of memory. The supply of cryptographic randomness comes from directly measuring quantum effects.

In short, Xanthoceras feels pretty safe. In many ways, she is the least secure part of her whole system.

She pauses, at that thought, and flips back to the part of Seeker's message about psykers using a "compelling voice". She clips her senses through a tight compression codec, making the sound of the waves into a low, rhythmic rumble, and the colors of the water and the horizon into a flat block of blue. Then she forwards the settings patch to Yew, along with an explanation.

Hopefully, the precaution is unnecessary, since Seeker doesn't even seem to think she can interact directly with the Warp for some reason.

But she also didn't think her experiment was going to explode, and she has even fewer theories about the Warp, so it's worth treating the danger as real. She thinks about what information she should ask for, given that Seeker thinks understanding the Warp is an infohazard — which is even less how physics works, actually.

She types up a reply.

Thank you for the explanation. It's a lot to take in.

While it is true that my brain does now run partly or entirely on a computer (depending on how you define your terms), I was born a biological human. I uploaded myself after inventing my universal fabricator because it was safer and more convenient. And the way that my brain works is still more similar to a baseline human than to a computer program; it is emulated by a physics simulation, not a raw neural net or anything like that. So I don't know whether I properly qualify as a Silica Animus, in your terms. In my world, we would call someone like me an uploaded human, if we even needed to differentiate uploaded and non-uploaded humans at all.

I'm also curious how you came to the conclusion that I lack a soul — it seems important to know, to really know whether the Warp can touch me directly.

 

As for worries about corruption from the Warp — obviously defending against any infohazardous thing is incredibly difficult, so I will understand if the answer is no — but can you elaborate on how the Warp corrupts minds and machinery, and any known defenses? (Other than not being a psyker). I did see some strange-looking code on the local network, but it didn't seem like the right category of thing to harm me. My computer has pretty good protections against having alterations made to memory or data in-flight, and my network sandboxes have had no problem filtering out the probes from local systems. And of course I myself have no traditional program to "hack", since I'm running on emulated neurons.

He have never even mentioned the word "corruption". That would be revealing a type of a peril of the Warp. Cherry drew that inference herself - or knew about it all along, but by now that doesn't seem likely to his gut instinct.

I was born a biological human. I uploaded myself after inventing my universal fabricator because it was safer and more convenient. [...] In my world, we would call someone like me an uploaded human, if we even needed to differentiate uploaded and non-uploaded humans at all.

He have never heard of the idea. That's definitely soild evidence of... something out of ordinary being up.

(There are really not many people in Imperium who have. The higher-ups at Magos who hunt down internal heresies to Omnissiah, and the more reckless souls in Logi who occasionally come up with new program ideas. Occasional philosophers or fiction writers rediscovering theoretical informatics on their own. Two Inquisitors who have delved deeply enough into the Black Library to learn of the origins of Necrons. For the rest, it's just a strain of the Silica Animus abomination that is particularly less dangerous and therefore particularly uninteresting).

It's chilling, the existence of perspective, even if it's holder might be made up, that so casually discards humanity.

And the way that my brain works is still more similar to a baseline human than to a computer program; it is emulated by a physics simulation, not a raw neural net or anything like that.

He doesn't understand a lot of these concepts. Lots of complicated compound words. Seems like a waste of cipher sheets to contact his departed comrade about this, though.

More important than any of this is the tentative takeaway. Weeping Cherry have stopped the experiments. Which is great, because it doesn't lead 2 trillion people and possibly all of Galaxy to doom.

Yet still, Weeping Cherry isn't afraid of the Warp. Or, well, she is. But she is afraid of the Warp like one might be afraid of a difficult question on an exam, ot a demotion. Not as if it's the Warp.

It have been proposed by some people that the thing Lupa needs to convey is that Warp is adversarial.

Ha! Ha! What isn't adversarial? Oenstinius Lupa haven't ever seen a miracle like that. Xenos are adversarial, and Imperials are only slightly less adversarial. Nature is adversarial, and machinery used to tame it is adversarial! Lupa's colleagues are the ones he trusts the least, Lupa's aides startle him at night, and his own brain with is something that cannot be trusted not to be influenced by the Adversaries!

To Lupa, Warp is something else entirely than just "adversarial".

You are right, all the probes and contingencies in the Network have missed you. The radars and orbital surveillance couldn't see you. But I have found you, haven't I? Do not presume yourself invincible.

The threat of Warp takes a thousand forms. Whatever one have learned of the Warp, Warp is moreso. What's more, Warp cheats. To use a metaphor, if you build yourself impenetrable walls to the left and to the right and ahead and behind and above and below, there is no guarantee the threat won't come from a seventh direction.

