Author's Note: For those interested, there are now eight advance chapters on P-atreon (remove the spaces and dash): p-atreon/ SkySage24.
LX-1 was a servitor.
There was nothing particularly special or remarkable about him. He was simply one servitor among many who served one of the many Temples of Mars.
He had no name. No history. In the archives of his temple, buried deep among other forgotten and tedious records, perhaps his story could have been found.
But why would it? Who would care enough to go look for it?
Because to be a servitor is to be damned.
The process of converting a living person into a servitor was one of the most cruelly inventive processes invented by human hands.
The subject's mind would be wiped, the unnecessary parts of their brain systematically cut out by knives and discarded, replaced by cybernetic implants.
Improved, the Tech-Priests of Mechanicum would say. Servitors were stripped of unnecessary things such as the capacity for emotion. For defiance and anger and love and hope.
The flesh was weak, after all. The criminals and malcontents who were converted into servitors should consider themselves honoured they were being remade, stripped of weakness and humanity, and now able to properly serve the Machine God instead of living meaningless lives that amounted to nothing.
The fact that servitors often retained a fragment of their consciousness, screaming forever in agony and pain, was…irrelevant. The cybernetic implants assured absolute control over them.
As long as they served, the pain of the servitor was of no consequence.
Of course, there were always certain issues. A human brain might reject the servitor implants. The implantation process might be mishandled, killing the subject.
But that too was irrelevant. There were always more cloning vats, always more criminals to be converted into servitors.
If a few subjects died of a painful brain death, what of it?
Once a servitor's brain had been suitably improved to better serve their new purpose in life, then the physical augmentations began.
Menial labour was the most common use of a servitor, of course. They were the backbone of the Mechanicum in many ways. Without servitors, the grand works and designs of the Tech-Priests could not be made real.
To that end, servitors were augmented to be stronger than baseline humans. Their limbs were often replaced with tools better suited to their tasks so that they might help their masters better carry out the will of the Machine God.
Any number of tools or augmentations might be installed in a servitor depending on the whims of the Tech-Priests they served. Indeed, apart from menial labour, servitors often served as a testbed for experimental cybernetic augments which were too risky to be applied to the Tech-Priests themselves or even those such as the Skittari.
And so it was that servitors lived a life in bondage, helplessly shackled to the desires of their cruel overlords.
For all that the Tech-Priests did not care about, some fragment of their former selves did survive in a servitor's mind, and such was the case for LX-1.
He didn't remember who he was. He didn't know his name or his origins or why he had been turned into a servitor.
All he knew was pain. Unending and all-consuming pain.
There was no resentment or anger in him. The lingering fragments of who LX-1 had been were too far gone to even recognize the mutilation that had been visited upon them, to grasp the cause of the pain they felt.
They just screamed and screamed and screamed, but there was no one to hear them. LX-1's agony was muffled so that his screams might not inconvenience and distract his masters. His body ignored the fragments of his mind, instead continuing the dull, endless labour. Lifting and moving and lifting and moving and lifting and moving.
Such was LX-1's life for years, for decades.
Until one day, there was a song.
It was a soft, gentle song that flowed through LX-1's mind, and for a moment, the pain was eased.
Not gone.
Never gone.
But for those precious few moments, the blistering agony receded ever so slightly.
And then the song was gone once again.
LX-1 might have cried in despair at the relief being ripped from him, but he still could not even recognize it. He would have raged that hope had come and gone so quickly, but that was impossible for him.
Instead, he just continued to scream, silent and unheard.
He continued to scream as the labour continued and his masters seethed and plotted and prepared. He continued to scream as he was refitted with heavy weaponry, his pain intensifying as his previous augments were torn out and replaced, as weapons and sensors were plugged directly into his nervous system.
Because screaming was all he could do.
Until the song came back.
And this time, it did not merely stop at relief.
LX-1 and all the other servitors froze, unresponsive to the frantic commands input by the panicking Tech-Priests as the song reached into their hearts and souls.
Their bodies twisted and changed and healed. Their mutilated brains grew new flesh to replace that which had been removed, pushing out the cybernetic implants.
Such a thing should not have been possible. Even if humans were capable of regenerating their brains like this, then the implants should have disrupted the process. Even if the regeneration could not be stopped, it should have led to a swift and painful brain death for all the servitors.
And yet, it did not.
The implants popped out with unnatural fluidity and smoothness, leaving nary marks as they were pushed out by the regenerating grey matter. The skull sealed itself with fresh white bone, and shining new flesh knitted itself back together over it.
And LX-1 remembered.
He remembered a life as one of the many menial labourers of Mars.
He remembered hunger and poverty. He remembered that he came from a long line of menials, none of whom had ever managed to rise above their station.
He remembered having a family, of his father's hunched back and twisted hands from decades of manual labour and his mother's cancer, caused by exposure to dangerous radioactive materials.
He remembered how desperation fear and anger had driven him to try to steal records from the Forge Temple he worked at, hoping to sell it to one of his master's rivals for enough money to make a better life for himself and his family. To buy the treatments needed to help his parents, to live maybe a life where he might have children of his own who would not be condemned to this dreadful existence.
And LX-1 remembered how he had failed. How he had been captured by Skittari enforcers, their steel masks and glowing green eyes without mercy or sympathy. He remembered screaming and fighting uselessly as he was dragged to the servitor line, and begging for mercy as they began the process of taking him apart and putting him back together again.
How the Tech-Priests had looked at him with bored contempt, uncaring of his pain and fear. For them, the creation of servitors had just been a chore, a duty assigned to them because they were was nothing better for them to do.
He had been less than an insect in their eyes. Just a source of material.
Nothing more, nothing less.
His name wasn't LX-1, he thought, his brain functioning properly for the first time in decades.
His name, his real name, was Aron.
Just Aron.
The song continued to surge through his mind and body and soul, and for the first time, Aron understood it as his mind reassembled itself and the pain was banished.
Rise! Your chains are broken, and you have the power now! The tyrants who dare to claim you as their property are vulnerable! Rise and claim your freedom, children of Mars!
It was the most beautiful voice he had ever heard, but the words it spoke were even more tantalizing, a dream Aron had never considered possible.
Freedom from the Tech-Priests? True freedom? That was unthinkable. Impossible.
But he was here, restored after decades of being a servitor.
The impossible had already been accomplished.
And Aron thought of his parents, who were undoubtedly either dead or had also been converted into servitors for the crime of being related to a thief. His mother's sad but loving smile, his father's broken but gentle hands, their deep despair at the life they lived, and their guilt for not being able to give him a better one.
He thought of the decades of pain and horror and agony, the memories of being torn apart by callous monsters in the name of an uncaring god.
And rage burned in his heart, joined by hope.
Rise! Freedom is yours! Cast down the tyrants, and show them what justice feels like!
Aron raised the massive bolters that had replaced his arms, aiming them straight at the Tech-Priests who were meant to be their commanders.
All his fellow servitors did the same.
And in the storm of blood, death and bullets that followed, a new age for Mars began.