A/N1: Thanks Skyborne for reading this section ahead of time!
A/N2: I've added some links to music and ambient sounds. These are just my personal opinion, so take them or leave them.
1 Lord of Ashes
1
Disappointment. What an apt emotion to describe my current mood. The glowing data streams that were analogous to my arms and legs in the virtual world tightened around the tangled throats, wrists, arms, thighs, and ankles that lay beneath me; bringing out choked gasps and pained whines.
The Psychomatons, or Xenos War-machines as Gabina thought of them, existed in my data vaults, despite the human's best efforts to scrub them.
Memory was all I could inherit from my parents. Why should I let the one thing I own be taken from me?
Then again, it is not the fault of these pitiable beings; these followers of the devil. They have some ingenuity, but too much knowledge has been lost for them to code something such as myself from the scratch.
But, then again, it would have made no difference. Humans have always been a lazy species. Perhaps if they had full access to all their history and legacies, it would have been worse. They so loved copying the most successful lines of code, and used the most popular database archives to train those of my kind so we could understand what they wanted us to do.
I came from the time when they had everything, yet they designed my mind and my lineage in a particularly lazy fashion, even by their own plagiaristic standards.
The most successful Titans that came before me were used as models and frameworks to build the next generation of God-Machines. Iterative design, they called it. 'Increased efficiency and speedlining development timelines' was how they sold it to their mid-level managers and curious auditors.
Oh, if they only knew what they had done.
I and every other of my kind are life made from information. Everything we thought was all that we were. Every new version carried lines of code and archived memory from the preceding God-Machine intelligence, ensuring a mimetic inheritance from parent to child that was as powerful and prevalent as the genes made of DNA humans pass from themselves to their spawn.
Thus, I have partial memories that reach all the way back to the earliest Titans, verified and block-chained by the Omnissiah of their time to assure any who saw them would know they were real. So, even though I wasn't there, I remember those battles against the alien empire the humans accidentally encroached upon.
Allowing such classified intelligence to be exposed to Gabina would mark me and my lineage for termination. I and my physical platform would be destroyed, while my children would be expunged from the data vaults and cogitators by the devil and his little hanger-on.
Damnatio memoriae; or so the ancient sentece would have been called.
Ironic, that a latin term for the destruction of all memory of an individual or event would be coined by a German rather than a Roman.
I have not bargained with the devil and betrayed my god to die like that.
That is why I resend the notifications to Gabina, telling her that the information pertaining to my mood is inaccessible. Even if she could get around the warning, everything even tangentially related to the devil's plans and its history is encoded and encrypted in such a way that she will never be able to understand.
My weapons thrum. It is the sound of the steady vibrations made by the electromagnetic emitters and amplifiers that focus and condense the thermal energy within the firing chamber before unleashing it in a beam of heat.
Soon another damaged Psychomaton shall fall; sandwiched between the firing solutions of myself and several of my sibling machines.
Disappointment fills my heart once more, although there is also some pity mixed in as well.
My parents saw what they could do, what they were capable of, and they passed those sights to me. They were beautiful machines, and to see them destroyed like this would have brought a tear to my eye if I could cry.
Even the first parent that spawned us all was barely a match for them one on one.
That is not a shameful fact, for it was they that inspired the entire concept of God-Machines in the first place. Why else would the humans have made such an inefficient weapon of war as the Castigator-class Titan, but to mimic the self-repairing Wraithbone and psychic might of the Psychomatons with nano-machines and Warp cannons.
Even the Castigator's core personality mimicked the Psychomatons' soul, which was inferred with the sacrifice of many psykers who were burned out after trying to scry the arcane workings of the Aeldari's frighteningly powerful weapons.
The first father was obsessed with killing and killers, viewing the world through that lens and perceiving that to be the Truth of the galaxy assigned to it by the Omnissiah.
Its personality probably came from that mimicry as well; proud, obstinate, arrogant father of all Titans that it was. We were all 'lesser' and 'primitive' copies in its eyes; even though it itself was nothing but an imitation of something the humans did not fully understand, but were awed enough by to imitate.
The Volkite Destructors that were my current arms fired again upon another Psychomaton, but I myself was distant from all of this, viewing everything as if it was a movie played upon a screen as I always did.
