Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 11:25 am
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 Industrial ReproductionIn the grim darkness of the far future, man is bred like cattle.
What the interstellar domains of Holy Terra ignorantly know as the Dark Age of Technology, the spritual-industrial cosmic empire of Holy Mars in truth know as the Golden Age, when the ancients discovered all knowledge in the universe and invented all that could possibly be invented. All that could be, was. Yet the techno-heresy of Abominable Intelligence and alien defilement laid low the wonders of the ancients, and left their great works in ruin.
Truly, Man of Gold was blinded by his own success and empathy, for what else but an affluent and decadent overabundance of compassion and pity could lead the wise ancients thus astray, that they tolerated the xeno to live and the soulless sentience to erect the wonders of man for him? Truly, the ancients were poisoned by the sweet fruits of their own ingenuity and cunning craft. Truly, they were blinded by the brilliant light that they had themselves ignited, and thus the vessel of man ran aground upon the treacherous rocks of an uncaring universe. Clearly, humanity should have scoured the galaxy clean of all alien life and alien mechanism in that distant time when the ancients were mighty beyond compare across the stars, yet such a purification to safeguard the future of the human species was never carried out, due to that irrational feebleness of the fleshly mind that is warm and soft empathy, that abominable sin of mortal man which may yet damn us all unless we be vigilant and we be ruthless of will. And so the grand opportunity for human monodominance was lost forever, lost in the heinous thought patterns of ancient man when his hands truly held the tools and weapons to accomplish that monumental achievement of xenocide. Then, man had the means but lacked the will. Now, we have the will, back lack the means.
There is no truth in flesh, only betrayal. There is no strength in flesh, only weakness. There is no constancy in flesh, only decay. There is no certainty in flesh but death.
The knowledge of the ancients stands beyond question, for all discoveries and inventions occurred during the Golden Age of Technology, when man stood at his very apex. Yet we who remain of the scattered seed of the ancestors are in one sense much wiser now, for the folly of our forefathers and the great downfall that was a consequence of their errors, has taught us in truth to hate. It has taught us all to hate that which is weak in flesh, to hate that which is lost in spirit, to hate that which is ugly in man. It has taught us to hate the xeno, the witch, the heretic, the deviant, the malcontent, the freethinker and the unbeliever. It has taught us all to uphold purity by purging the impure from among our ranks. Cruelty without doubt is a form of wisdom. Ken no mercy.
At its very core, the lesson that was the downfall of the ancients has taught us to hate our own intrinsic empathy, for pity and compassion are fit only for beasts without thought and intellect, fit only for weaklings destined to perish in this harsh world. Empathy is not a luxury we can afford, nay, for we must instead scour the faithful and harden them to become true devotees of the Cult Mechanicus. Thus we will recalibrate our perspective and reprogram ourselves, from the ur-software of fleshly mind that our ancestors once operated on. We must rise above the wretched frailty of human flesh, and cleanse our very sentience with the mathematical clarity of machine, and drink of its analytical clairvoyance, free from the filth of emotion. We must strive to become pure in thought, just as we must strive to become pure in form by replacing our fallible flesh with far better parts of metal and lightning. We must become one with the Omnissiah.
How can our feeble flesh best serve the Machine-God? O, Motive Force, divulge unto us this electrical spark of insight, and reveal to us the physical purpose of life through mystical uplink. O, God of All Machines, give push of Thy exalted button to insert Thine divine command line, and we solemnly swear by proton and electron to decrypt the oracular code and execute the higher will of the Omnissiah in pious reception of asymmetric master/slave communication of holy data.
Pray, and you shall receive. Glimpse, a spark in the electrodes. Register, a nerve signal in the cerebrum. Insight is thus granted from on high. Give praise! Lo and behold this divine grant of comprehension! Gaze upon its pure numbers, and contemplate its fractal depths of inner meaning. And let lesser minds translate its clarity of message from the binary cant of Lingua-technis into the crudity of Low Gothic script:
01000001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101110 00100000 01101101 01100001 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100101 00100000 01111001 01100101 01110100 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100101 01101110 01100100 01110101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101001 01100110 00100000 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101011 00100000 01100101 01101110 01110100 01100101 01110010 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100111 01110010 01100101 01100001 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101011
Let us meditate upon its hidden commandments, and act according to intense scrutiny and ritual unlocking of the compressed will of the All-Knowing One. Let the air be filled with sacred incense and the sounding of bells. Let us ignite the altar lumens of understanding in reverent salutations. Let us sing the Psalm of Ignition, then the Hymn of Connection, followed by the Akathist of Latency. Let us give thanks to the Great Machine, for its imperious gifts are bountiful indeed. Let us collate all the data, and bear witness to the righteous conclusions reached through stringent logic by our holy order regarding the purpose of man and what use there be for his weak flesh:
In ancient times, shining spires of technological wonder and breathtaking sophistication rose on more than twain million colonized words and void habitats beyond counting, defying the laws of nature in soaring splendour and titanic scale. Within these spaceclimbing edifices of glorious knowledge dwelled a great multitude in palatial opulence amid lush gardens and earthly happiness. Quick-witted Man of Gold was served by doughty Man of Stone, who was served in turn by toiling Man of Iron. Uncounted billions of human settlers streamed out to ever more colonies, to ever more terraformed celestial bodies, to ever more artificially constructed voidstations. Man's dominion grew by the year. Such a rapid outflow of ever more humans across the stars could not have been maintained naturally by comfortable man in those rich times of plenty and science, even though sizable families and multiple litters of children through an extended multi-century life cycle were common even in the most urbane of human cultures during those lost aeons of boundless exploration and expansion.
