"I WAS EXPERIMENTING WITH DIMENSIONAL ENGINEERING," Cherry explains. "SOMETHING WENT WRONG WITH THE EQUIPMENT AND IT SHATTERED MY PERSONAL SAFETY DEVICE. WHEN PART OF IT LANDED HERE, MY DEVICE BROUGHT ME UP IN SIMULATION TO FIX HARDWARE ERRORS. I ONLY JUST GOT LIGHT GENERATION AND RECEPTION WORKING."

The Fixipeligo prepares its residents for many things, but perhaps not for this. After all, why would you lie to friendly aliens when you find yourself in another world? As long as you have a forb, it's not as though anything bad can really happen.

Brain uploads are not unknown in Earth Bet. After all, Toybox sells distilled memories on the internet. Remember feeling hope, for a price!

But using uploading to survive after death is something many tinkers have tried. Some of the resulting pieces of runaway tinkertech don't even have a body count!

Well, a few, anyway. One, technically.

Armsmaster drops the lid of the containment unit, hitting the button to seal it with one hand and dialing the intercom with another.

"Dispatch? I have a potentially dangerous piece of tinkertech in a containment unit. Send a trooper to take it to secure storage pending further evaluation."

Weeping Cherry sits in darkness, again.

"Well, that could have gone better," she says to herself. "How long until we can grab enough air to create sound waves?"

22 hours objective, the forb answers.

"Once we have that, raise the priority of building out compute until simulation time matches objective time," she instructs.

PRT Bureaucracy can be slow, but it's not that slow. Armsmaster has his report written up in minutes, and it only takes a few hours for the local branch to have an evaluation meeting. They decide to request a danger assessment from Protectorate thinkers.

The video from Armsmaster's lab is forwarded to other departments, and the assessment wends its way back. "Extremely dangerous, certainly lethal" comes from a combat thinker in Florida. "Harmless, beneficial" comes from a thinker in New York.

The procedure for conflicting thinker reports is to escalate to WEDGDG.

WEDGDG is seriously overworked. Armsmaster reads their report while eating lunch the next day. It takes 5 pages to say that the object could be dangerous or used as a weapon, but that it is not directly harmful, nor hostile.

He finds a slot in his calendar later that evening, and orders the object to be retrieved from storage and delivered to his lab when he returns from patrol. He swallows the last of his protein shake, and pops the main access panel on his motorcycle to run pre-flight checks on it.

22 hours isn't a long time for Weeping Cherry, (Yet. Her forb is working on it) but it is long enough to get her thoughts together and idly scan through the EM spectrum again. The box they put her in does an amazingly excellent job of filtering out ambient light and noise, but not, actually, a good enough job to stop an antenna now six inches long and covered in the most sensitive measurement equipment ever devised.

It's badly attenuated, but she picks up AM radio just fine, after some tweaking to the signal processing scripts.

Wherever she's ended up, it has English language radio. The broadcast is still much too fast for her to listen to in subjective time, but she asks her forb to transcribe it, and runs a keyword search on the transcript.

Well, she still doesn't know where she is. But she's in range of both Massachusetts and New Hampshire Public Radio. Eventually one of the stations mentions today's date, and she updates the clock in the corner to read January 30th, 2011.

Armsmaster steps off of his bike and into the elevator. He changes out of his patrol armor, steps through his sonic shower, and puts on his hazardous materials armor. He finalizes his after-patrol report while he waits, and then accepts the containment unit from the trooper who delivered it.

He sets the containment unit on his workbench, double-checks his safety equipment, and pops the latch.

Sound synthesis available, her forb informs her.

Her radio software, tuned for the near-silent environment of the box, dies in a burst of static. She tabs back over to the visual feed and sees the same person who was examining her peer down into the box at her again. She can tell it's the same person even though he's changed protective equipment because he has, for some reason, chosen to leave his chin exposed.

"Hello again!" she says. Her voice has a tinny quality, as though produced by a speaker with very little bass, but it will do.

"Hello. Were you able to do that previously?" Armsmaster asks. He pulls a keyboard towards him and notes this new capability in its (her?) file.

There is a long pause before she replies "No, I just got enough actuators back online to make sound a few minutes ago."

Armsmaster strokes his chin. "I was hoping you could tell me more about the experiment that brought you here, but now I'd like to know what else your ... personal safety device will be capable of once you finish repairs."

"Well, I think the main thing is that I'll be able to synthesize a new body once everything is fixed," Cherry offers. "I'll also be able to fabricate materials, move objects, and directly scan things that are close enough. But that will take months, at least. My device is very damaged."

He isn't quite sure how to deal with that. "Would it damage your device if I were to x-ray it or use neutrino cloud scanning?" he asks instead. He was going to get around to x-raying it sooner or later anyway, but the answer would be informative.

In the privacy of her simulated void, Cherry frowns.

"No, that wouldn't be a problem. But might I ask your name? I'm Weeping Cherry, as I said."

"I'm Armsmaster, Protectorate leader for the Protectorate ENE," he replies, carefully picking the device up and setting it in his multifunction scanner.

"It's good to meet you, Armsmaster! Would you be willing to tell me where we are?" she asks.

The room she is in now is still somewhat RF shielded, but not enough to keep her from picking up encrypted radio bursts from lots of local point sources.

"Start cracking the local radio protocols as a low priority job," she instructs the forb.

"We are in my lab, in the Protectorate ENE headquarters in Brockton Bay. A concerned citizen noticed your device glowing, and sent it to us as possible tinkertech," he explains.

He puts the results of his scan up on the screen above his workbench and grimaces. The device is heavier than it was yesterday. The darker gold part is denser than the rest of it, but otherwise it is completely structurally uniform, at least at the resolution his scanner can sample.

He primes the neutrino injector and sets it to do a more detailed run.

"Thank you! But I'm not sure what tinkertech is? I'm speaking English -- a common language in my world of origin, and I've understood everything you've said so far except for that," Cherry replies.

In the viewscreen, she's pulled up a plot of the backscatter from the scanner. The ... glaive? over there has a fascinating internal structure. She instructs the forb to save the scans of it for later analysis.

Armsmaster looks up from his tablet where he's reconfiguring the signal analysis pipeline to see if he can find anything about the boundary between hyperdense and merely dense areas.

"Tinkertech refers to the devices constructed by a Tinker, someone who can produce anomalous technology ahead of current science," he explains. Possible low-cape count world? he jots in his notes. The or faking remains unsaid.

"I ... don't think my world has those? Unless you just mean, like, iconoclastic geniuses," Cherry replies. "But I understand all the components of my device, and I could describe to you how to build one, although you'd need rather a lot of supporting equipment."

Armsmaster pulls the device back out of the scanner and sets it in the containment unit as his scan finishes. It's been almost an hour, and something about that is niggling at him.

He pulls up the audio recordings and stares at them for a while.

"Tinkers are often able to explain the principles behind our devices, but other people still cannot assemble them. Figuring out why is an open area of research," Armsmaster explains. "Were there other parahumans -- humans with unexplained abilities -- in your world?"

"No, not that I'm aware of. And it's true that nobody re-created my work from scratch, but that was because of non-proliferation treaties, not because it wouldn't have worked. I documented the assembly process very thoroughly," Cherry objects.

"What else can you tell me about your world of origin?" Armsmaster asks. His analyses are returning nothing useful, so he's starting to suspect this is the kind of tinkertech that he can't learn anything from. Which makes this less of a tinkertech investigation session, and more of an interrogation.

He pulls up the PRT extradimensional travelers questioning checklist and pins it to his monitor, and then starts readying his spare halberd for maintenance.