If not being a psyker counts as a form of defense against Warp, then not having a soul certainly does too. Physical distance from Warp-influenced objects, people, space, and information helps. In physical defense against Warp, a powerful measure known to Imperium are Pariahs - a particular kind of soulless humans with an actively dampening effect upon Warp phenomena. Unfortunately, they are exceedingly rare, almost solely employed by Officio Assassinorum or the League of Black Ships.

Mental precautions are even more important. Vigilance, surveillance of your own thoughts for things outside of ordinary, is a vital defense. Keeping mental distance from Warp, remembering yourself as a separate thing and a part of reality, is also important. Keeping a strong spirit and iron will, remembering your purpose, refusing to give in, refusing to be tempted. Ignorance, as mentioned, is a powerful defense.

The most practicable and scalable defense against this threat that Mankind ever came up with, however, is faith in the God-Emperor. Where that faith is strong, the worry is much lesser. As far as I know - and I do know a lot - the Adepta Sororitas, the military branch of Ecclesiarchy made of the most painstakingly devoted people you can find, have only ever had one of it's members succumb to the threat. Consecration of locations and objects by the Ecclesiarchy can purge physical threats. Prayer and devotion can resist mental. [Texts of 3 prayers to the God-Emperor are attached. One for shielding against darkness, one for deliverance against heresy, and one, a lesser-known one not available on public network, for clarity of mind.] 

Well, these are the ways that humans, including soulless humans, can be warded. Mechanicum are the experts on warding machines, and I recommend contacting the person en route to you for further details.

And, of course, other civilizations have their own ways of Warp-warding that I am not an expert in.

As for your question, well, the presence or absence of a soul is not undetectable, if you are searching for it and have the right senses. I would guess that it worked in approximately the way you have detected that the Shackles were a Warp artifact.

Now, let me ask this:

What is your civilization like? And what role have you played in it, aside from inventing the universal fabricator?

Oenstinius suspects that if Weeping Cherry really had a substance of a human mind in a different shape, that may make her more vulnerable to Chaos by itself - what does Chaos care for shape, really? But he's not about to recommend a Silica Animus to become even less human.

She reads through that reply, and takes notes on possible precautions to apply to herself.

She sets meditation reminders, self-check in reminders with Yew, gives herself a "check that the reminder system is functional" tattoo on her left pinky finger, and a few other precautions in that vein. Unfortunately 'have faith in the Emperor' is ... not really something that Xanthoceras can do. She hasn't had faith in anything without understanding how it works since she was a child.

Thank you. That was really helpful! I will implement precautions based on that, and inquire with the person coming to watch my demonstration for others.

 

I like your question — it really gets into the heart of what I expect you want to know. Hmm. How to put my answer ...

My civilization is small, compared to yours. It felt big at the time, but our total population is only about ten billion, and we were limited to about a light year around Sol. We hadn't met aliens, there were no signs of radio signals from any other intelligent life, we still hadn't figured out faster than light travel, and so on. Also, as you know my sensors can detect Warp artifacts — and there was no sign whatsoever of the Warp. So do bear that in mind, when I'm describing our different institutions; we don't have to deal with nearly so many people, no so extreme dangers as you do.

It's hard to pin down any one way things are, because my civilization is a federation of many different polities. The main ones are the countries on Earth; a (close) majority of the population still lives on Earth. There are, depending on how you count, somewhere around 300 countries on Earth. The exact number is a hot subject of debate, because nobody completely agrees on where the borders are, or who is capable of self-governance. There are many more, smaller countries in space, ranging from individual space stations to settlements on the other planets. Many smaller countries and some larger countries join together in alliances to set various standards for how people should be treated. Those different countries are very diverse, with people living in thousands of different ways, and people moving around between them fairly freely.

But ... humans are still human. Most people just go about their lives: having families, telling stories, exchanging gossip, writing music, complaining about things, etc.. The vast majority of the population is still unaugmented humans. I was one of the relatively small fraction who uploaded, I think in part because I still probably understand the whole process better than most people, so I was more comfortable with it.

As for how it came to be that way, and my role in it ...

I suspect you can imagine what happened when I invented the universal fabricator. I de facto conquered the world, even if not de jure. Because nobody had anything that could have stopped me from doing whatever I wanted. But I didn't want to rule anything. I'm a scientist and inventor. I was working on trying to understand the principles behind the universal fabricator because I wanted to be able to make things for people — primarily, solving medical problems, and providing better food, water, shelter, etc.

So I donated the fabricators to all of Humankind. I set one base rule: that anyone could use the fabricators to move themselves away from wherever they are. Other than that, I instituted a system that allocated shares of the universal fabricator's manufacturing capacity to people, and let them trade their shares. My intent was that people could build whatever kinds of places they wanted to live, with whatever amenities they wanted, and then go there. And it pretty much worked!