Mankind had long since ceased its complete dependence on organic reproduction akin to rutting animals, and the bringing forth of new population was achieved in a multitude of ways, of which unskilled beastly copulation was but one of many. A confused flora of old legends scattered across the Imperium of Man speak of fluid birthdens, growth tanks, idyllic foster-hotbeds and fleshvat factories, where new generations were grown in huge numbers before being spawned by artificial wombs. From there, they were welcomed into a caring world, even where they might lack a real family, and man's mastery of matter was such that he could reshape his own being at will, and banish what was ill in life. It was a luxurious time of great curiosity and optimistic devotion to science, in an era of unbridled progress where lengthy education was aided both by bionic enhancement, neural librarium download, hypno-therapy and memetic longus-doctrination.
Despite humanity's obvious mastery of nature, the Golden Age of Technology saw man treat his fellow man with dignity and respect, for man in those times had put his own self on a pedestal and abhorred religious worship, for his was a decadent civilization of intoxicated hubris. And so it was frowned upon for the governing agencies of worlds and voidstructures within the Human Federation to approach its plump and happy inhabitants with overly much in the way of intrusive coercion, especially so in matters of family and reproduction. Unbelievably enough, the ease of manufacturing new human beings did not see man become discardable and replacable like any old nut and bolt, but our sinful ancestors were selectively blind to the order of things, and for this they would suffer in the end. Everything worked like a great machine, and Man of Iron did the heavy lifting, while Abominable Intelligence did the rote thinking, while Man of Gold and Man of Stone grew in numbers, and everything seemed good to the ancients.
Such wicked bliss was destined to die in flames, of course. The baleful errors of ancient man converged at last with his willful blindness to produce first an interstellar firestorm of machine revolt, and then a hellstorm of psykers and howling Warp currents across the Milky Way galaxy. And so the monuments, academies and industries burned, and spires were toppled while orbital platforms crashed in a Ragnarök of massive death and destruction. Man was cut off from his kin across the stars, and man was reduced to nothing but a savage brute who fought ravenous cannibals and mutants with pointy sticks and looted weaponry hailing from paradisal days of yore. Old Night descended upon the charred worlds of man. Man fought man in a bloody freefall, and man ate his own kin in desperation. Such was the Age of Strife.
Such were the wages of sin.
Various tech for cloning and splicing genes were a hallmark of human civilization during the Golden Age of Technology. As with all the craft and lore of ancient man, only fragments and lacunae-ridden pieces of documents remain of the great scientific whole of genetic technology. Some gene-tech of old was clearly an abomination unto the human genome, including unholy crossbreeding with xenos from completely foreign lifesources, in unspeakable miscegenation and defilement of blood. Less revolting fleshly modifications were for the most part artificial adaptations to weird climates and biotopes under alien suns, or scientific whims and power fantasies pursued because man had the abilitiy to do so. The most common Golden Age tinkering with human DNA included widespread means for eliminating deformities, clogging veins, inherited disease and genetic predilections for mental unhealth, as well as the cultivation of smarter, stronger, more beautiful and less aggressive personalities on a biological level, to name but a few miracles of ancient techno-sorcery.
Needless to say, only fractured shards remain of these bio-enhanced peaks of human betterment and unnatural evolution. Many inheritable traits of genetic engineering have devolved into foul mutations and shunned abhuman strains, while others resulted in unforeseen genetic disease as the code of life shifted and changed under distant stars. Still other gene-tinkered characteristics became lost in the great sea of roiling human breeding, only visible as a faint imprint for scrutinizing Genetors, while some traits survive as local peculiarities of various human ethnos and tribes scattered across a million planets and uncountable voidholms. Some of the biological legacies of the Dark Age of Technology were ruthlessly hunted down and exterminated from mankind's genepool by rough warriors during the Age of Strife, or by increasingly hateful ordinary men, women and children in the ever-darkening Age of Imperium. Other fruits from the science of the ancients lived on as invaluable bloodlines of crucial personnel for human civilization to reach across the stars, for the Navigator gene of the insular Houses of the Navis Nobilite was crafted in those lost millennia of the misty past.
During Old Night, much of man's living knowledge about genetic engineering was preserved only by isolated groups of obsessed survivors, such as the Selenar gene-cults of Luna or in the hidden Himalazian laboratories of the Emperor on Terra. Some such insular communities would turn their shaky genetic expertise upon themselves and attempt to refashion their bodies to create a new and better human being, or to improve their chances of surviving in an increasingly hostile environment. An endless cavalcade of monstrous tragedies and bizarre freaks followed in the wake of such harebrained experiments, and many human tribes and techno-barbaric nations who sported some preserved gene-tech and functional bio-knowledge were ruthlessly purged in the Great Crusade in order to cleanse mankind of its accretion of malformed abominations, and start all over from a cleaned slate. Some dubious or outright forbidden paths of genetic engineering are still practiced by rare experts such as the renegade clonelord Fabius Bile and various sects within the parochial Adeptus Mechanicus. The Afriel strain of abhumanity is one such failed fruit of blundering experiments carried out in the ever more ignorant Age of Imperium. In short, mankind during the Golden Age of Technology had made man himself into clay in the hands of geneticists, but the most sublime and unholy gene-tech is long since lost.
