Tales of the Amber Vipers Chapter 396
Wulfe wasn't happy, that was common most days, but today was truly aggravating. The Squat's temper was barely held in check, his ire bubbling near the surface. His face betrayed frustration and his clenched fists spoke of a desire to smash everything within reach. Any sane person would flee before his wroth, but for the current conversation that was impossible. It wasn't like the blasted machine could get up and walk away.
The Rotundus stood deep within the Black Mountain, in a most unique chamber. The room was spherical, split in half by a mesh grille floor. It was filled with arcane machinery that leaked red light from below. Twenty servitor heads lined the circumference, which featured two doors, an entrance and a dedicated Astropath's billet, who would remain in this facility for the rest of his life. The entire apparatus had been cut out of a ship and lowered down a specially dug shaft, then buried in Ferrocrete. It was a strange device, one that made Wulfe uncomfortable and one he would not have tolerated, were he granted any choice in the matter.
The servitor-heads spoke in unison, "Development curves have plateaued, drastic steps must be taken."
"A step towards a trash compacter would be best," Wulfe snarled.
"You cannot abandon the work, not when we are so close! Belisarius Cawl, Supreme genius among Magos, demands it."
"Cawl can stick his head up an Ork's arse!" Wulfe snapped.
"Error, we cannot transmit that to Belisarius Cawl, Last Hope for Reason in an age of ignorance. The Cawl Diminutive serves him in all things."
"I be this close to sending you back to him in bits," Wulfe growled.
The servitor heads went silent and cogitator stacks whirred as the device processed this insult. Wulfe loathed speaking to the machine, one of Cawl's toys, made to convey his word and intent. Cawl claimed it would recreate his meanings exactly, Wulfe could believe that part, the damned thing wouldn't stop stroking its maker's ego.
"The work must continue," the Cawl Diminutive asserted.
"Why here though, why this blasted rock?!" Wulfe snapped.
"It is an ideal place to hide."
"We had a ship, we could go anywhere, this rock is a bloody big target!"
"It is a feral world, no advanced surveyors or auspex to track us. Furthermore proximity to the Cicatrix Maledictum covers many transgressions, the immaterial energy-flux drowns out stray signal leakage. We are undetectable."
"Stop calling the rift that, ye idiots feed it by giving it names," Wulfe snapped, "The Votann know better than ye to not attract unwanted attention by messing about with that which ought narry be messed with!"
A click issued from its depths as the Cawl Diminutive reassessed its responses and uttered, "Your own Kinhost will benefit from this project. The Balor-Attal Conglomerate needs this knowledge."
Wulfe grunted, "Our woes are no concern of yours."
"But we need each other! The Neo-Cadmus can be the salvation of mankind. So speak Belisarius Cawl, architect of Primaris and successor to the Emperor's great work. Legions of perfect Silica Animus can replace the faulty and individualistic Astartes. War machines as once marched across the galaxy shall drive out Xenos threats, crush Heretics and repulse Daemons. The Machine Mind does not need to fear the Warp, we shall defeat Chaos itself and our creations shall bring the Imperium back from the brink!"
Wulfe's lip curled, "Ye be stupider than ye look. The Votann remember what those machines did in the past, we remember how they rose against their makers. The warp-abortions ye fear so much cannot be bested by machines, nothing can beat them. All ye can do is fend them off, drive them back, slam the bloody door in their faces. These tinkertoys shall not be the end of Chaos."
The Cawl Diminutive however replied calmly, "Brontes saved your life, that gift stands unrepaid. By the laws of the Votann the debt passes to his successors. You owe him your finest efforts."
Wulfe bit back a curse as the truth sank in. He hated it, he hated having that burden lie upon his shoulders but there it was. Wulfe owed Brontes a life-debt, and the bitter old bag of bolts only had the unmitigated gall to die before it could be repaid. For a Rotundus that was unbearable, an oath was a sacred thing, to be remembered and honoured so long as memory endured. Death was no end to oaths, the onus passing through generations, handed down from father to son like relic weapons. A Rotundus would sooner suffer a thousand woes than break a promise, sooner die than let a debt go unpaid.
