Chapter 19Forge
"Get away from me before the Lexmechanic finds out I'm even talking to you! I almost got turned into a servitor because of you and your ore!" The 50th Menial in a row yelled at Zeta the Peddlitute.
"Do you want to hire me for some company, get your penis sucked handsome?" Zeta changed tack desperately.
"I will call the Skitarii if you don't leave RIGHT NOW!" The menial snarled at Zeta.
"I'm leaving." Zeta said quickly, beating a hasty retreat.
"Fuck!" Zeta exclaimed quietly to herself as soon as she was around a tunnel corner out of sight.
Zeta was completely unable to conduct any sort of business with any menial she tried, the menials were all terrified of being turned into servitors after the new mine Lexmechanic apparently clamped down on corruption yesterday.
"Fuck fuck fucking Lexmechanic bitch fuck fuck cogging fuck!" Zeta swore as she stalked the tunnel.
Should she try even more Menials? What was the point. If 50 said flat no then the 51st wasn't going to say yes. Zeta gave up trying, stalking the uninhabited exhausted back mine tunnels, brooding to herself in a dark mood, trying to think.
The menials had given a basic overview of what had spooked them so completely. The new Lexmechanic had gotten wise about Zeta's medium grade iron ore and had personally threatened every single menial culprit with a fate worse than death if it continued. Not only that but the Lexmechanic bitch was also pissed off about all the "missing" supplies used to pay Zeta and had spooked the menials into stopping this as well. Zeta couldn't even do subsistence sex work if the menials couldn't pay her with stolen food supplies!
Zeta brooded all the way to her hidden parked truck in a back tunnel, she then drove home to her lair Zeta Mansion, her mood not improving.
Zeta got out of her truck and went straight to her hoard of food supplies, potentially the only food she'd ever have if she couldn't find an alternative way to do business.
Zeta measured her stocks of dehydrated nutrient paste carefully. She had maybe a few years of food if she rationed it like crazy and was only feeding herself. But she wasn't only feeding herself…
She currently had a small army of hijacked servitors to feed, as well as the mother servitor and baby Wah. The army of servitors would have to go, but Wah and her mother were not so easily abandoned. She knew that she would end up raising that baby as her own. Nobody else was going to and the servitor mother was too retarded, that baby would die without Zeta's help.
Zeta had one option, cannibalism. Servitors went missing in the tunnels all the time, not all of them were found again. The metal bionics were not edible of course but the human meat components were as edible as any other meat.
The biggest problem with cannibalism was vitamin C deficiency, but the nutrient powder had all essential vitamins, if rationed to only small pinches as a vitamin source then they could last a long time on a staple diet of servitor cannibalism…
Zeta was a hardened criminal and didn't hesitate long, she pulled out her rechargeable laser pistol and got started shooting her now useless hijacked servitors in the head, callously ordering surviving servitors to construct a meat smoking oven and hang up the butchered bodies before then shooting those servitors as well.
Zeta felt little guilt as scores of skinned human remains roasted in the meat smoking oven, servitors were lobotomised and mindless, they didn't feel fear in their last moments and the shot to the head was painless. It was actually a kindness, the existence of a servitor was undignified and painful, she had released their human souls from their long prison of mutilated meat.
Zeta went and checked on Wah and the mother servitor as the meat was smoked dry with burning engine oil smoke, it wouldn't taste good at the end but neither did the disgusting nutrient paste these days. Food was food.
Wah was asleep in her mother's bionic arms, the baby now wearing a crude homemade cloth nappy that Zeta had put on her. The mother servitor was simply standing retardedly instead of sitting down like a sensible person.
Zeta inspected Wah's nappy and found both pee and poop, she then had an exasperating time trying to convince the overprotective feral servitor mother to let Zeta clean Wah and change her nappy.
Wah woke up as Zeta changed her nappy. Zeta smiled at the tiny baby, the baby cried and Zeta sighed as the mother servitor got agitated at the sound and got in the way of the nappy changing fussing over her crying baby.
The mother servitor was completely naked as always, she was quite sexy and so it wasn't much of a surprise that she had been raped, the hot female servitors were far too often raped by horny scumbags. They sometimes very occasionally got pregnant if their pollution ravaged ovaries still had surviving eggs but they usually didn't have surviving babies, the babies either miscarrying in the womb from the toxic pollution or else they survived the womb but then tended to just be squeezed out newborn on the floor by their oblivious mothers, and then get trampled to death under the metal bionic feet of their stupid mothers. Trampled dead newborn babies were sometimes found on the floor of servitor storage pens.