The year after I released the fabricators, average happiness was up, average health was up, and people were having more children. People started building the first interstellar star ships, and both physics and materials science made huge leaps forward.

For myself, I set up a handful of countries based on how I thought things ought to be. One flopped, but the others have been mildly popular — although not as popular as some of the other countries people have started. I continue to administrate the universal fabricator network, to ensure that it remains operational and keeps up with the expanding needs of the populace. I do physics experiments, educate people about universal fabricators, work with some volunteer organizations, talk to people, that sort of thing. I live in an apartment near one of the poles of the moon, in a nice area under a crystal dome for air.

If I had to really sum up my civilization, I would say that it's ... relaxing. Everyone's needs are provided for, so everyone does what they really want to do, whatever that is.

 

I hope that answers your question. For my own question, I'm hoping you can tell me some things about the law of the Imperium. Do you have a process for recognizing friendly (or allied) independent human states? If so, what is the process, and what hurdles would you expect to come up in following it? If not, why not?

These just keep getting longer and longer, don't they?

What does the serious man actually want to know?

What he actually wants to know is - what does Cherry want?

But anyone can tell anything about what they want. They don't even have to be plausible. They can say just what you want or expect to hear.

What he asked instead was to give an overview of her civilization, because here, the lies do have to be consistent. For someone who invented the universal fabricator, there shouldn't be that much of a difference between goals and actuality.

Here's the picture Weeping Cherry is drawing:

- I do not seek power over lives of others.

- I seek absence of any powers over lives of others.

- I do not seek unity.

- I seek prosperity - happiness, health, growth.

- I am not an enemy to humankind.

- I am an inventor and a scientist.

Here are the innate discrepancies the Inquisitor sees:

- She says she gifted replicators to humankind and obviously did nothing of the sort. She controls them, and with them the world.

- She makes a straightforward and implausible lie when describing why she keeps the power over her planet.

- She says that as a scientist and inventor she doesn't want to rule anything. This is not true of any known inventor or any know person who describes themselves as a scientist (ridiculous compound word as it is).

- What Weeping Cherry describes as a "universal fabricator" can trivially move people around. This isn't something you would expect of the universal fabricator. This is something that you might expect if you assume that all of Cherry's capabilities - vanishing blood, intercepting lasgun shots, flying - grow from the same root.

Here are the traces in which Weeping Cherry's explanations have been made to fit the tastes of Cherry's Interlocutor, Presumed Human from Imperium, Cautious and Informed:

- My lack of caution is explained by absence of any serious threats in my world.

- I am not a political danger to your country, I simply don't want to rule and inexplicably permit countries to exist!

- Despite being an Abominable Intelligence, I have no interest in eliminating competition from humans because I am, contrary to evidence, basically a human. People of my world keep unaltered sacred human forms because they want to, not because religion commands them.

- I want to provide everyone's needs because this was my initial impetus to seek my form of power, that overperformed anyone seeking it for the sake of it.

- And probably one or two more that the Inquisitor is missing at this moment.

And here are the tentative scenarios:

- I am an ordinary rogue AI of Mechanicum or a Machina Daemonica, hellbent on conquest of reality, who invented all the nonsense about parallel worlds wholesale. (But then - why body, why fly up into the air above ocean, why this communication at all?)

- I am a rogue, trying to bamboozle people into believing I have miraculous capabilities I don't. (But then - why the nonchalant reaction to the check, and how to explain the capabilities she indeed has?)

- I am a small fish in her pond, trying to convince people outside of being the shark. (But why? Not looking like the shark would make her life easier.) 

- I am an AI of a different civilization, hellbent on conquest of this reality if not my own, trying to make it seem I am not. (But then - why reveal capabilities like universal fabrication at all?)

- I was nearly exactly what I say I am, but am being influenced by Chaos, and am now willing to lie. (But then -why admit to Chaos experiments; and how is Chaos so darn fast on subverting a soulless entity? it ain't this good on Necrons.)

- I am exactly what I say I am. (But then - why the inconsistencies?)

...fuckdamn. I am tired and need some time to think.

Imperium has no allies outside of short-lived alliances of convenience. Imperium claims all humans in the Galaxy as it's own by right and all space of the Galaxy as it's own by right, and anyone outside of that claim by their origin or by their will is in violation of law and a foe, now or in the future, as a matter of principle. Qui non est mecum, contra me est. Thus, there's no official service or protocols for diplomacy.

Unofficially, however, it is a much different story. One that I might tell a bit later.

 

Your explanation is appreciated. It is a lot.

But I am tired and need some time to think.