Wulfe glared at the Cawl Diminutive and snapped, "The bairns aren't getting any smarter, and we cannae fix that."
The machine responded, "Belisarius Cawl, the brightest star in the firmament, has communicated that an infusion of original Nanocytes will remedy the shortfall."
"Ha, good luck with that, they be gone from this universe. Good riddance to the tiny buggers."
"A solution is being engineered as we speak."
"Care to explain how?" Wulfe growled.
"The answer will be self-evident, when the moment comes. Till then, await the sign."
The Cawl Diminutive shut down as Wulfe growled angrily, turning on his heel and storming out. He strode into an elevator and slammed the cage shut, watching the chamber slide out of view as the lift ascended. Wulfe chewed on his beard silently as the decks flashed past, taking him to another part of the mountain, one equally hidden and twice as heretical. He wished he could go anywhere else but his word was his bond and he would not shirk from the consequences.
The cage stopped with a thump and Wulfe stepped out into a broad workshop. As vast as an arena, with red-robed adepts making ritual circles, swinging smoking censors on silver chains. Stacks of logic engines occupied the corners, thrumming constantly as data was processed. Skardar was labouring in a corner, directing teams of Ironkin to set up mysterious devices, whose purpose Wulfe cared not to guess. Another corner was given over to two great biers, upon which rested a pair of Cadmus robots, laying dissembled like anatomical drawings of a vivisected man. It made Wulfe wince, to see the dissected remains prodded and poked. The dead should be laid to rest with honour, as the Cloneskein passed their memories to the Ancestor Cores, but secrets were yet to be gleaned from the millennia-old devices.
In the centre of the room a trio of heavy machines were studying. Broad they were and well armoured, with piston limbs and reinforced chassis, to withstand tremendous damage. A passing glance could mistake them for artefacts of the Legio Cybernetica, Battle-automata, but the shape of the armoured cowls over their many-eyed sensor domes was eerily familiar. Broadly similar in design, but there were differences.
The first of them rested on two legs but had four arms and two sensor-domes, making it appear as if two chests had been fitted onto one set of legs. Another had a humanoid torso but four legs, like a Centyr of proto-history. The third had no lower body but floated on a ring of anti-grav impellors, hovering over the floor without concern. Bulky plasma-casters were fitted to their arms, and their fists were crushing claws in their own right. Wulfe didn't fear them, but had no desire to measure himself against those hands, not all three at once for sure.
Wulfe strode up and saw the machines' were being tested, not physically, they had passed all trials years ago, but tests of intellect and reasoning. The one with four arms was playing a game of regicide, Inos using extending Mechandrites from his palms to manipulate the tiny pieces. The four-legged one, Agrave, was stacking wooden blocks marked with numerical formulas, to describe complex equations. The floating one, Samala, was manipulating a Hololithic image of a Repulsor engine, trying to take it apart and reassemble it virtually.
"Astartes two to Cardinal's seven," Inos recited as it moved a piece on the Regicide board.
Adept Egor calmly moved the piece back to where it was, "No, the Astartes piece doesn't move like that. Forward two, then one left or right: as we have repeatedly told you."
"It doesn't move right," Inos protested.
"That is how the game is played. The rules are the rules."
"The rules are stupid!"
Wulfe suppressed a grimace as he saw Samala exclaim he had finished. Weary adepts however pointed out seventeen mistakes in the reassembled engine, meaning it would never run like that. The less said about Agrave's attempts to build equations the better, the mounds of formula blocks stacked by colour order, making gibberish patterns of the mathematics. The attempt to educate machine minds wasn't going very well, if anything it was going backwards.
Inos spied Wulfe approach and abandoned the game, "Explorator! We can go outside today?!"