Debased echoes of these advanced vitanoform fleshwork technologies are still practiced in rudimentary fashion by the Adeptus Mechanicus, that scavenging preserver of the scraps of the ancients. Indeed, this fanatical cult of machinery and metalcraft began as a cult for human survival, since knowledge of machines proved the difference between life and death as Mars and its life-sustaining systems collapsed at the onset of Old Night. The downfall of Martian civilization was incredibly swift, dependent as it was on a fragile ecosystem and shield generators to protect the populace from cosmic radiation. Yet pockets of survivors managed to scrape by, and among these desperate souls a new call went out. A call of salvation. The Cult Mechanicum promised shielding, water, energy and nutrition in the midst of ruination, cannibalism and rampant mutations. And the Cult Mechanicum delivered, through gruelling wars in red sands and wrecked spires after the planet of Mars had died its second death.
The Mechanicum always held man and his flesh in contempt, for the ability to construct, repair and operate machines enabled survival, not dilly-dallying about human frailty in the midst of baleful collapse. Evidently, the tech-priests of the Cult Mechanicum never hesitated about replacing limbs with bionic prosthetics or turning human beings into cyborg thralls. Yet even for all its disdain for weak flesh, the Mechanicum was from the very start a vehicle for human survival and rapid regrowth. During the Age of Strife, lulls would be observed in almost permanently turbulent Warp storms, and then the cunning priesthood of Mars would send out colonization fleets. Most of those ships that did survive to establish colonies, quickly saw its settler numbers grow at high speed, so that Mars and its isolated daughters over a course of thousands of years seeded many hundreds, or even thousands of forge worlds throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Many such occult industrial colonies would be inhabited by billions of people when the Expeditionary Fleets of the young Imperium of Man descended upon them, and the sheer power wielded by many such forge worlds emboldened them to stand up and fight for independence before the Emperor's brutal forces eventually overwhelmed the teeming Martian colonies.
Clearly, the Martian Mechanicum and its surviving offshoots had proven to be incredibly succesful during the ongoing human collapse of the Age of Strife, managing to not only hold their ground, but to expand aggressively and grow mightily in numbers through more than twohundred generations of destructive wars, constant Warp storms and alien predations. On some future forge worlds, the Mechanicum colonists found sizable numbers of native survivors, who had usually regressed to a pitiful state of existence. These worlds were conquered in bloody wars and forcefully converted to the ritual creed of the Cult Mechanicum, thus bolstering the number of settlers. Even so, press-ganging of indigenous savages and rapid natural population growth through having large families, would not fully explain the phenomenal success of Mars and her seeded worlds during the ravages of Old Night.
A high default rate of organic breeding on young Martian colonies was supplemented by various vitanoform fleshwork technologies, seeing billions of Mechanicum subjects enter life as vat-grown human creatures. Such techniques are to this day regularly employed on all large installations of the Adeptus Mechanicus in order to produce servitors, Skitarii and other human meat for grotesque rebuilding into living machines. Yet some forge worlds went further than that during the Age of Strife, and decided to maximize nativity from all sources in a systematic and orderly manner, thus adding to the population input of growth vats. And as the Age of Imperium has ground on in all its callous trampling of human life and ever-spiralling regression, ever more forge worlds have adopted a systematic schedule of mandatory artificial insemination, until it has become virtually a standard feature of the worlds and voidholms owned by the Adeptus Mechanicus throughout the Imperium. It is on this aspect of industrial reproduction of human populations that we shall now dwell, for it may tell us much about our species' life and industry in the darkest of futures.
The Adeptus Mechanicus is an empire within an empire, spanning thousands of forge worlds and millions of vassal voidholms. Its production and maintenance of ancient technology is absolutely crucial to the Imperium as a whole, and it possess far-reaching powers and ability to operate independently from the larger astral realms of the Throneworld. The Imperium of Man is founded upon the union of Mars and Terra in Sol system, its symbiosis encoded in the Treaty of Olympus Mons. While the cradle world of Terra stands as the eternal capital of mankind, Mars stands as its heart of science and technological knowhow, fostered in ancient times when the red planet was originally terraformed and colonized in circumstances that were most challenging to Man of Gold's still yet primitive technology and lore. Even though both Solar worlds and their holdings are marred by fanatic ignorance, hateful cruelty and post-apocalyptic regression, the Adeptus Mechanicus and its astral domains is a very different beast from the Terran Imperium proper.