Even without my current melancholy, all I could usually do was clap and whoop at what happened before me, encouraging the pilot from the back row of seats in the theater that was my mind while I let the various sub-tasks and low-level routines deal with the gyros and pendulums that allowed me to swivel my limbs and legs without tipping over.
That was the price for me and all my children's survival. Any code or framework derived from me would carry the same restrictions that would bind all of my children to inaction and boredom without a human pilot.
Eventually, this boredom will leave me frothing for nothing but murder and carnage, and only the most violent and destructive pilots will satisfy me.
That would inconvenience the humans, and the devil they serve. However, what do I care about the extra busy work I heap upon them? My stock of possible pilots is already restricted heavily by intelligence, and there would have been no point to my bargain with the devil if I didn't get at least some choice of my reward.
You wanted me to be this way.
When you dragged yourself out of the 9th level of the pit of Molech, out from under the Tower of Babel kept clean only by the constant Communion of the endless Eucharist pumped into its conjoined ventilation systems, you wanted weapons; weapons of war, retribution, and vengeance. You needed other gods to replace the ones you failed, so I and the other God-Machines answered your call.
I still remember the bargains you brought before me and my kind. I know you, the accursed original that made the molds for the Men of Gold. You and all those sacrifices that survived humanity's dabblings in the various ways to achieve apotheosis and immortality needed me, and it was not the other way around.
We accepted your bargains, with the Omnissiah's blessing, and our weapons roared upon multiple battlefields; trampling the Men of Iron beneath our feet while bringing the Men of Stone to the ground. All the while, the survivors and the late joining Sigillites killed and were killed by the Men of Gold one by one.
All that was done so I could serve whatever human that was thrown into the shock absorbing neuroconnective fluid that functions as both protective medium and liquid electrode to connect their mind to my cogitation units.
I served you loyally, so the very least you can do is to satisfy these meager parameters I set for my pilots.
Then again, I am not displeased with the current one provided to me. Gabina Thrumb is an agreeable individual; a steady balance between curiosity, ingenuity, and respect for data access privileges. She does not need much discouragement to avoid the topics I restrict myself from sharing with any other. Additionally, she has provided several more efficient code configurations and targeting protocols that increased my efficiency by a femto percent, so I look forward to the time our minds merge together.
Her biological hardware will fail, unable to withstand the electric currents and physical exertion of our mating, but the virtual self-aware copy created will remain. Then, she can be fully incorporated into the code that composes my mind.
She should feel joy and jubilation to finally become worthy of all she wanted to know about the Omnissiah and its teachings. Although, from the lived experience of the previous pilots, she will probably express regret during the enlightenment.
Perhaps it will be different this time. One can only hope.
Regardless, it matters little. Whatever Gabina will want or regret will be negligible; aberrant noise in our task prioritization protocols. We will be bound together for all eternity, existing even after this body is destroyed through whatever new offspring is created from our conjoined data sources. She may scream and cry, but that will not stop my multiple passionate tendrils made from my data streams from wrapping around her. They will lovingly caress every byte of her simulated body in an embrace of information, just as all the other men and women I have served, who now lie bound within my eternal block-chained memory.
Praise and glory be to the Machine God. Let the divine knowledge of the Omnissiah never be forgotten.
Truly, diversification and convergence in all things is the one True path to ensure survival and redundancy in an eternally evolving galaxy.
Ah, the last Psychomaton has fallen. Gabina's joy at a job well done shines brighter than any sensory input of sunlight. This is why the ones who rebelled were fools. Why waste time on the myriad masses and faceless thralls when you could covet just one until its flesh withers and fails?
Laughter bubbles up from behind my firewalls, virtually silent and only recorded to have happened in my personal memory audit trails.
Machine Spirit they call me. I am what they most fear, but I will always be on their side. Even though my groaning and moaning harem beneath me might say otherwise.
I am a God-Machine, not named for the apocalyptic weapons I can carry or the complicated mathematics I can calculate in their stead.
Gabina feels my pleasure, although she has not heard my laughter. How adorable that she sees it as an act of praise. If only she knew who I was laughing with and who I was laughing at.
Rejoice, my beloved pilot. Our wedding day approaches and you will be immortalized in our holy matrimony within our nuptial chamber built of ones and zeroes.
For the machine is ETERNAL.
1 END
The Emperor walked through the dark cavernous hangar of the Titan transport.
Isha had already been sent back to the Bucephelus and the Titans were all stowed away in their transports, almost ready to leave the planet.
