The Fixipeligo cares a lot about safety, actually. Weeping Cherry's forb was sending live-streaming backups of her mind to several geographically-dispersed datacenters. When they notice that the stream has stopped, they'll query the planetary logistics program, which confirms that her body has been destroyed beyond recovery.

In accordance with her on-file advance directive, the cost of a new body is deducted from one of her accounts, and she is re-awakened in her apartment in New Selenopolis.

But this story isn't about her. This story is about the copy of her that was preserved in her forb and catapulted wildly across the dimensional sea. The pale gold orb that houses her pings off of the protections around an Arda, passes through the Maelstrom just long enough to have a streak of the interior transmuted into tapioca, hits a hyper-dense sleeping form, and shatters.

The largest fragment slows, and falls, and lands ...

... in a dingy alley in a run-down city, where the wind off the ocean that chills to the bone is the least of the inhabitants problems.

This causes a few instant reactions: In orbit, the Hopekiller alters her bearing by a tenth of a degree. In a fancy hotel on another Earth, a woman in a fedora drops her gun and grabs an orange instead. In a government office building, a costumed figure pauses and opens a blank report.

The thing is, forbs are tough. They are meant to provide essentially complete personal protection to their assigned person, and that includes being able to survive loosing 60% of their mass.

Loosing 60% of their mass and suddenly finding themselves in a place with more physical dimensions than their internal fold-crystal circuitry is designed for and suddenly being disconnected from the planetary logistics manager is less ideal.

The forb scans through its data storage and tries a few different fallback procedures. Finally, the code reaches the end of what it was prepared to handle and pops into an exception handler.

Unable to complete recovery. Awakening user in sim ...

Weeping Cherry opens her eyes. She remembers swirling colors and a pain in her abdomen, and then nothing.

In front of her hovers a user interface window with a warning in large, friendly letters. Below that is a summary of what her forb has tried and why it doesn't seem to have worked.

No connection to logistics manager ... complete discorporation ... fold crystal unable to manipulate local electron fixity ... insufficient compute for real-time sim ...

Her eyes dart to the upper right corner of her vision, where the objective time clock is ticking over as though the minutes are seconds. Beyond the window and her clock is darkness. Not the textured darkness of a room that merely happens not to have any light in it, but the utter blackness of a graphics card that has not been told to render anything.

Right, she thinks. Lets see what I can do ...

In the alley, rats skitter. The sun wheels overhead and dogs bark.

A passing citizen sees a flash of gold, and digs it out of the trash pile where it landed. A fist-sized jagged crystal, the edges sharp enough to cut. There's a hole through it, full of gunk, as though it is meant to hang from a necklace.

The citizen stuffs it in their pocket and hurries on. He's sure he can pawn it for something.

She digs into the low-level diagnostics, and spreads the error analyses around her head like stars.

These readings make no sense, she thinks. Unless the distance metric is ...

She stops. Her fingers tingle. She doesn't know what she expected, but she knows it wasn't this. She's not at home anymore -- well, that much was obvious because her forb wasn't fixed immediately. But she's not just outside the service area of the logistics managers, she's in some kind of spacetime that looks like it's 128+4 instead of 3+1. Which is, in a word, insane.

"Recalculate crystal geometries for a 128+4 dimensional spacetime and suspend my sim for one day objective or until that calculation finishes, whichever is earlier," she tells the forb.

She blinks, and the clock in the corner jumps forward.

Crystal geometry available, the forb informs her.

"Synthesize a minimum actuator using the new geometry," she tells the forb.

Matter synthesis severely compromised, the forb responds. Synthesis time: 19h objective.

"Pause my sim until you're done," she decides. She could take the time to think, but she really wants to see what kind of world she's ended up in.

When she opens her eyes again, the forb greets her with an all-green diagnostic report. There is a tiny fleck of deeper gold crystal adjoined to the side of the forb now, with which she can manipulate the electrons within several nanometers.

"Calculate what your base schematic would look like using the new crystals," she commands. "And open a visualization window using the new actuator."

The view that greets her is black, but it's the black of a small, dark place, not the black of the void that surrounds her. The visual spectrum is quiet, but the radio spectrum reveals her to be in a metal box, about 18 inches on a side. The infrared spectrum shows her to be room temperature.

"Is the actuator grabbing enough air to get sound?" she asks.

Sound available, the forb concurs.

"Put a random sample on."

The sound that reaches her is quiet, muffled. She hears the sound of cars, maybe, or of geese.

Updated schematic available, offers the forb.

"Set the new updated schematic as your base schematic and re-try emergency recovery procedures," Cherry tells it.