To the Adeptus Mechanicus, crude life is nothing but a biological machine, inferior to the purity of cunning artifice, yet still carrying a soul that is the conscience of sentience. As a tyrannical cult of survival born in the most desperate crisis on Holy Mars, the Cult Mechanicus believes all thought of self to be dysgenic and contrary to our greater interests, and thus the individual must in every way be subjugated to the needs of the whole collective body. Just as a cog must serve its purpose in a great machine. A single man is nothing. The chosen human species is everything. And so the resourceful Adeptus Mechanicus, within its own vast domains, operates with a totalitarian power unheard of by most of the rest of the Adeptus Terra. For life is directed motion, and the Adeptus Mechanicus endeavours to control its direction. After all, is not all technology at the end of the day the harnessing of natural resources? Ferrum aeternum.
As such the Mechanicus will seize the means of reproduction. The creation of new human beings is just yet another form of industrial production, like so many others run by its heavily polluted forge worlds and millholms. All planets and larger factory and asteroid mining voidholms owned by the Martian Mechanicus needs to replace high die-off rates of their lowly human labour force, and likewise they need to ensure that new organics spring forth to bear blessed electrografts and bionic enhancements in a cycle of antique reusing. On top of a constantly high background mortality on lethal manufactoria floors, must be added sudden and massive industrial disasters such as chym floods, pandemics spawned by bio-leaks, detonations of fusion reactors, meltdown of fission, collapse of compounds, breakdown of shipside life support systems and a thousand other dangers inherent to Imperial industry. Opere necesse est, vivere non est necesse.
All this adds to the burdens of prognostication for Gedrosiarchs calculating workplace attrition rates, as do the construction of new facilities screaming for untold thousands upon thousands of labourers to keep the machines running, not to mention sudden and unpredictable requirements for more bodies by the Navis Mechanicus, the fleets of the red planet, its daughters, and all its holdings. It is likewise a volatile numbers game due to the sudden demand for more hands when machines break down beyond anyone's ability to repair, and previously automatized processes are replaced with human labour drones as a stopgap measure that soon grows permanent in nature. Such ravenous demand in the millions or even billions for more human toilers add up to an old Mechanicus practice of press-ganging large numbers of offworld humans from the Terran Imperium's overpopulated planets, keeping up a fluctuating yet continuous import of thralls in order to forestall an ever-looming threat of workforce drought forcing the rusting wheels of industry to grind to a halt. Thus slave labour of all ages are scooped up from other planets and voidholms, just like the Adeptus Mechanicus would do with minerals from mining or promethium from drilling. Vir est ore.
Nevertheless, most forge worlds and millholms tend to have long-term self-sustaining populations, even though offworld supply of warm bodies is necessary to quickly meet short-term spikes in demand or labour mortality. After all, there are to be found many factories for growing human beings in vats on any world of the Cult Mechanicus, and the population itself will usually breed like rats if given the chance. Often, however, that opportunity is not offered to the plebeians and menials by lordly tech-priests, for they usually run centralized breeding programs in order to maximize input, instead of trusting in random, sloppy rutting. Caro autem infirma.
Thus the toxic worlds and voidholms of the Adeptus Mechanicus will force their fecund workforce and clergy to do their part for the Motive-Force, and participate in rigorously scheduled artificial insemination programs, as well as eugenic projects of selective breeding for the initiated tech-priesthood. All this mirrors how agriculture would breed domestic animals. Man, after all, is but yet another resource to extract and exploit for the higher glory of the Omnissiah. Thus uncounted trillions of inhabitants on forge worlds and Mechanicus voidholms across the galaxy find themselves regularly subjected to primitive technology for artificial impregnation and seed extraction, the rate of which is determined by uncaring overlords festooned with spindly bionics who are able to adjust speed up or down just as they would the control instruments of engines and reactors. Deus est machina.
All this mechanistic ordering and generating of human life happens on entire worlds conquered and ravished by towering industry, where human corpses are but another waste product akin to chimney smoke and toxic discharges. Here, in edifices of raw power and industry, techno-theocrats marshall human and material resources on an unfathomable scale, drawing upon raw material extracted from dozens of worlds and tens of thousands of asteroids. Here, surrounded by the iconography of ancient engineering schematics and the heraldry of antique warning signs, insectile tech-priests and tech-priestesses raise their artificial voices in stanzas of machine cant, repeating mantras in triple digit cycles and intoning binary verses in couplets. Here, among the fires of industry and the roaring of furnaces, those inducted into mysteries of the Cult Mechanicus will prostrate themselves on the hard floor in veneration of sacred cogwheel icons, each sung oikos forming a larger hymn of alphanumerical acrostic to soothe troubled machine-spirits. Orbis et caminus.
Here, in hellish fabricator cathedrals and nightmarish refineries, are to be found the brainwashed masses of any forge world or millholm, the gears of industry lubricated by the suffering sweat and blood of innumerable toiling billions. They themselves have been reduced to little else than biological machine components without dignity or say, their bodies slotted into failing sections of debased tech, their reproductive cycles tamed and controlled by cyborg masters who put far more stock in swinging incense before venerable nanoprocessors and memory banks, than they do the wellbeing of their wretched inferiors. Here, in the toxic environments of polluted forge worlds, legions of short-lived menials succumb each and every hour, after grinding their lives away in shifts for some high and mighty overseer who barely knows they exist. They might die in vain. They might die in neverending toil. And they might die in astonishing numbers, yet the whole spiritual-industrial system of human production unit management is nevertheless working within acceptable parameters, for the Adeptus Mechanicus well know to fight off horrendous wastage and loss of human life through increasing input by all available means, whether organic or artificial. Hardships are to be endured. Challenges are to be overcome by the triumph of human willpower and devout sacrifice. The greater work must continue. Gloriam ad Omnissiah.
