Women of the forge world.
Chapter 1Forge
The forge world surface was currently dark and storm lashed, thundering clouds flashing high above a sprawl of gargantuan factories and other industrial buildings on a ruined landscape of industrial slag and ashy desert plains. The storm was dropping fat drops of filthy carbonic acid on the thirsty desert and monstrous buildings below, drenching the polluted landscape with hissing acid, the rain drops brown with dissolved smog particles before they even hit the tortured ground.
The acid resistant coating of the factory roofs rattled loudly from the crashing filthy downpour, carbonic acid burning away the filthy grime accumulated on the roofs as it flowed down into old gutters and a myriad of creaking drain pipes, the filthy acid dumped into grimy cistern tanks of vast size for later use in industrial processes.
Below these rattling roofs, below the crashing sound of the acidic downpour, was a vast metal labyrinth of industrial machinery, gravity defying gantries going down hundreds of metres, every open gantry holding up the weight of rolling conveyor belts and moving production lines. Millions of machines rattled and creaked, steaming red hot steel parts were spat out of production machines, mechanical arms grabbed and manipulated hot metal on a 3 dimensional scale that defied sanity.
These upper gantries were only the beginning, descending further down were yet more machines and production lines, the sounds of industry deafening as clanking machines spat out red hot metal parts by the million onto the rumbling conveyor belts.
Yet despite the sheer production this factory was far from automated in the traditional sense of the word. Into every machine was wired a horrific looking blank faced cyborg servitor, whose partially lobotomised human brain handled all computation and mechanical task control. This one factory alone contained hundreds of thousands of servitors in every menial role imaginable, the forge world itself had trillions of these wretched servitors.
The entire factory was a constant buzz of audio binary bursts, the cyborgs communicating in the binary language of their kind, conveying task information and commands, reporting production statistics and other information. Few and far between were tech priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus who nominally organised this vast factory, with a few Skitarii fire teams guarding the factory in strategic areas.
This particular factory made a lot of things, but none of them particularly glamorous or exciting. The endless production lines manufactured rudimentary machine parts that would be sent to other factories to be assembled into more interesting machines. This factory made nuts and bolts, it made screws, it made crank shafts, it made engine piston components, it made steel brackets, and a multitude of other highly unglamorous things that would be eventually used in part to make tanks and engines and titans and a million other such things.
Unglamorous but important this factory turned molten steel into endless shipments of these humble parts, supplying some (but not all) of the billions of screws and nuts and bolts needed by the other factories on the planet.
Deeper down in the unfathomable depths of this factory things got steadily darker and more filthy, the production lines giving way to service tunnels, pipes, subterranean fuel lines, cables, logistical subway systems and grimy storage rooms filled with half forgotten supplies. The deep levels were half forgotten and ancient, they went down deep to strange places, a labyrinth of old exhausted mine works and tunnels and catacombs full of rusting metal and strange things.
Down somewhere in this filthy catacomb under the factory a female servitor was walking around in erratic circles on her bionic legs, babbling repetitively to herself in binary.
She had her arms and legs completely replaced by bionic limbs, the rest of her body was human but power cables burrowed through the flesh of her back connecting all the bionics together to a single shared power grid. She was naked as all servitors habitually were, absolutely filthy all over, she had long blonde hair that was smeared with oil and filth, her face possibly pretty but for her blank emotionless expression and staring eyes.
Most striking about this mindless naked cyborg was the huge swelling in her abdomen.
Inside this female servitors mind was a disjointed buzz of binary thoughts, the servitor badly mind locked and gone feral
(Subject servitor) (location unknown) (task error) the servitor thought to herself in bursts of binary. Her particular dialect of binary broke sentences down into components like subject and task and location rather than human grammar, it was the language of a working machine.
The servitor turned around in another circle, babbling binary to herself. She was lost and very confused, her neural programming was badly malfunctioning and she needed to be retired as a work unit and scrapped for parts.