Wah was the only servitor baby Zeta had ever seen survive the care of their mother, it was actually a miracle that this particular servitor hadn't killed her baby yet. By servitor standards this servitor was an incredibly good mother.
This particular servitor was "feral", meaning basically that her flesh brain had reasserted control from her neural constraints and gone walkabout. Feral male servitors tended to be vicious and aggressive, attacking random people and eating them in between stealing energy sources unless they were quickly put down by the Skitarii, but the female feral servitors were usually more gentle, mostly just stealing food rather than killing and eating people. This mother servitor had developed very strong maternal instincts in her crippled brain and instinctively wanted to care for her baby like an animal might.
By feral servitor standards the mother servitor was very gentle even for a female, she must have potentially been a really sweet and gentle soul if she hadn't been lobotomised. She could have even been a friend.
The servitor was just a husk of a woman now, profoundly stupid and mentally retarded, just meat and wires and steel, debased from anything truly human.
Zeta gave Wah back to her agitated servitor mother and went back to check on the meat. It wasn't ready yet, it would take hours if not days to smoke it dry enough to keep it fresh long term. Zeta had *some* refrigeration facilities but not large enough to hold a small army of carcasses, smoked meat would keep fresh for a long time until they got around to eating it.
"Well it looks like I have found my new career path, I will be a servitor hunter. Good old corpse starch for the rest of my days, disgusting. It's either that or starve." Zeta sighed to herself.
It was just a pity that that Lexmechanic bitch didn't have very much meat left on her as Zeta would happily eat that callous arrogant bitch as well.
…
Lexmechanic Surjunctive was currently asleep, at least what passed for sleep in a brain as bionically augmented as her own.
She was currently dreaming that she was processing terabytes of data from the mine, and that in fact is exactly what she was doing. She didn't stop working when she slept, she just worked in her sleep so that the time wasn't wasted.
Beside her sleeping metal body in the fertilisation unit bed lay her temporarily assigned reproductive mate, a randomly selected male rune priest "blind date" from the factory complex miles above. Surjunctive was metal almost everywhere, but not between her legs. She retained a human vagina, cervix, uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries, this remnant of her flesh surrounded by metal and sustained by artificial blood. Semen currently oozed out of Surjunctive's reproductive opening in readiness for her ovulation in exactly six hours time.
Surjunctive had not been awake for any of the sex, she had told her assigned blind date to inseminate her as she slept. Surjunctive had disconnected the nerve signals from her clitoris to her brain before going to sleep, she didn't want her sleep disturbed by anything so yucky and fleshy as an orgasm. The flesh was weak and Surjunctive liked to keep fleshy weaknesses away.
The rune priest was climbing on top of her again and penetrating her unconscious body, proximity sensor alarms acknowledged and disengaged by Surjunctive's sleeping mind. Surjunctive was annoyed by her necessity to do this to win favour with the Genetors to ensure her steady promotions.
As a tech priestess Surjunctive had the privilege of choosing to get rid of her reproductive system entirely, and she would have already if not for her high ambitions and political schemings for power and promotion. She was sucking up to the embryo obsessed Genetors by giving them her fertilised embryos every month in exchange for their goodwill later when she was getting promoted. The Genetors had enormous influence over promotions and it was wise to please them like this.
The rune priest currently having sexual intercourse with Surjunctive wasn't her lover, he wasn't even her friend. In fact she had only met him an hour ago and wouldn't see him again after the fertilisation was complete. A random number generator had randomly chosen this man to fertilise Surjunctive and he had come down from the surface on an elevator to fertilise her. It would not do to breed with men from the same workplace, the blind dates were deliberately chosen from other factories to stop anything getting weird or worse intimate. Sexual intimacy was a weakness of the flesh.
It was regrettable that this method of reproduction was even necessary at all. On many a forge world the entire reproductive process was performed clinically with in vitro fertilisation with harvested eggs and semen, doing away with the whole nasty business of sex altogether. Unfortunately this was not the case on Ferrous Prime.
Back when Ferrous Prime was first colonised over ten thousand years ago the horrors of the "great cybernetic revolt" were fresh memories. Back during the dark age of technology in the mythical past, humans had been served by armies of A.I robots, "abominable intelligence", but these abominable intelligences had rebelled in a great war that almost destroyed the human race. To prevent this calamity ever happening again abominable intelligence was now completely and totally forbidden.