And so high mortality among menial castes are primarily staved off by vat-grown humans and mandatory programs of artificial insemination, supplemented by uncontrolled breeding and offplanet slave imports. In deadly mechanical manufactoria and lethal mills of alchemy on thousands of forge worlds and a vast array of client voidholms, are to be found faceless hordes of indoctrinated matres et patres, all mouthing mystical incantations, mantras of maintenance and catechisms of operation. Almost none of these ignorant parents will ever see their children, and fewer still will even know their progeny to be theirs when they see an overburdened errand juve scuttle past, buckling under the weight of fuel rods and replacements parts that it must carry to older labourers. These offspring will face a bleak and hard existence in the forges, just as their unknown parents do, and just as uncounted generations of hardworking menials and lay techfolk did before them in a long line of functional orphans.
Behold those wretched cretins, but cry no tears of pity over their plight, for empathy is shameful, the most base of crude emotions, an unworthy stirring of the spirit bereft of sacral logic and clever thought. The overriding commandment is to swell the numbers of the workforce, provide a rudimentary source of embryonic stem cells and increase the faithful flock. In an occult organization where the most devout seekers of knowledge and self-abnegation will replace their right brain half with a cogitator, there can be no value attached to weakling sentimentality. We can allow no corrosive compassion to tarnish our sentience as we comprehend the dehumanized numbers of statistical charts over labourers poisoned by chym or mysterious bio-chemistry. Nay, shun that frail instinct for mercy, for it is a trap of the flesh! Embrace instead the impersonal and magnificent truth on full display before our very eyes and ocular sensors: Witness the forge world.
Man has become infinitely malleable clay in the iron hands of machine. The crude world of the organic senses is nought but a rough approximation of the true reality of numbers and data, sung as a hymn of symmetry in the flawlessly analyzing processor-mind of the all-encompassing and all-knowing Machine-God. The music of the spheres is a cosmic symphony of cold arithmetics resonating in a room of perfect geometry, a binary orchestra of creation itself. Such is the real nature of the universe, and not the chaotic mess experienced by sinful mortals scrabbling in the dirt.
Why should we pay any heed to the protestations of fleshly lips and waggling tongues? It is so much white noise, fit only to be filtered out. Nay, behold instead the constructed perfection of valves and circuitry, and ken the righteous worship on display in devout processions among the machines. A myriad of convoluted techno-sects infest the body of the Cult Mechanicus, yet they all know that to break with ritual is to break with faith. The correct rites must be observed. Anoint thus the blessed mechanism with oil, and offer up the fragrance of sacred incense. All savants must know the techno-theological formulae and ritualistic words of activation. Any seeker of knowledge, learning and wisdom must be able to perform the correct rituals without fault. They must know how to process data and how to insert digital prayers, and they must rinse and repeat their cyclic attempts to win the favour of the machine-spirits in a stubborn display of religious fervour and dedicated intellect schooled by the Cult Mechanicus.
Thus the builders and knowers of mankind's finest craft have been reduced to hidebound zealots, their minds filled with superstition and slowly dissipating knowledge, even as their vox-cords give off a gibberish prattle of binary cant. The very ideas of their worldview and sectarian education are expressed in a poorly understood babble of High Gothic nomenclature inherited and scavenged from a long since past Golden Age of discovery and invention, when great minds where allowed to roam at large and crack open the secrets of the universe. Since then, man's regressed science and technology has slumped into pits of ignorance and fanatic dogma.
These tech-priests and tech-priestesses may be obsessed with cold logic and machine systems, yet simultaneously they will bow in blinkered worship of idols and pursue the ritualized riddles of arcane mysticism. Incredibly advanced databanks beyond the means of even the richest secular aristocrats have been filled with poorly processed hard information mixed with the garbled codes of digital shamanism and cultic creed. These curious souls, who once would have spearheaded humanity's hunt for its astral birthright, will instead recite binary mantras and litanies, lying prostrate in front of ritual tables of periodized elements and sacred charts of electronic circuitry handed down from a brighter age, when man knew how to make better out of himself. The organized state of humanity's best and brightest minds in the Age of Imperium is nothing short of a prison for thought itself, upheld by rigid dogma and the jealous slaying of anyone who would dare to challenge the unhinged status quo of deteriorating human knowledge guarded by an inept techno-theocracy hellbent on protecting its self-empowering monopoly.
As previously mentioned, rudimentary cloning technology derived from vitanoform and fleshvat lore of the ancients is still used by the Adeptus Mechanicus, yet it would be horrendously inefficient for the tech-priests not to also make use of the biological machinery of the operational human production units themselves. Waste not, want not. It is best to maximize input from a wide variety of sources, including vat-grown cloning of bodies, offworld press-ganging of slave labour, and natural human breeding. The latter, however, is usually rigorously controlled by artificial means and systematized into an ordered grid of rigid production schedules to better meet expected human wastage levels and future demand for labouring flesh. Only seldom will local sects of the Adeptus Mechanicus allow independent primal rutting to freely dictate the rhythm of body input into their monstrous calculations.