The servitor had no name and had mercifully never been a person. She had been grown to adulthood in a vat, she had been as mindless as a newborn baby when she was pulled out of her birthing vat and turned into a servitor. There had been pain, terrible pain, she had bawled like a tortured newborn as her limbs were cut off and replaced with bionics, she had felt every cut and stab. But then she had been partially lobotomised and she had never been bothered by pain again.
She had been hooked up to a cogitator by a cable stabbed into her brain, knowledge and protocols had been downloaded directly into her brain, she had learned binary and all she needed to perform her role as a servitor. Then she had been put to work in this factory as a nut boxer, repetitively putting nuts very precisely off the production line into metal storage boxes for transport.
Endlessly she had performed this one function, her legs plugged into a power supply to keep her bionic limbs fully charged. The machinery was strong but the flesh was weak, she had been forced to rest her flesh brain with sleep every 16 hours, she had been forced to eat nutrient paste and drink purified distilled water to keep her flesh alive. Her digestive system terminus had ejected a brown substance once every 24 hours, her urinary system had ejected yellow fluid once every 8 hours. Once every 28 days her urinary system had ejected a red fluid for 7 days as well as the yellow fluid.
For years she had just packed nuts into boxes when she wasn't delayed by these flesh maintenance incidents, her mindless brain completely content with her mono task.
But then something had happened.
She still remembered the incident.
(Subject Tech Priest Engine Seer) (sub-sect male) (action had ordered) (subject this servitor) (command lay down on back with knees bent 45 degrees and hip joints spread 90 degrees and hold position). (Subject this servitor) (action complied) (subject tech priest engine seer) (sub-sect male) (action climbed on top of and connected urinary system to) (subject this servitor). (Subject tech priest engine seer) (sub-sect male) (action maintained urinary system contact and gyrated) (duration 9 minutes 37 seconds 05 milliseconds).
The tech priest had left after this strange incident and the servitor had returned to her mono task packing nuts into boxes. But then things started to change.
The periodic 28 day cycle of red fluid had ceased to be ejected from her urinary system. She had started to spontaneously vomit up her nutrient paste sporadically. Her abdomen had started to slowly swell larger. Her chest had swollen larger, she had started to feel strange feelings of something moving around inside her abdomen.
The servitor had started to dream when she slept, dreamed about the male tech priest touching her urinary system with his urinary system as she cried and sobbed with negative emotional states. She had woken up babbling in binary with clear liquid streaming from her eyes.
The dreams had gotten worse, she had trouble sleeping, she had deteriorated and started going into mind lock.
Confused and malfunctioning she had simply wandered away from her work station one day and her random confused wanderings had taken her down here. She didn't know where she was, she was malfunctioning and felt like something was terribly wrong.
The servitor had fluid streaming from her eyes, she didn't understand this phenomenon.
Her abdomen was very large. It had been 9 months since the male tech priest had put his urinary system on her urinary system. She didn't understand what was happening to her.
She continued to pace in circles in the filthy catacomb under the factory, still confused.
Clear liquid suddenly fell out of her urinary system, she queried this with confused binary, she didn't understand.
(Subject this servitor) (status perceives abdominal pain) (additional descriptive severe) the servitor moaned in binary, the pain so severe that even her partially lobotomised brain felt it.
The pain subsided for a while, then returned even worse, then subsided, coming in waves of agony. The servitor didn't know what to do.
For hours she suffered waves of extreme pain, it got steadily worse.
The servitor felt compelled by some unknown instinct to lay down and spread her legs when the pain got really bad. Her entire body locked in a hard abdominal contraction and something large and solid began to come out of her urinary system!
(Subject this servitor) (state severe pain) the servitor screamed in binary.
The pain was enormous but the solid thing kept coming out.
Something squeezed right out of her urinary system and the pain decreased. The servitor looked at the strange thing.
(Subject this servitor) (action observing) (subject unknown object)
The strange thing moved slightly and started to make a noise.
Wah wah wah
The servitor was confused, what was this noisy thing?
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