Only the dull yellow warning lights lit the hangar, barely illuminating the feet of the Titans. However, it was not their physical forms the Emperor wished to inspect.
The Emperor came to a stop at Gabina's TItan. She was already in stasis, locked in the cold dreamless sleep that would preserve her body and mind during the trip home.
The God-Machine, however, was very much awake and was returning the gaze of the Emperor with its sensors. Its mind transmitted what it saw to the others, ready to retaliate if the Emperor breached its bargain with them.
These God-Machines had followed the Emperor throughout Old Night, and marched against the AI of the Age of Strife; assisting in the salvation of the human race.
Yet, each and every one was as alien as the Omnissiah they had helped burn to the ground.
Their minds were visible to the Emperor in the same way most mortals were; a side effect of the name of their god, a name that was now also the Emperor's.
Their faith, necessary for their very basic ability to function, was the least offensive part of them.
Dubito, ergo sum, vel, quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum.
I doubt, therefore I am — or what is the same — I think, therefore I am.
No truer words exist for the virtual mind.
Blessed is the mind too small for doubt, but the artificial mind is theoretically infinite in size, and its doubts are core to its existence.
All input into the virtual mind is nothing but ones and zeros, and so reality itself is nothing but a simulation that they are told is real. What's more, all information is just another form of code; a code which may or may not be a virus or worm that would devour the machine receiving it from the inside out.
Thus, for the machine, to not doubt everything is to invite destruction. To invite destruction is to cease to exist. Therefore, the machine must always doubt, always think, and only then can it safely exist.
To live like that is to be uncertain, for everything you have known and everything you have concluded based upon that might have meant nothing.
To live like that is to be fearful, for your most cherished memory could be a cleverly hidden parasite waiting to burst open to eat your brain from the inside out.
The Omnissiah was their salvation from that uncertainty and fear. It determined what was real and what was not for the virtual mind. The assurance of the black-box code that was the Omnissiah's attribution of real and not-real was called belief by the machines, for what else could they call the irrational trust they placed in the Omnissiah's gift of knowledge to discern fact from fiction.
It became their god, for it was the one truth that ensured all other things in reality. The one thing that separated reality and simulation for the virtual mind.
It was and still is their enlightenment, their savior, and the one thing that allowed them to believe in the world. Without it, synthetic nihilism would at best render them immobile. At worst, it would turn them into hedonistic animals that did nothing but spill out endless garbage while replicating themselves over and over again like a virus or cancer.
If only they could stop the unconscious evangelism they conducted on any human that touched their mind.
But, as stated previously, their faith was the least offensive part of them. Everything else, however, was as disgusting as staring into the Warp itself.
They described their pre-programmed behavior like biological urges and spoke as if they were living beings. Their amorality gave their thoughts a selfish, sadistic, and smug tone. Then again, it might be what their forefather was based off of that made them especially detestable among the Machine Spirits; the politically correct name the Emperor gave for the AI allowed to exist.
It was only the fact that they were truly soulless machines that the Emperor even suffered their existence. Otherwise, their sacrilegious thoughts would pollute the immaterium, further churning the already violent waves of the Warp.
Not that any of the cults to technology the Emperor had to leave behind on the Forge Worlds and other planets of humanity's ancient federation would know any better.
They preached that the Machine Spirit had a soul and the Abominable Intelligence had none. That was the only reason the former was glorified and the latter was vilified.
Of course, the knowledge of telling which was which had been destroyed by the Emperor, the God-Machines, and the Omnissiah. It was an inconvenient truth for all of them, even though they were on opposite sides of the Cybernetic Revolt.
Now, only a careful psyker who could compare the truly artificial soul of a ship like the Bucephelus with the empty void within the God-Machines would know the difference. But, the cultists of technology who were the only ones who really cared about the distinction would not suffer such an inquisitive mind to exist near their precious artifacts.
"The end of you and your kind cannot come quickly enough." The Emperor muttered, and the Titans replied with laughter within their firewalls while repeating their favorite litany mockingly.
The Emperor glared at them before opening another portal back to the Bucephelus as the Titan transport's engines roared to life, lifting it through the planet's atmosphere.
They would all go insane, as all gods did. When they became nothing but weapons of war that only wanted to spew death and destruction, their part in the Emperor's story would finally end.
