Some context… and a warning…
M42.796
My career within the organization has been a long one colored by much controversy. At times I have become a target because of my prying eyes, and natural proclivity to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong, a fact which I find quite ironic considering the investigative nature of the organization- the pot must always call the kettle black. Sadly, our culture does not live within the context of history. Information is seen as just a weapon, the most dangerous weapon of all being the truth. So it is kept well hidden, its void in society filled by propaganda.
Our empire’s propaganda serves not the truth, but only to maintain the status quo. It is a lie, but it is a lie driven by a desperate sort of pragmatism. I know why we, the powerful few, must lie. We live in a cruel universe where the vast majority of matter in existence is bare, dead, rock. Everything that isn’t human, or made of rock, is actively trying to kill us or actively planning our species downfall. That is if you discount rogue meteorite strikes- sometimes even the space rocks are trying to kill us. My point is: there can be no disunity and acts undertaken to preserve Imperial unity, though sometimes unethical, are nevertheless a necessary evil. Necessary evil is a theme that this volume will explore.
I cannot hate my people or my Lord. After all, it is his story which I have been intellectually obsessed with for… almost two and half centuries now. But to question the story of his origins or his divinity, even for academic purposes, is heresy of the highest degree. Civilian historians who go looking into data archives pertaining to old Earth often end up missing. If they are not killed they are recruited into our profession. As a career inquisitorial historian and intelligence analyst I am afforded a bit more leeway, the limits of which I have often pushed, much to the chagrin of my superiors. I’m a thorn in their side, but one which cuts both ways sharply enough to be indispensable in the long war. If that were not so I would already be dead, or exiled to a far off planet, or… Fill in the blanks yourself…
I digress. Before humanity began encoding information into crystals we were completely reliant on microprocessors. Microprocessors are especially vulnerable to electromagnetic pulses, such as the ones generated by atomics. So much of human history is now forever lost because of their delicate nature, and our own self destructive impulses. By the mid second millennium nuclear conflict had become so commonplace that 7 meter thick layers of lead shielding became standardized in all terrestrial data centers. When humanity began its first serious colonization efforts in the Sol system, spurred onwards by Terra’s political instability, the first services to be completely offshored into space were communications and data storage.
In fact the offshoring of data centers, en masse into space, led to a ten percent drop in the market price of lead. The crash in lead prices was the deciding factor in the destabilization of a socially entrenched mercantile dynasty, which claimed dominion over much of the Eurasian continent on Terra. A period of bloody infighting ensued. Details, like the market price of lead on Terra during the second millennium, matter a great deal- They can lead to war.
What information we do possess, regarding the time predating the Imperium’s founding, was recovered from an ancient data node found orbiting a XVb1135, a rogue planet located several hundred million miles outside the Sol system. XVb1135 travels at the same angle and velocity as Terra. So it’s position, relative to Terra, remains fixed. The discovery of the nodes arose from a theory put forward by my predecessor.
Its logic is as follows: Orbital data storage installations in the Sol system are often destroyed during times of crisis- such as the interstellar civil war between Mars and Terra during the late second millennium. One crude solution to this problem, he postulated, would be to build thrusters into the installations, alongside automated “retreat and rally” protocols. So, during war times, orbitals could boost away from the threat of hostile invasion to a preprogrammed rally point. This rally point would have to be an asteroid, or exoplanet, whose velocity and angle of motion fix it in a static position relative to Terra, so that the orbitals could eventually be retrieved. It would also have to be far enough away that the orbitals would not be detected.
There are twenty million extrasolar bodies, of varying size and shape, that fit this description. To test his theory, my predecessor scanned them all over a period of fifty years, with some help from the Adeptus Mechanicus. Five such bodies yielded orbitals. Four of the five were orbited only by the useless dead husks of primitive communications satellites. XVb1135 was the only extrasolar body orbited by data nodes, seven total. Of the seven data nodes, only one remained intact, which he and I designated as the intact site.
Ancient Terran data nodes are massive, their size is comparable to an imperial warship. Viewed from space, they are roughly cylindrical, studded with masts of antennae, and devoid of insignia. Inside they are hollow, the data infrastructure itself is built into the walls of the orbital, protruding inward. A transit system runs through the center, providing maintenance access to the entire complex, and there is an atmosphere comparable to Terra’s, but no artificial gravity.