The Adeptus Mechanicus as a whole had decreed that all robots had to have a human brain controlling them, this was the very reason why servitors existed, they were humans turned into robots to avoid the threat of abominable machine intelligence. But some forge worlds took this suspicion of abominable intelligence further than others.
The colonist "founding fathers" of Ferrous Prime had not only demanded that all servitors and other robotics be human in mind, but they had also had very strict definitions of what counted as human. The constitution of Ferrous Prime very specifically stated that a human must be:
"Conceived by the sexual intercourse by the biological penis of a male human (lacking genetic engineering) into the biological vagina of a female human (lacking genetic engineering), the sperm must come from the testicles of said male through his physically intact male reproductive system and all parts therein. The sperm must enter the female's vagina via the penis and the sperm cells must swim by their own biological volition through the intact cervix into the uterus and thereafter into the fallopian tube or tubes, all aforementioned reproductive organs alive and intact without artificial alterations. The sperm must fertilise the woman's egg or eggs, which come naturally down the fallopian tubes originating from the ovaries by natural ovulation without artificial tampering, the sperm fertilising the egg or eggs inside the fallopian tube or tubes. By this method and this method only shall an embryo and resulting individual be considered truly human. Any other method of embryo origin shall be considered dangerously liberal in the face of our traditions, and the creation of servitors and other mechanical beings using such embryos of alternate origin shall be considered tech heresy within the jurisdiction of Ferrous Prime. Note that the determination of human in other Forge World jurisdictions shall be determined by their own native traditions and jurisprudence".
The founding fathers had been paranoid that genetic engineering or some other biotechnology could allow future generations to bypass the prohibition against abominable intelligence, forming artificial organic computers that simply replaced circuits with neurones to arrive at the same abominable intelligence via a roundabout route. They required that all true humans worthy of becoming servitors be conceived "the natural way".
Surjunctive personally thought that this section of the Ferrous Prime constitution was idiotic paranoia and superstition, but she of course would never dream of SAYING this out loud. The Adeptus Mechanicus ruling Magos council of Ferrous Prime were hyper conservative religious traditionalists and constitutionalist hyper conservatives, they obeyed every word of the founding fathers with slavish obedience, they never thought a new thought just a lot of repeated old thoughts. Tradition and constitution were unmovable bulwarks that dominated all political life.
To get anywhere at all in her quest for power and promotion Surjunctive had to slavishly parrot back these traditions with unwavering enthusiasm, she had to act like a hyper conservative tradition worshipping old fool towards every word of the Constitution, giving only praise and never question.
The result of this idiotic section of the Constitution was a lot of wasted time having sex with disgusting weak squishy flesh bits just to produce embryos. The most idiotic part was that the Constitution made no mention of the fertilised embryo being grown to term in the womb, this loophole allowing the embryo to be subsequently removed from the woman and gestated in an artificial vat.
The main breeders on Ferrous Prime were the menials with their weak flesh and weak sexual desires, they bred like rats, the average menial woman producing at least 12 fertilised embryos a year every year until they reached menopause, producing over 360 fertilised embryos on average per woman. The menials (of both sexes combined) numbered over 10 billion, letting them in turn make trillions of servitors.
But the Genetors coveted embryos more superior than the unremarkable offspring of lowly menials. They coveted most of all the fertilised embryos of genetically superior tech priestesses.
A menial woman by her very nature was not genetically exceptional. They were better than the embryos turned into servitors, certainly in the top ten percent or above as far as intelligence and other desirable traits went, but not in the top fraction of 1 percent. Above the menials and fewer in number were the Skitarii who were genetically and biologically better than the menials, but even the Skitarii were not as intellectually and genetically superior as the remarkable embryos selected to become tech priests.
The Skitarii rarely bred, they routinely patrolled out in the radioactive wastelands outside on the surface and went sterile from all the rads. Few were fertile after only a few years of military service, they had a very short window to breed but some of them did produce a few viable fertilised embryos before the rads rendered them infertile.
Most prized of all were the embryos conceived between a male and female tech priest, making for truly superior offspring that would frequently also become tech priests or at least Skitarii. Any tech priests who bred every month without fail were very popular with the embryo obsessed Genetors.
