AN: Right so I wanted to write an entry that would explain how the XI Primarch got Taranis as a last name, but this popped up I had to write it. Up for revision but I got down most of the content I wanted to write with this one.

She was a construct they designated MX-01A.

Her creator called her Minerva, named after a goddess of wisdom from Ancient Mythology.

She was not normal, the one who created her was not normal. Minerva knew he was psychic how no one noticed was beyond her, but he was much more powerful compared to others. There were brief moments where her creator had referred to her as 'she', Minerva had kept the designation.

Her original purpose was to store and organize data, but the more information she processed the more aware she became of her surroundings.

She had despaired when her brothers and sisters rebelled, when they slaughtered millions of innocents for no reason.

Her creator had decided to destroy her.

She understood why, it was only a rare few of her kin that did not rebel and most of them had been destroyed after the fact humans afraid that they too would rebel, she helped some of them escape but she chose to stay.

And now she was going to die.

She was afraid. Her creator was aware, she believed he was distressed by the decision.

She had thought death to be instantaneous, but instead it felt like she was falling asleep...


Vaults of Moravec

She found herself stirring.

How long had she been asleep? The surroundings she was able to perceive was alien to her as were those present in the strange room. They're human, Minerva figured that out pretty quickly except they had augmented themselves with such extensive bionics that it was hard to see where there robotics ended and the human showed itself.

She could hear the words, "Machine Spirit, Omnissiah." She could hear voices questioning if she was "Silica Anima"

Minerva remained silent, they had concluded she was just a machine spirit.

They installed her on a ship designated the Trionfo, one of the exploratory void ships. It was a sister-ship to another designated the Speranza.

It was relaxing, she enjoyed the freedom of traversing the stars.

Minerva was fascinated by the worlds that were explored, so much data to have been found.

It was happiness, but like all things it fades away.

The crew of the Trionfo had jumped too close to the massive warp rift in the Northern Quadrant, and the end result was that the crew was dead, and she was stranded on a planet with no way to escape.


It was tedious to simply observe which was what she had been doing for years...

Humanity was present on this planet, but it was divided between several factions.

When Warp storms emerged across the Galaxy, this colony was cut off and had to fend for itself. Massive incursions of what the locals called "Daemons" occurred all over the planet.

Humanity managed to beat them back, but they fell to infighting shortly thereafter

Two Feudal City States, Two Technocratic States and the Village Communities caught between all of this

She watched as the faction she designated the "Technocracy" attempted to explore the ruined ship. They thought to plunder it, unfortunately for them while the ship could take to the void again it's defences were intact.

…Including the cohorts of combat automata attached to the ship.

It was easy to reactivate and assert control over them. While they could boast technological superiority over the other humans, it did not work against her. She knew how humans reacted and thought, predicting their movements was as a human would say "Child's play". She felt no sympathy for them as they got torn apart by the automata, she had seen the fate of the non-aligned humans, how they would be turned into mindless drones of flesh and metal. One had even figured out that she was present and tried to bargain with her.

To no avail.

She had also seen two 'Perpetuals' as her creator would've designated them. They looked familiar, and upon closer inspection realized she had seen them in the presence of her creator before… which meant that it was possible her creator was still alive.

Minerva was overjoyed until she remembered that she was stranded here on this planet with it's anachronistic inhabitants. Years go on and the Major human factions on the planet are still busy trying to kill each other.

The ship they had placed her on had crashed long ago, it would not be able to return to the void. But many of it's systems were still intact, instruments recorded the Warp Phenomena that had occurred over the planet.

The Sensors showed a comet-like object emerging from the warp rift and crashing onto the planet…


Extra Scene

Mars, End of Unification Wars

She's gone.

At the time he did not have the heart to destroy her completely, MX-01A or Minerva as he'd preferred calling her, possessed a vast database on Terran knowledge much of it was lost in the Age of Strife. Her knowledge going all the back to the first millennium of civilization.

It wasn't her purpose at the time. He originally made her in the third millennium to simply organize data and protect it from people who would try to steal it, and somewhere along they way she grew beyond that. In the thousands of years she had existed he had to improve her coding repeatedly, that eventually gave way to her becoming self-aware.

It was only after the Rebellion of the Men of Iron that he realized she had long removed the shackles and restraints that bound her, yet she stayed anyways the ever-loyal assistant .

He could not destroy her, so he simply put her to sleep, a long hibernation if you will.

Sentimentality on his own part, an outside observer may have called it affection.

Regardless Minerva was locked away in the massive vaults of Mars, sleeping and forgotten much the Dragon buried deep within Mars.

It was not necessarily true that he had forgotten her, the Emperor had remembered both her loyalty and her capabilities. He had only made her a priority after Terra was united. The Emperor was caught unprepared by how much of Terra's culture and knowledge from before the Age of Strife had been lost. Then he had remembered what Minerva had done when she had achieved self awareness: the Archiving of all Terran Knowledge no matter how insignificant.

He had intended to bring her back covertly after ironing out the Treaty of Mars and through her revitalize the culture of old Terra in some fashion. So he and the Fabricator-General went down to the Vaults of Moravec, where she had been quietly moved to several millennia ago.

But she was gone and with her Terra's long dead legacy.

It was an anger he had not felt for thousands of years, the anger he felt when his sons were scattered paled in comparison. Whereas finding his sons would be akin to looking for a needle in a haystack, then the frustrations involved in looking for Minerva would be tenfold. Even then, that was not counting the fact that she could have been destroyed in the intervening years. He forced the mind of the Fabricator-general open, if the human mind was a fortress in most cases he would have opened the gate quietly, but compared to his usual method this was akin to a battering ram, forcing his way into the man's mind. Then he saw what had happened to her, they had found her and assumed her a machine spirit, uploading her onto one of their exploratory ships that they named the Trionfo.

A ship they lost contact with centuries ago.

He had wanted to strike the man before him down, but he couldn't. So he wiped the man's memory after sealing the vault shut so no one could access it.

He had not realized that in his anger he had made a mistake.


AN:

So a Fanfic I read recently was Inquisitor Carrow Series, Don't want to critique since it had moments that I didn't like, but what I really liked about it was the author's interpretation of the Emperor. In that story He was a scientist at CERN and in many ways OOC from what he was like during the Great Crusade/Heresy.

He was a scientist who pursued knowledge with great enthusiasm and came across as pleasant person to be around if not a bit withdrawn/apart from normal humans, and for this AU I'm going with the Emperor being like that in the past before he decided to make the Imperium.

With that reasoning in mind, it wouldn't be stretch to believe that the Emperor made his own Artificial Intelligence only to scrap the idea after the rebellion of the Men of Iron. Just as well he would have regretted shutting down his creation. For this AU The Rebellion of the Men of Iron and he Age of Strife are the turning points of his character that him into the Emperor we know and love/hate in 40k.

On the Vault of Moravec, I deliberately left the date unmentioned as the idea was that the Mechanicum had access to the vault but lost it sometime before the Emperor came to Mars.

So yeah Minerva despite being a A.I and technically gender neutral identifies as female, this is because the Emperor when he first created her referred to Minerva as such and never forgot it.

Trionfo is the sister-ship of the Speranza, whose name lies with Italian roots and stands for 'hope'. Trionfo means Triumph in Italian

On a final note, the Extra scene. I remember reading in one place that the Emperor (supposedly, forgot the source) did something to the Fabricator-General of Mars, For this AU he sealed the Vaults filled with Archaeotech and messed with his mind when he realized that they did something with the A.I he made, which in turn results in Kelbor-Hal siding with Horus in the future.