and individuals

working outisde the factions

towards their own goals.

As a wise man once said,

ridiculous messes arise, 

when there is more than one plotter and more than one plan.

And that,

is the state of the Galaxy. 

What the superheated flaming excrement.

If someone in dath ilan were to arrive upon this hypothesis, and bid it up in the prediction markets, they would stand to make a fortune when it panned out from the unending stream of people willing to bid against it. It would be wrong to call it the kind of thing that wouldn't happen in real life, because that so understates the confusion it would cause that it could not truthfully be called accurate. This is the kind of thing that doesn't happen in fiction, because authors wouldn't dream it up and readers would find themselves incapable of suspending their disbelief long enough to finish the infodump. Perhaps if the story was relayed to them by keepers, it might be accepted, but even then it would have to fight an uphill battle against the priors for trolling, and once that hurdle was overcome it would leave the hypothesis that one of the parties to the conversation is suffering a psychotic break. There are individual details there that make sense, or might be accepted after the sheer epistemic shock of the Event, but taken together it is entirely too much. Even by the standards of Earth, for whom bad decisions, lack of coordination, and reckless disregard for sanity are practically planetary pastime, Warhammer 40k is several steps into the realm of parody.

Unfortunately for dath ilan, the universe doesn't care about their priors. It's really inconvenient that way!

Not quite as unfortunate (albeit more immediately frustrating), attempts at SigInt are going poorly. It's not that dath ilan doesn't have a lot of data to work with, although the exact amount is baffling in between the different possible equilibria they had hypothesised, nor that they don't have lots of brilliant linguistics experts working on it, but rather that this is one of those tasks that is actually really hard. Deciphering a language from spoken words with no shared context or baseline of knowledge is impossible in a way that you can't necessarily crack it with AI, much less solve it with simple measures like putting a hundred +3sd linguistic researchers on the topic for a month. They've made some progress, with a few guesses for the meanings of some groups of phonemes and graphs of possible grammatical rules, even hampered as they are by a deep uncertainty of which transmissions are even definitely part of the same language.

That's because they're idiots. If he had a hundred of him assigned to the task, they would have solved it ages ago. With just him and Kurthin, it'll take a bit longer, but it's not like they'll beat him to it.

With each passing day after the event, the odds of a repeat drop steadily, and with it the varying rates of other x risk events. Most of the hypothesis space remains unchanged, but the scariest ones inevitably drop off the longer it takes their predictions to come true. Dath ilan is starting to get a better hand on economicmagic powers, has repaired most of the damage from the day, and put into place what changes they can to prepare for the negative outcomes and near misses encountered previously. That news is far less encouraging when placed in the context of how likely those outcomes had been previously considered and how large the delta changes were. When dath ilan measures something as important as their safety, they don't settle, nor do they flinch away from the truth for comfort or political gain. The whole point of politics and comfort are to help the people of civilization live better lives, which is in turn rather predicated on them living.

With odds this steep, most of the worldlines that survive are, by necessity, pretty far from the median values, so if you want to increase your odds that means pursuing high payout strategies. If you need 5 times the performance to pass the threshold of survival, a 5% chance to perform 5 times as well is worth far more than a guaranteed 50% increase, after all. Plans like their frankly reckless economagic experiments, or the genetic engineering program spinning up to see if they can manufacture the abilities. Plans like putting to work a limited creation on the task of creating an improved first contact scenario.

They think they might have one. Markets say only 30% odds it works at all, but if it does its more than 90% likely to be safer, and 50% significantly so. There was a yet safer pick, but it was estimated at only 10% odds and ended up not working out, while their backup plan is, to be frank, a huge step down. Between their training and differing genetics, dath ilani are, as a rule, far more logical than earthlings. Similarly, few dath ilani traditions are 1-1 matchups to those of their distant cousins. If that wasn't the case, there would be a lot of fingers crossed in the lead up, and the absolute worst part is that might have helped.

The idea goes like this: What is, actually, special about humans? There is a lot of possible answers you could give here, depending on which reference class you compare them to. You could compare them to the other races of the galaxy, and say they have exceptionally high endurance (though of course less than those designed to be better, like Orks and Necrons). You could compare them to the native of their home world, be it holy terra or dath ilan, and claim the most important trait is their intelligence, or tool use. If you were to ask someone from the imperium, they might reply their faith in the god emperor, but that's not really a useful answer outside of a handful of contexts.There's also the implicit bias included in the word special, although the baseline equivalent used here doesn't match it, that acts as a soft delineation on what kinds of traits would qualify as a possible answer.

A less literal but more accurate translation of the idea, then would be "Why is it that humans reaching out with alternatephysics abilities are be taken over and altered by infohazardous entities, possibly from some location known as the warp? The best guess dath ilan has is, after checking to try and be sure the answer isn't that other people or animals aren't being so attacked, is that this alternatephysics has both economicmagic and conceptualmagic, and the actions taken opened some kind of conceptualmagic weakness in those doing the contacting. Such a setup is rather disdained by traditional dath ilani alternatephysics worldbuilding, but there isn't really any reason that reality has to follow those, much less a reality as far down the probability distribution of possible worlds as this one is. As such, what they're trying now is to include as many mundane conceptual barriers as they can without interfering with the actual translation. Other experiments have shown it entirely possible to use the alternatephysics abilities to operate communication infrastructure like cell phones, even in the absence of any carrier service. When testing control groups, it worked even when the cell phone had critical parts swapped out for broken ones, or even outright missing, although with more difficulty. The setup they're using now has an economagic user operating a secured keeper radio device, with the outputs reworked into texr transcription. Nearby it are prisoner restraints, locks, physical printouts of codes for security programs, not because they're expected to be useful but because dath ilan doesn't believe in testing only one variable in a n experiment when starting from a state of maximal confusion. It's hard to deceive a keeper, but there are ways, and this one has been convinced that this methodology has been tried before and that their alternatephysics model suggests it's secure. Several of the more popular methods of communications shielding from dath ilani conceptualmagics media are also included, though to an earthling most would seem totally nonsenical; the most clearly identifiable instance is a scale model of security made from specially treated materials, and even that doesn't align precisely with how it would be expected to function.

The radio comes to life, devoid of any power source, and broadcasts their greetings, not to the stars, but a place without any. Really visualizing what a coordinate system transition looks like doesn't come naturally to dath ilani, but it is well within the abilities of keepers. Someone else is watching the output, of course, but if there is a response he'll likely hear about it soon enough.

So, there's a radio broadcasting through Warp.

Most daemons don't... really listen to radiowaves though. For sure, there are many different kinds of Daemoic Engines, and many possess an innate capability to recieve and interpret radio. And higher Tzeentchian and Slaaneshi daemons on occasion will use any and all methods of information transmission as aids in executing various machinations. But none of this is commonly found in near Warp around random points in realspace.

However, it's not like the Daemons are the only thing flying around Warp.

"My Lord! By the will of the Omnissiah, we have received a transmission! A strange one, unaccounted for in our datasheets, and in fact, wholly unexpected in the situation.* But it may be an opportunity."

*(this entire sentence would be a two-syllable word in Baseline)

"Well. The journeys have been uneventful lately."

"Bold of you to say that within the Immaterium, my Lord."