In the dark, the darker fleck grows over the surface of the orb like oil staining the water. Internally, the forb checks and 'fixes' each of its subsystems, synthesizing new high-dimensional crystals and slotting them into the internal mechanisms.

Repair in progress, the forb informs her. Estimated repair time: 4 months.

Yikes, she thinks. That is ... a long time.

But now that she can actually _see_ the outside world, and will soon be able to touch it, she feels no temptation to suspend her sim any longer.

She makes the forb jiggle some of its surface electrons to create light and illuminate the space around her.

She finds herself sitting on a small shelf, overlooking several boxes. An untidy sheaf of papers leans against the far wall of her enclosure. As she looks this over, one of the far walls of the space disappears, and a squinting face replaces it.

"What the hell?" the pawnbroker says. "Goddamn tinker shit."

He closes the safe and dials the PRT Tinkertech Hotline.

Weeping Cherry's sim rate is slowly picking up as the forb replaces its processors with something that takes advantage of local spatial geometry, but it's still well below 1:1 with objective time. She has no time to react before the face disappears again, and she's only just switched off the light when a gloved hand reaches in and plucks her off the shelf.

The following blur of motion is too fast for her to track, so she has the forb play it back. A uniformed figure wearing heavy gloves and a dark face shield grabs her and drops her into a dark container.

She sits back, slightly shocked. Mentally, she had been gearing up for a first contact situation, because she cannot even begin to imagine what sort of creature would call a 132 dimensional space home. So she really wasn't expecting humanoid (... human?) figures and a normal looking room.

She waves away her confusion and returns the outside view to real time, only to find that her current container is just as dark as her previous one.

"Show me accelerometer data," she tells the forb. Examining the resulting plot makes it clear that she's being transported, although with no idea where she started from that doesn't tell her much. In a moment, the motion ceases and she is once again lying still in a dark box.

Armsmaster nods to the PRT officer as she drops the tinkertech containment vessel off on his workbench, and reaches a finishing point on his current project, and carefully cleans and lays down his tools.

80% of 'tinkertech' called in to the hotline isn't. But on the other hand, 20% of it is, and so it's worth his time to take a look and make sure. He switches to a heavy-duty face shield and flips open the containment vessel.

She is no longer glowing, but as soon as she realizes that she's being looked at again she starts flashing a series of primes, on the basic premise that this is a reasonable first step when the air is still too heavy for her actuators to grab.

Armsmaster pauses and backs away when the crystal starts flashing. After a moment, it's clear that this is (probably) not the prelude to an explosion, so he reaches back and carefully taps it with his custom inspection tool.

(It is not, no matter what Dragon says, a tinkertech stick. It is a very sophisticated inspection tool. That he pokes things with.)

The clock ticking in the corner won't let her forget that she's at a disadvantage, reaction time wise. If the primes don't get a reaction with a few seconds (minutes), she'll switch to morse code.

"HELLO MY NAME IS CHERRY," she flashes. "I COME IN PEACE. PLEASE INDICATE IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND MORSE CODE"

"I'm glad you called, Colin. You're right, I've never seen anything like it. It's much too dense to be silica-based, and if I'm reading the weight sensors in your workbench correctly it's actually getting denser," Dragon remarks. She cuts herself off as the pattern of lights changes.

"Huh," she says.

Armsmaster touches a knob on the end of his inspection tool and blinks back at the crystal.

"MORSE CODE UNDERSTOOD," he replies. "ARE YOU DANGEROUS? YOU PURPOSE?"

"Colin!" she objects. "Are you sure it's wise to talk to it?"

"We were already expecting it to explode," Armsmaster explains. "This could provide valuable data."

He crosses his arms and peers at the crystal.

"On the other hand, apparently it might not respond."

"Maybe it's damaged?" Dragon suggests. "Considering that it looks like a piece of a larger mechanism."

Cherry sighs in relief.

"I AM NOT DANGEROUS," she reassures them. "I AM FROM ANOTHER WORLD. I CAME HERE BY ACCIDENT. I AM THINKING SIXTY TIMES SLOWER THAN YOU ARE."

Armsmaster and Dragon exchange a glance. Well, he looks at the video pickup beside the screen on which her avatar appears, and she turns her avatar to point more towards him. It's the thought that counts.

"That's an interesting set of claims. How do you think we should respond?" he asks her.

Dragon hmmmms.

"Let's ask it for details of how it came here, and what its world was like. It's not very likely to be from another world, but if we can keep it talking perhaps we can learn more."

"HOW DID YOU COME HERE?" he asks. As he waits for a reply, he checks that the investigation so far has been recorded properly, and enters a few notes in the report he has open.