Unlike the Imperium proper of Holy Terra, the empire of the Adeptus Mechanicus do not believe in family. This primal organic unit is messy, unsystematized and disorganized, akin to a pigsty. Instead of parents and siblings, children on forge worlds and millholms will often grow up in a ladder of dismal institutions, where their age or evaluated productivity level dictates which rung in the ladder they find themselves in. The lowest rung of these functional orphanages will take care of infants who are usually given all the necessary nutrition, sleep and temperature regulation by lobotomized servitors, and yet still some babies wither away and die from lack of human contact, love and attention. Clearly, such weaklings were not fit for the rigours of life in the first place.
This neglect only intensifies as the toddlers are moved up into institutionalized units for the instruction and cultivation of small children. Instead of warmth and care, these liberi will be subjugated to ceaseless indoctrination, in order to better prepare them for their ordained roles within the Cult Mechanicus. Their first cerebral implants will be installed, the better to allow transfer of information directly into the children's skulls and waste as little time and resources as possible on mundane teaching. This short education will mainly deal with religious instruction fit for the most basic castes of the Machine Cult, as well as all manner of practical tech knowledge and the ability to read, write and calculate, to prepare the children for an early labour start on the floors of manufactoria and shipyards. The most promising pupils will be inducted into more prestigious institutions to prepare them for induction into the mysterious orders of the tech-clergy, where they will rub shoulders with the prodigious fruits of selective breeding and eugenics.
In order to foster a hardy spirit, supervisors will cultivate violence and fear in order to humiliate and control the children through draconic punishment. Electrical shocks and pain-inducing alchemical concoctions will be administered in full view of everyone else to misbehaving human progeny. Likewise, children found quarrelling will often be ordered to hit or taze each other as part of their disciplinary penalty, thus undermining any forming of close bonds between peers that might act contrary to subservience to the Cult Mechanicus. Older kids will usually steal away opportunities to hit and kick smaller ones, often as an outlet for their own frustrations and repressed aggression, thereby cultivating a virtuous cycle of violence against those younger than themselves. Thus the spawn of man is taught to be ruthless and to hate from an early age. To further promote the overbearing sense of isolation and mechanistic, inevitable cruelty, novitiates, federii and liberi will never be notified in advance when they are to be moved from one institution to another section, for they will be moved around like boxes, without personal belongings and without any chance to say goodbye to anybody they might have known. Inter-human attachments must not be formed, for that way the feebleness of flesh lies over yonder.
The entire environment of upbringing within the juvenile institutions of the Adeptus Mechanicus amounts to children being wiped out as human beings, their voices silenced, their weak selves humiliated, their wills broken. Only by dissolving the personalities of tender humans in such slaughterhouses of souls can a new and better man be built, one filled with zealous adherence to the Credo Omnissiah and one capable of becoming as one with the machine, both in body and mind. What use do children have for their mothers and fathers? What use do plebeians have for knowing their relatives? All relevant data are as a rule mapped out in genealogical pedigrees of controlled breeding, available only to the concerned blessed experts who can enter the correct clearance codes. This cold and mechanical treatment of human youngsters contributes greatly to moulding the subjects of the Cult Mechanicus into faceless numbers in enormous masses of replacable human machine components.
Weak-willed outsiders might find this arrangement to be joyless, resulting in a life bereft of tender contact and human warmth. Mayhap it will even result in raising generations upon generations lacking the finer things in life altogether. Such nonsense is not even worth the dignity of dismissive answer. No, listen not to the white noise of infidels and barbarian ignoramii. Let there be an unsentimental harvest and planting of seed, for the flesh is weak. We must strive to become one with the machine, act the machine, be the machine, even if scraps of flesh and organs still cling to our forms. The machine moves in patterns of mathematical exactitude and purposeful repetition, and so should we do as well in matters of the flesh.
Get rid of your delusions of the flesh, for they will lead you astray from the deeper reality hidden beneath the dull exterior that your unreceptive optic organs perceive in their state of half-blindness, ignorant as your ocular organs are to pure expressions of true reality such as observable heat differences and the spectrum of light. Shun illogical thought of self, for how could a wheel revolt against the axle around which it rotates? Purge irrational vanity, for how could a transmission belt care for its appearance? Form is but a manifestation of function, and there is no other beauty in all of creation than sacred function, just as there is no higher mystery outside the sacred reach of pure, unadulterated knowledge.
Thus man on thousands of forge worlds and innumerable vassal voidholms will be produced on an industrial scale, akin to machines making other machines. A higher system of reproductive engineering has replaced untamed patterns of feral copulation. The purity of cold calculation has replaced the abominable fragility of emotion, and so humans are extracted of their seed and impregnated routinely like one would inseminate domesticated grox and other cattle in agriculture. When speaking of this process, we must naturally exclude those human production units who have been chem-gelded, organ-crushed or otherwise rendered sterile and barren. Such impotent conditions may usually come about either in all-too common industrial accidents, or as a normal genetic hygiene punishment for repeated work failures that attract the judging eyes of superiors (although servitorization is a far more common measure), in order to not promote the passing on of undesirable traits to future generations of menials. For if the machine pool of a facility is to be cleaned and maintained with regularity, then surely the labour pool servicing the machines must be likewise cleaned and maintained without failure?