The interrogators we deployed to the intact site discovered armored suits with built in air jets which, they hypothesized, afforded movement to the engineering team. This was confirmed when several of these suits were found to still contain the crumbling, ossified, remains of their owners.
Further inspection of the air filtration system yielded more ancient bone fragments- for instance a set of gold capped teeth studded with synthetic pink diamonds. I inherited the set from my mentor, who adhesed the teeth in a line along the long stem of a phalaenopsis orchid- one of the last surviving ancient orchid specimens, stolen from the palace of a rogue trader on Terra scant years before the species extinction. So now the orchid, and the teeth, and the diamonds and the gold, sit trapped together in a stasis vase on my desk.
He called the piece: The Fleeting Mortality of Beauty. Beauty is mortal. So is history… Unless the history in question is kept in a stasis field.
The single summary data archive in the center of the orbital was ensconced within a stasis field. This is why we were still able to recover so much information many eons after its initial encoding. The generator was still functional tens of thousands of years later; speaking of a remarkable design philosophy, endemic to the time, which heavily emphasized robustness.
The discovery of the generator refuted the prevailing theory, permeating Imperial historical thought, that stasis generators were developed during the fifth millennium. Granted, this was likely the time period during which they proliferated in human society. However, organic chemical compounds found inside this particular generator were carbon dated to the early third- proving they were invented much earlier. Part of the deal struck with the Adaptus of Mars for their assistance was that they would get to keep any technologies of note discovered inside the orbitals. So the generators belong to them now. A skitarii division deployed to the site saw to that. Their fate is unknown to me. However, I suspect that study of their workings played some role in the successful resuscitation of Robute.
Much of the data recovered was explicitly clerical: business sales manifests, transit logs, birth and death records, addresses, names and dates. However buried deep within this morass of mundane information were a collection of encrypted files. This encryption was one of a kind, so novel and complicated that it was initially thought to be of imported xenos origin by the first analysts who examined it’s mathematical architecture. This is plausible, as the time of the files authoring corresponds with a period of stable trade between humans and xenos species. It took a brilliant mechanicus cryptographer many years to break it. The tech-priest in question was a novelty himself. His personal philosophy was that a man is first and foremost a brain, and that augmentation of the brain’s mental processes was of higher value then augmentation of the body. He practiced what he preached: his body was still almost entirely organic when I met him, save for a handful of carefully concealed combat augments in his arms.
The man’s brain was a different story: ninety five percent augmetic and hooked into a bulky cogitator bank, via mind impulse cables. I know because I asked. All brain functions except his higher order thought processes were fully automated. The cogitator would float along behind him on a repulsor field. I remember it would bump into things and always get in the way. A senior inquisitor once tripped on its cabling and threw a screaming fit, threatening to have the cryptographer dissolved in a vat of molecular acid. The tech-priest just smiled a mocking smile and walked away, followed by his cogitator.
His beliefs had made him a pariah in the Mars priesthood, where creative thinking and expressions of individual identity are harshly punished. My predecessor scooped him up, after he was exiled from Mars, and put him to good use as a codebreaker. His unique approach to problem solving led to his eventual success decrypting the files retrieved from the orbital.
My mentor passed before the tech-adapt finished the codebreaking. He left me his possessions, projects, and position within the organization. Years later, when the work was finally done, the tech-priest wordlessly handed over the unlocked cache and walked away. There was something in the priests eyes I had never seen before- he looked aged, haunted. I didn’t understand until I read the documents myself. When I look in the mirror now I see the same light in my own eyes. So reader, I must warn you. Some truths are better left unknown and you need to ask yourself a hard question now before you read further: are you happy? Are you secure in your career? Because this volume will threaten both of those things- it will threaten your understanding of your place in history and it will threaten your place in the organization. Knowing its contents is an act of sacrifice on the altar of truth. You will loose something- if you’re lucky it will only be peace. If you are unlucky it may be your faith in our lord, your career in the organization, or your life. Choose now and choose wisely and above all be pragmatic.