"Nay bairn," Wulfe growled, "It's too dangerous."
"But we're big and strong! Nothing outside can hurt us!"
"We grow bored," Agrave added, "These walls offer no stimulation."
"Let us go outside, so we can see the stars," Samala begged.
Wulfe looked up at the three towering machines, taking in their huge girth and soaring height. Built like a Battle-automata, yet whining like children. Almost he felt moved to pity for them, almost, but he held his tongue. There were damned good reasons the project had been moved underneath a mountain, on a remote feral world no less, and Wulfe wasn't going to blow everything with insipid sympathy.
"Ye cannae go outside, the sky is split," Wulfe retorted, "Ye must stay underground, till ye is finished."
"We're ready now!" Inos claimed.
"Show us the enemy, we will beat them!" Agrave added.
"Beat them into a pulp!" Samala chuckled.
"I said nay!" Wulfe snapped, "If ye go outside the cogboys may see from orbit. They aint like Egor here, all friendly like. They will try to end ye. Stay here, stay out of sight, till we're ready to show the galaxy what ye can do. The day will come, be patient. Till then carry on with ye studies."
The giant robots sagged like told-off scholam boys. They resignedly returned to their tasks, testing their intellects against fresh puzzles brought forth to challenge them. Wulfe nodded his head off to the side and Egor split off, walking with Wulfe as the pair strode away. Wulfe marched them to the far side of the chamber, where he was sure the robots couldn't hear, next to the disassembled remains of the previous-generation Cadmus. Skardar wandered over, a pair of Ironkin hanging off his flank.
"Narry any progress," Wulfe sighed.
Egor deflated, "The initial growth of intellect and coordination was most promising, but at some point their development faltered. Some unseen error in their programming or construction constrains self-actualisation. We are on the cusp of true sentience, but it remains out of reach. The Neo-Cadmus cannot achieve their full potential."
"The bairns are stuck as children," Wulfe sighed.
"Prepubescence is not a term one can apply to a Machine, but their stunted intellects do resemble underdeveloped flesh-units," Egor allowed.
Wulfe slapped Brontes' corpse, "Any more ye can wring out of this one?"
Egor's voice modulator took on a wistful tone, "We have learned much, but there are secrets we cannot unravel. Their quantum circuitry is amazing, but gives no clues as to the manufacturing process."
Skardar agreed, "Reverse-engineering can only take ye so far, we need ta understand how ancient Cadmus were made, in order to repeat the process."
Wulfe chewed his lip a moment then asked, "What about Nanocytes? That glitch Cawl seems to think they could be key."
"Nanocytes?" Egor mused, "That would be most enlightening, if we had any. The microscopic devices could manipulate atoms; they would be able to correct the sub-atomic flaws that riddle our inferior quantum-circuitry. The Neo-Cadmus' intellectual problems stem from our imperfect recreations of the base technology. If we could obtain a sample of Nanocytes we could bypass the issues and achieve true sentience!"
Skardar sighed, "We're truly stuck then. There be no Nanocytes left. Brontes' all shut down when he died, and we cannae make any more. Not even the Votann can make them."
Egor cocked his head, "Perhaps we can reactive inert Nanocytes, trick them into thinking the Brontes-unit is operational again. They are intact afterall, they only lack direction."
"Ye be welcome to try Egor," Wulfe sighed without hope.
"That is not my name," the Adept retorted, "But the attempt shall be made."
Egor and Skardar bustled off, leaving Wulfe alone with the dead robots. The squat shook his head, wondering how he had come stuck in this dire state, nursemaid to intellectually stunted robots, of a breed hostile to his people. He would never have believed it possible, had it not happened to him, the onerous debt laid upon him driving him to dark places he never wanted to go. Still he had to try, his debt to Brontes demanded it, and the Votann's need compelled him. For his people's sake, and his own, he must do everything he could to see the Neo-Cadmus made whole. Though he wondered how much further into the darkness he would stray before this was done.