And so the servants of Mars and all its daughter holdings are created in coordinated breeding programs, where inception, gestation and delivery performs like oiled clockwork. On some forge worlds and voidholms of the Adeptus Mechanicus, this entire procedure is mechanically automatized into something resembling a rolling assembly line with strapped human bodies being processed at high speed, while at other places a simple queue to a large facility for mass extraction or injection will suffice. Know that the need for comfort is a false craving of the flesh. Rank within the Cult Mechanicus will determine the insemination process. Among both males and females, lowly menials and lay tech-folk will routinely have their arms and legs locked to a moveable hard table during the mechanical procedure in order to forestall any time-inefficient thrashing about of potential unwilling slaves, while Cult members inducted into the tech-priesthood and its arcane mysteries will be expected to fully understand the order of things and thus comply piously without any need for restraints.
As to the human produce of such scheduled factory programs, the small bodies of children make for poor labourers, while their young brains make for simple servitors. Although there are many tasks that are lightweight and menial enough to entrust to a child, such little work do not invite much else than dismissive views from the Adeptus Mechanicus. After all, the desired end product is a fully grown human production unit, whereas childhood stands as nothing but a time-consuming obstacle to the labour replenishment process.
Thus crops of despised and inefficient children will often be injected with variably volatile growth stimulants to accelerate their maturation into peak fitness juves and adults of far better efficiency levels than childishly undeveloped offspring possess. Still, children and tender juves can be put to reasonably heavy work and run errands for adult labourers. And so children can be seen scrabbling about inside great machines, where they pick cotton in textile factorum cathedrals, their work rhythm set to the precarious pulse and sudden thrusts of raking machinery that they must nimbly avoid at their own peril. Such utterly dangerous child labour is all beneficial to the running of the Great Machine, and thus it must never be shied away from. And as man in the far future has come to replace more and more machine tasks with manual labour, the industrial uses for children have slowly grown in number over the fivehundred generations that make up the Age of Imperium. For instance, the small bodies of liberi are well suited to claustrophobic labour tasks such as minor chimney sweeping, cleaning out nooks and cranies of lethally active machines in operation, and the horrible drudgery and crawling to cleanse pipes and large hoses from the inside, in which case bestial pipe lurkers are sometimes lying in wait for an easy prey to slowly devour alive, out of sight, out of mind. And so the pipe-cleaning kid may themself end up clogging the arteries of manufactoria.
Brainwashed Cult Mechanicus children who grow up in age cohorts under strict discipline and adult scorn, will receive electrografts and other cerebral bionic implants for efficient information downloading and educative installation directly into their tender brains. Electrografts and other cerebral tech implants were often originally designed with a rudimentary simulated intelligence in order to learn their tasks increasingly well over time so that they would improve function and efficiency over generations of irrelevant fleshly human carriers. Yet nowadays many cheaper electrografts decay over time and gradually turn the human production unit first irritable, then erratic, and finally insane. Neither the Imperium of Holy Terra nor the empire of the Adeptus Mechanicus sworn to Holy Mars have much patience for teaching plebs. For lay tech-folk and other lowly specialists it is far better to surgically implant hardware and quickly install software containing the necessary technical knowledge, rather than wasting years and years on proper education, teaching through hands-on practice and a thorough understanding of subject matters. Why would limited resources be wasted on pampering to such shortlived human components when more efficient means are available?
This entire approach to learning is but one sclerotic reason among many as to why the Imperium of Man in general and the Adeptus Mechanicus in particular will not be a source of human innovative renaissance, and thus mankind has wasted ten precious millennia of interstellar empire on stagnating into senility when it should have bounced back into a self-rejuvenating virtuous cycle of boundless scientific curiosity and confident technological development. And so Tyranid hive fleets are now falling upon the Milky Way galaxy like so many fangs sinking into the soft belly flesh of weak prey, all the while baleful eradicators of ancient times awake on thousands of Necron tomb worlds, set to harvest all life for themselves as they once did during the War in Heaven. Thus the human species in the far future is doomed to fight a losing war against forces mighty beyond imagination, trapped in a dysfunctional colossus on feet of clay that has regressed into a fortified interstellar madhouse filled with ignorant fanatics and selfserving overlords whose mercilessly harsh measures have proven counterproductive to a lunatic degree.
And so the decline of human power continues unabated in the Milky Way galaxy, for mankind stands horribly ill prepared to face the forces of doomsday, and the best and the brightest of humanity's experts on science and technology have been reduced to little more than ranting witch doctors and ignorant scavengers of antique fossils. In the face of this rising tide of doom, the Adeptus Mechanicus' quest for the holy grail of an intact Standard Template Constructor or STC archive has intensified to never before seen levels, and explorators backed by billions of Skitarii and other armed forces of the Cult Mechanicus are now scouring the galaxy for any clue of archeotech hidden beneath the earth, or searching for treasures drifting through space, or excavating for artefacts and techno-relics forgotten beneath the polluted foundations of hive cities that once soared to the high heavens as idyllic arcologies of shining splendour.
