Chapter 22: Chapter 22

The raw state of a C’tan shard was far less impressive than I had expected. The half-molten giant glitched in and out of reality in a blur of black, green and silver pixels as it failed to maintain its form. Only my console use kept its shell from failing outright. I was keeping it that way because of the other stats I saw in the shard, and because I remembered the rules and lore about what happened when you killed one of these things, even as drained as this one was.

 

Big boom.

 

Much bigger than what the game’s poor scaling implied, if I converted the shard’s remaining power correctly.

 

So yeah, while the troops restored reality around the site with the appropriate rites, I just scrolled through the shard’s stats. These things were highly, highly impressive, generally broken down into ‘Ctan’, ‘Shard’ and ‘NDermis’ categories, each with a shitton of subentries that made me wish once more that the console had better formatting, like the simplest word processor, instead of lumping everything together like a fucking Notepad text file. 

 

The latter two warranted research back in Ix and Gesserit, since necrodermis and sharding seemed to be material states that could be prodded and poked around with. Some safeties had to be put in before research could proceed, but a few tweaks to reinforce the labs and tools shouldn’t take too much time.

 

I’ll have to personally test the first category though, considering how conventional research couldn’t exactly look into a being’s properties like how my console did. Also, the ‘Ctan.Power’ and ‘Ctan.PhyControl’ stats sounded potentially fun to work with. The values on this Void Dragon shard for these two were in three decimal places low - 0.007 and 0.016 respectively, if I remember right - and the thing had been an ass to deal with, even with console. If not for my previous experience putting down reality-bending eldritch abominations and elder gods, I could see myself losing from an overlooked weakness.

 

Now imagine the shard being closer to in both stats to a solid 1.0. Or if the damned scale was actually set to a hundred or a thousand, and the values were more than just one.

 

One major saving grace though was that the C’tan seemed to be beings fully within the conventional, natural realm. No eldritch, metaphysical bullshit to deal with. They just could bend the natural order of things to their whim like it was fucking Play-Doh, that’s all. Judging from what I’m reading off the stats, it’s far more versatile and far less limited than what Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath could do. Plus there doesn’t seem to be any corruptive effects linked to them.

 

So I’ll definitely be playing around with those. Fuck the mind-deleting maluses of the outer gods.

 

While I continued to scroll through the wall of console text, the tech-priest witnesses finally were led down to ground zero. I didn’t bother landing on my feet, I still needed to get used to floating after all. Instead, I just swiveled in the air to face the group of shaking cog-fuckers to address them.

 

“Behold, your false god,” I announced.

 

*****

 

Koriel kept alternating her gaze between the pixellating giant on the ground just feet from her, and the man (or the thing wearing a man’s form) that took it down. Her optics fixed onto Sev when he started talking though, as much as the words he uttered were truly blasphemous.

 

“Your Omnissiah in the flesh…ish, an alien slave-slash-superweapon.”

 

Alien? The adept’s head snapped towards the defeated being. “That…is a xenos?” she muttered with disbelief.

 

“Yep,” came the smug reply with eyes literally sparking in amusement. “The source of most of Mars’ technological growth, and probably your Dark Age of Technology too.”

 

“You lie,” Magos Nir-Kalek managed to deny with strength fuelled by fervor. “The Omnis-”

 

“Your Omnissiah is a farce,” Sev quickly interrupted, his smug amusement turning into something harsher. “Both of them. Worse, this degenerate machine cult of yours fed so much of its idiotic faith into the Immaterium that it was effecting reality.”

 

Koriel felt righteously affronted, and was about to decry the invader along with the others, but a sudden flash of unseen power overwhelmed the tech-priests with raw, primal terror that froze the congregation. “I’m not done venting. Do you know how the Warp works? Truly? It’s a realm of emotions and belief, almost fluid in its state if not for several constants of sapient beings that imposed some immutable laws within it.”

 

Sev floated closer to the silent priests, fixing his unblinking gaze directly at them. Koriel’s optics could not decipher the energies spilling out of his eyes, and resorted to simply registering an empty void.

 

“And your fucked up belief in machine animism was almost dense enough to calcify into something that would permanently leak into reality.”

 

Somehow Lexicano Arcanus Enok managed to find the strength to rebut by reciting the Universal Laws. “The knowledge of the ancients stands beyond question. The Machine Spirit guards the knowledge of the Ancients. Your hollow words mean nothing. You are the false god here, trying to undermine our faith in the Omnissiah, to turn us from the Cult Mechanicus!”