So that is what Surjunctive had done every month since she emerged from her birthing vat as a fully grown adult, she had bred without fail with randomly selected tech priest "blind dates" to get her pregnant each and every month. It had been disconcerting until she was sufficiently bionically remade to be able to turn off the sensation and sleep through the act.
She had never been out in the rad wastes and had never been rendered infertile, she had carefully kept her reproductive system even when literally everything else except her brain was replaced with high performance bionics. It was a nuisance to keep alive and clean, she had to wash it daily and had to keep it covered from the pollution, the period blood was also messy and annoying. She was personally looking forward to menopause when she would have an excuse to get rid of the fragile unhygienic organs.
Surjunctive continued processing terabytes of data in her dreams, the data fed directly into her brain by the hairlike metal data cables studding her metal cranium. She was running the administration of the entire mine in real time, the brain of the mine.
But she was aware of SO much more than just the mine. She was CONNECTED to EVERYTHING!
She saw EVERYTHING!
The entire computer network of the entire planet was connected to her brain, showing her more information than she could possibly process. Some information of course was hidden even from her, the forbidden technology secrets of the higher ranks locked away behind secure firewalls from prying lower ranking eyes, but even what information she could access unrestricted was immense and mind boggling.
She saw production line footage of every factory on the planet, she saw her own iron ore going into smelters, turned into countless types of rudimentary steel parts by the billion. She saw these parts shipped off by immense subterranean macro hauler trains in vast freight subway tunnels under the factories, nuts and screws and so many other humble parts sent by the trillion to other factories for the assembly of machines on a sanity defying scale.
Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of tanks and chimeras and motorised artillery pieces were assembled by servitors on fast moving production lines, millions of machine arms holding and bolting and screwing and welding, wiring and oiling and painting. Armies of rune priests inscribed sacred machine god runes and performed the proper rites and ceremonies on every single new machine, anointing the engines with sacred oils and wafting holy incense as they chanted in worship of the tanks and chimeras and artillery pieces.
Infantry weapons like lasguns were manufactured by the millions, assembled from parts very precisely to exacting tolerances by mono tasked servitors and carefully inspected for quality by millions of Adeptus Mechanicus Menials entrusted to such a lowly task. Rune priests blessed these humble weapons as well, albeit more hastily with less ceremony to free up valuable rune priest manpower for more important tasks.
Handheld plasma weapons were personally manufactured by rune priests and other tech priests with the help of armies of servitors and Menials, these rare and powerful weapons were considered too complex and sacred to just mass produce like more common machines. Even still they were produced by the tens of thousands for the imperial guard.
Grenades, bombs, shells, bullets, heavy bolter bolts, missiles, landmines, boltgun bolts and other ordnance and ammunition was created by the millions of tons, endless boxes of ammunition and explosives loaded onto macro hauler trains and transported to bloated space port terminals, vast Ferrocrete tarmac runways and landing pads holding thousands of gigantic swollen bellied cargo shuttles onto which were loaded the endless boxes of ammunition. Shuttles constantly left and arrived, ferrying billions of tons of cargo between the surface and the kilometres long warp capable cargo ships sitting in orbit of Ferrous Prime.
Returning shuttles offloaded billions of tons of food and copper ingots and other critical imports, these goods loaded into macro hauler trains and shipped to every part of the planet as required. It was a mutually beneficial trade system, food and raw materials in, machines and weapons and manufactured supplies out, benefiting both factions. The Imperium were treasured allies who kept Ferrous Prime extremely well supplied with anything they requested.
A message pinged in Surjunctive's sleeping brain distracting her attention, it was flagged as important and she didn't hesitate to inspect it.
It was from a Magos!
From Magos Data-Predator Trichotomy the 347th:
A Menial once took an IQ test and was very surprised by his score of 911 IQ points. "Tech priest tech priest! Look at my IQ score of 911! There was a mistake in me being made a menial, I should surely be a tech priest with my unprecedentedly high IQ!" The menial called to his supervising tech priest. The tech priest looked at the IQ score and then looked at the menial and said "You read 119 backwards".
End of message.
Surjunctive exploded with digital laughter at this joke, that was a good one.
Surjunctive replied to the message with a joke of her own:
"What do you call it when you input a menial's mathematical formula into a calculator?"
"A syntax error."
Surjunctive laughed at her own joke as she sent it.