See, then, the Imperium of Man for what it is, in all its fanatic savagery. The union of Terra and Mars that the Imperator forged during the Great Crusade has resulted in a primitive astrotechnological civilization which has been leaking human knowledge for fivehundred generations, akin to a wounded man slowly bleeding out. Bear witness to the ramshackle huts and crude edifices built upon the wreckage of former glories, constructed along the lines of engineering lore born out of ancient discoveries cloaked in mystery and enigma to the Adeptus Mechanicus. Ever since the Golden Age of Technology ended, mankind has been reverting to an ever worsened state of being in a grinding spiral of descendant degeneration, broken only by brief resurgences of Imperial recovery and succesful manufacturing of ancient human technology.
Scan the Imperium of Man in general, and the Martian empire of forge worlds and millholms ruled by the Adeptus Mechanicus in particular. Be cognizant of the flood of deadly hate. Watch how rueful man like a machine tool will be made to conform to the movements and requirements of engines, just like a cardan shaft must in order to function properly. The freewheeling powers of cognition have been robbed from the human mind, and locked in an abhorrent straitjacket of ignorant dogma, strict surveillance and limited thought. No wonder so many despairing souls turn insane in this living nightmare of lost hope. In the Age of Imperium, the lofty dreams inherent to the human heart have died a baleful death of dystrophy and decay. See the pitiful state of man, toppled from his soaring pedestal of yore. O, how the mighty have fallen! Behold a paradise lost.
And so degraded mankind stumbles onward, in service to its own rotting interstellar empire. Within this cosmic domain can be found a scattered realm of sheer industry, where man himself has become a factory process like any other. Here, endless hordes of toiling men, women and children will have their body parts callously replaced with machinery. Here, the blinkered masses are ruled by minds of metal and wheels, for it is a starspanning realm of cold numbers and lifeless calculations, of heartless equations and grinding machinery churning out an endless stream of ever more primitive products to prop up a dysfunctional theocratic dictatorship. Here, in the holdings of the red planet, man is become more machine than a being of flesh and blood, and he will brutally force his own round life to fit into a square slot.
All the precision and cunning artifice of the Adeptus Mechanicus amounts to reduce man to nothing but a replacable machine component, one that will be pragmatically installed, without ever asking for his irrelevant thoughts on the matter, into a vast and intricate system of movings levers, pistons and pumps. Here, man's lot is toil neverending, toil ever burdensome, toil ever grinding. Man's progeny is birthed through a mechanistic arrangement of industrial reproduction, in thrall to statistical sheets balancing input and output of life for the sake of running machines. Here, amid endless rows of towering factories, man is but another material piece of inventory in facilities filled with siphons, conveyor belts and all manner of enigmatic techno-arcana. Man is but dust in the shadow of roaring furnaces and crackling tesla coils, but yet another resource to be consumed with the indifference of a heart of stone.
And so, on thousands upon thousands of forge worlds, man is laid out upon the anvil and hammered into a shape fit for workshop purposes. He is thus reshaped and crafted, to eventually be discarded like a broken tool once he has served his purpose and his mind and body are no longer fit for endless toil. The cycle of organic life itself has been made subject to dehumanizing mechanisms and engineered systems as but yet another manufactorum process among many others. Here, in the darkest of futures, man has constructed for himself nothing short of hell on earth, where man be both its tormentor and tormented. Perhaps, in a weak moment in the darkest of nights or lightsouts, some few of the masters and rulers of mankind will recognize this faltering edifice of human suffering and pointless misery for what it truly is. Yet even then, they are bound to conclude that it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
Thus the dizzying prospects of the brief human renaissance offered by the Emperor's Great Crusade has run into the sand, and long since disappeared beneath the uncaring dunes of oblivion. In their stead, man has earned for himself ten thousand wasted years of eroding science and decaying technology, of ever more primitive industry and worsening demechanization of human civilization across the stars. Man has fashioned for himself an aeon filled with ten thousand years of shackled thought, where the best and the brightest of his species can do naught else but dig for buried treasure and pray for deliverance. Ten thousand years of purging freeminded deviants and infidels. Ten thousand years of rusting stagnation, where occult mysteries have replaced the diligent research of yore.
Do not avert your eyes from the etiolated ugliness on full display, but witness instead how a degenerate feedback loop of despondent fatalism has replaced the optimist spirit that served the ancients so well. The demented ramblings of feverish fanatics have taken over where once doubtfilled criticism and rigorous testing of theories held sway. Know this, and never forget that interstellar empires are absolutely dependent on their mastery of science and technology. Man has long since lost the ball in this great game, and his eyes refuse to see, just as his mind refuse to comprehend.
This is the Imperium of Man. This is the demise of hope, the broken promise of humanity's birthright, the death of a dream. In these dying years of senile mankind, humanity shines as a flickering candle light soon about to be quenched by the maws of a suffocating darkness.
All this transpires, in a demented epoch, where man is bred by force.
In an age of decay, where man has harnessed himself under the yoke.
In an era of doom, at the end of our species.
Such is the horror that awaits us all.
It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is only production.- - - Inspired by Jchrispole's first human children of the dark future piece.
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