 

Koriel and the others found themselves sharing the Lexicano Arcanus’ fervor, standing together behind him as if to channel their righteous anger through his rebuke.

 

“Destroy us, but we will never turn away from Deus Machina. We denounce you! To break with ritual is to break with faith. In the name of the Machine God, in the name of the Omnissiah, in the name of the Motive Force, thrice will we deny your paltry attempts at corrupting us!”

 

For all the fire in Enok’s words, Sev only smirked. “False god? I’m more of a god than whatever deified cogs you believe in. And that wasn’t me trying to turn you.” His feet finally touched the ground as he strode over towards them. Koriel steeled her will and her faith against the torment or oblivion that was sure to come with this fake-man, false god’s anger.

 

“I’m glad all of you have direct digital interfaces to your brains. It makes this so much easier. Here, this is my attempt-”

 

The Mistress of Magna City heard no more as her entire processing capacity was completely overridden. Koriel was detached from her body, her senses surely not her own as she saw and smelled and tasted the new environment around her.

 

She was in a massive cavern, stale and isolated, yet dimly lit when a giant of a man wreathed in a familiar golden glow entered, dragging the struggling form of a metal, vaguely reptilian thing of black and silver. The familiar monster’s form flowed like wax, but otherwise it was helpless as its saintly captor tossed it into the center of the cavern. 

 

The Omnissiah and the Dragon, Koriel innately understood. And with no doubt she knew this to be true.

 

Koriel felt time speed up, and the golden giant was moving all over the cavern, inscribing glyphs and hexes into the rocky walls which formed chains of ethereal gold that bit into the broken dragon and bound it tightly many times over. The binding was not complete though; enough of a gap was left that the creature’s scalp was exposed.

 

A robed priest and a primitive servitor-construct joined the giant later. Time passed too fast for Koriel to pick up on the weighty conversation traded, but after the haloed figure left, the priest and his servitor remained. 

 

The first Guardian began his watch, and Koriel again knew this to be true.

 

And they remained there as her sense of time increased, and the dragon’s form grew, swallowing the chains and eventually the very cavern itself. It flexed and occasionally struggled, yet the adept somehow knew that it was still helplessly bound to this place. The priest and his familiar would often inspect the half-slumbering, half-struggling metal monster, and only occasionally left the subverted chamber for reasons unknown.

 

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Koriel saw gossamer threads of its thought leak out of the imprisoned dragon, metallic strands that pierced through the cavern’s roof. Her astral sight suddenly shunted upwards, and then she was up on a foreign yet utterly recognizable surface of lush greenery and clear blue water. The landmarks were obscured, but there was no denying that this was Mars, a Mars long before the darker ages.

 

The metal threads spread out, and Koriel was involuntarily following some of the strands as they traveled across the Martian surface to seek sleeping men and women. Scientists, laborers, test subjects, the strands did not discriminate on their targets as they stabbed into the heads of the sleeping forms. Then light pulsed rapidly from the ethereal strands into the sleepers, the silver-green flashes both wondrous and sinister. 

 

Information was being forcibly sent to these men and women, dreams of new machines, visions of wondrous creations unimagined until now. Koriel recognized some of the designs - Knight walkers, battleships, cyclonic torpedoes… But they weren’t tools of war when they were dreamed into being. Instead, she saw the first attempts at colonizing the stars with pioneer walkers, colony ships and terraforming agents.

 

Koriel was yanked up into the stratosphere, and with a bird’s eye view she looked down at the pulsing light spreading from the Dragon’s prison across the whole planet. A few strands even left the planet entirely, infecting unsuspecting mortals on other planets. Mars’ surface saw great blooms of industry and megastructures, transforming into a scientific utopia.

 

So began the Golden Age of Technology, and Koriel knew this to be true.

 

As Mars grew in splendor and humanity spread across the stars, Koriel noted a new addition to the pulsing lights that inspired billions to greatness. Black pulses spread across a few of the Dragon’s threads. These rare dark specks carried no inspiration, no great seed of imagination. Instead, the motes exacerbated the existential dread of its victims, one that could only be soothed by the awe of the marvels being churned out. 

 

Awe which turned into reverence, which was then associated to higher mysteries as the inspired scientists and designers became hungrier in their quest to explore everything and anything. They congregated in the shadows, sharing and refining their beliefs as they fawned over prototypes and found comfort in mixing scientific pursuit with mysticism.