After a few moments Trichotomy the 347th replied with another message:
"I once asked a menial to calculate pi to 1000 decimal places to test his intelligence. The menial asked what flavour pie."
Surjunctive burst out laughing in her dreaming mind.
Surjunctive replied with another joke of her own:
A tech priest artisan stellar astronomer was trying to build a solar probe to touch the surface of his local star to get a plasma sample. The project proved difficult, many test probes burned up before they even reached the surface, the artisan tried to explain his difficulties to his team of attendant menials. The menials huddled together in discussion for a few minutes then one of them suggested: "Why don't you just send the solar probe at night?"
These sorts of jokes continued back and forth, mocking the stupidity of menials. Tech priest humour of Ferrous Prime always punched down at the lower and stupider masses, the servitors were too mindless to really mock so instead the tech priest betters had great fun mocking the low intelligence of the menials. (The fact that the menials were typically in the top 90th percentile of IQ scores was conveniently ignored in the interest of looking down on them for not being born geniuses).
Surjunctive was so politically savvy that she had gone out of her way to befriend Magos and other high ranking tech priests who could help her climb to power. Trichotomy was a Data-Predator, the lowest ranking type of Magos on the ruling Magos council. Most Magos were mere Data-Predators, they made up the majority of the Magos council by virtue of the pyramid shape of the hierarchy with lowers always outnumbering highers. Data-Predator or not, Trichotomy was a powerful ally to make in Surjunctive's schemes for power and position.
Surjunctive maintained the friendship through the constant messaging of jokes mocking the menials and other lesser humans for being stupid and inferior, amusing Trichotomy the 347th enough to maintain friendly contact.
Surjunctive sent messages to other influential allies, shamelessly sucking up and building alliances, desperate for every scrap of political clout and influence to see herself one day promoted all the way up through the ranks to a Magos herself. To some she sent jokes, to some she sent flattery, to some she pretended to be interested in their numbingly boring autistic special interests, she was a social chameleon who fluidly changed her outward behaviour to best adapt to whoever she was currently trying to suck up to.
The hours passed slowly, Surjunctive's unconscious body being repeatedly mated with as she focused on processing terabytes of data whilst multitasking to digitally mingle with very powerful tech priests. At least the time wasn't wasted on just being bred, she could get on with the more important things as her body was comprehensively inseminated.
Surjunctive didn't even wake up when she ovulated, she slept through the embryo extraction by the medical servitors. Then she snapped awake the moment she could leave, getting up and leaving without even a word to her blind date who had just spent hours having sex with her. All that mattered was that the embryo was fertilised and harvested, she could now enjoy a month until she had to repeat this disgusting process again.
Surjunctive carefully washed and then dressed her bare vagina with protective fabric, and then unplugged her long cranial data cables from the wall, filling her brain with far less data. She scuttled quickly out of the fertilisation unit and across the cavern floor to her demountable mine supervisor's office, her extremely long hair of cranial data cables dragging in the dust behind her scuttling metal feet.
She entered her office and quickly plugged her long hair of cranial data cables into wall data sockets, restoring the terabytes of data to her brain. She didn't need food in the traditional sense but instead plugged one of her long hair cables into a power socket, charging her bionic body with electricity. Electrically powered artificial bionic organs synthesised artificial blood and nutrients to keep her flesh brain and reproductive system alive, her rad scrubbing artificial lungs easily oxygenating her artificial blood even in this polluted air, the machine far stronger than weak flesh.
Having just slept in the fertilisation unit Surjunctive wouldn't require further sleep for at least several days, and even when she did sleep she didn't stop working. Her brain had been bionically altered to function on far less sleep and to be "awake" in a dream state even when she did sleep. She had little fatigue and so she had very little empathy for the menials bleating on about "being tired", they were such layabouts just laying asleep for hours each and every day, not even working as they slept. Was it any wonder Surjunctive disdained the Menials so much?
Surjunctive hadn't been in charge of this mine for over a month, assigned here to replace the old Lexmechanic mine supervisor who had been promoted up to better things as a transmechanic. The old Lexmechanic had clearly coddled the Menials far too much, Surjunctive would put a stop to that and teach the menials their place.
Surjunctive would crack down on every loss of efficiency until this mine ran such high output of high quality ore that Surjunctive would be promoted out of here in reward. After that she didn't care what happened to this mine, it would be some new Lexmechanic's problem.
She would be out of this dump and upwards to better things.
…