 

Intellect is the Understanding of Knowledge. Understanding is the True Path to Comprehension. Comprehension is the Key to all Things.

 

So sprouted the first hidden believers of the Machine God, and to her horror, Koriel knew this to be true.

 

Koriel was on her knees, her augmentations struggling to pacify her organic body. Her lungs convulsed for air and her eyes stung with the phantom pain of crying. As she reined in her senses, she realized that she was not alone. The other tech-priests were in various states of despair, incomprehensible binaric buzzing or raw vocal cries filling the air as they had no doubt seen what Koriel had.

 

“By the Motive Force…” somebody muttered in binaric, their vocalizer too static laced and Koriel too emotionally compromised to accurately identify the speaker.

 

Koriel stared blankly at the ground, her mind still struggling to fully come to terms with what she was forced to witness. The great lie that was the Cult Mechanicus, the ancient machinations of the Emperor of Mankind, the one falsely labeled as the avatar of the Machine God, the horror that all of Mankind’s advancement was fed by the dreams of slumbering xenos instead of divine guidance…

 

What did humanity truly achieve then?

 

Koriel slowly brought herself to look up at the black-attired leader of the Nexus invaders. “Wha- What about the Machine Spirit? What about…what about the Abominable Intelligences?”

 

Sev shrugged nonchalantly. “From what I’ve checked in Terra’s archives and the salvage from the Librarius Omnis, the Artificial Intelligences-” he stressed the correction, “-had a massive vulnerability, coding wise. Allowed for the spread of an inter-system patch that slowly corrupted their core parameters without anyone or anything noticing.” He paused for a moment before shrugging again. “Still have to do some digging before we can be certain that it’s a product of malice or incompetence though.”

 

If she still had eyelids, Koriel would’ve blinked dumbly. There was a possibility that the subversion of the Men of Iron, the birth of the Age of Strife, was caused by incompetence?

 

“As for the nonsense of Machine Spirits,” Sev continued, “That’s all on your cult’s clumsy attempts at making a secure AI. You basically made barebones AIs with programmed personalities and little else. The problem though is without it, your machines aren’t programmed with any of the basic safeties to ensure that friendly fire’s turned off. Because apparently none of you know how to do advanced coding. This one I’m going to blame fully on incompetence.”

 

He let out a loud sigh as he shook his head. “Of course nowadays, thanks to the fucking buildup in the Immaterium, all the useless prayers and shit will eventually become a necessity.”

 

What had he said before? That their belief could leak into reality?

 

Something drew Sev’s attention, causing him to stiffen for a literal second. He blinked a few times and then regarded the shattered tech-priests. “Right, tour’s over. I’ve got other things to do than enjoy broken cultists. If you can’t get up by yourself, you’ll be carried out.” He nodded to his soldiers who had been until now standing quietly at a distance, and they marched over to do just that.

 

Koriel found her footing without the aid of the Nexus warriors, and shuffled out in silence. She was barely conscious of her feet dragging one in front of another as she struggled to accept the harsh revelation.

 

Her whole life had been built on a lie. 

 

Her faith had been misplaced. Twice.

 

The Machine God was a deluded fantasy, an invention of their forebearers. The Omnissiah was a charlatan who took advantage of the Cult Mechanicum’s superstition.

 

Something clicked - or snapped - in Koriel’s mind as she returned to the surface.

 

“There is no Omnissiah,” she voiced aloud, mildly surprised at how hollow her voice sounded. “There is no Machine God.” She paused for a moment, letting her thoughts fall into place. “But…but there is a god…?” she half-stated, half-asked, glancing at Sev and his soldiers.

 

“On various metaphysical levels, there are gods, yes,” he replied, and for some reason the faces of the visored men and women broke into smirks.

 

For some reason Koriel was raising a finger at Sev. “You are a god,” she accused.

 

“Again, on various metaphysical leve-”

 

“Please,” Koriel interrupted, falling to her knees, and then prostrated herself before him. “You have enlightened me- enlightened us to this…this Great Lie of Mars. You have made us see that we are nothing but lost souls. Please, great one. You have granted us the harsh mercy of truth. Please show further mercy, and guide this misguided fool. Please allow me to join your Nexus of Knowledge.”

 

The rustling and thudding around her told Koriel that the other tech-, no, the other enlightened Martians went to the ground like her, supplicating themselves before the divine ruler of the Nexus Unity.

 

“Oh for fuck’s…”

 

So sprouted the seed of what would later become known among the Cult Mechanicus as the Great Apostasy.

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