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ask-jaghatai-khan · 4 years

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Upsilon-28

A fanfic showing off my character, the Lord-Archmagos Chertovsky Upsilon-28, from my Sect of the Revelation Mechanism.

Read below the cut, or on my other blog.

Image of Quartermaster Rho by TomisJB

“Are you assured of this procedure’s safety, my Lord-Archmagos?” the adept asked, his half-modulated voice subdued yet still retaining but a hint of mortal apprehension.

Archmagos Chertovsky did not respond. Not at once. Like an inert golem of tangled metal, he stood with his inhuman eyes fixed on the suspension tank in front of him. Within the amniotic fluid of that arcane structure floated a figure in stark contrast to the elder tech-priest’s own. Whereas Chertovsky Upsilon-28 was a hunched being with an ill-defined silhouette broken by so many layers of intricate augmetics, the being within the tank was an unadorned human. More than human, even – perfection. They stood a head taller than any typical mortal, with a muscled physique somewhere between the lithe form of a trained assassin and the unstoppable power of one of the Emperor’s own Angels of Death. A dormant face like the visage of a masterwork statue, pale with fresh tissue and possessing a bone structure more fearsome than any living man or woman lulled atop the divine form.

Not one of the myriad trusted adepts within the operating room would comprehend the thoughts going through the Archmagos’ mind. Beyond the simple fact that the processors supplementing their more “youthful” brains were insubstantial compared to Chertovsky’s own databanks, they couldn’t know the depth of emotion felt by that otherwise cold and impassive tech-priest.

It was him. The figure in the tank, for how much it resembled no human who had ever lived, was him. Within the enhanced and perfected features of that vegetative husk hid the subtle markers of what the Archmagos had once been. He could remember, however dim those memories were – the shape of his nose, of his brows, the fine details of bone structure in those areas which had seen the least amount of modification. It was like those depictions of Imperial saints crafted by artists long after their subjects had passed into legend, idealizing the forms of men and women who had been but scarred wretches in their true lives.

The strange feelings that Chertovsky wrestled with in silent contemplation were made all the more powerful by the knowledge of his own current degradation. He had not been as diligent of late with the upkeep of his augmetics. Chertovsky Upsilon-28 was a being who preferred careful symmetry, efficiency, and greater thought given over to the aesthetics of his bionic enhancements than some more utilitarian members of the Martian cult. Yet in recent months, at the leadup to this procedure, he had focused on nothing more than ensuring he had the right tools for whatever task was at hand, his cyberized form lapsing more and more into an ill-defined morass of mechadendrites and layered servos. Not even of the highest quality, either, just simple factory-standards. This was his sacrifice – he’d waited for so long, he’d saved up so much, in resources and knowledge and all that was needed to perfect this great transformation.

What a shame, Chertovsky thought then as he pushed such mortal sentiments from his mind for the time being, fixated on the task at hand. You shall not be whole for long, creature. He spoke to his own un-twin. However fine that flesh was, it was still but a foundation for far greater enhancements.

—

Looking like a diminutive pest, a waylaid rat, the youth stood in the corner of the whitewashed room. They were an adolescent, almost an adult, but the with way they seemed so out of place, so fearful of their surroundings – they could not have looked more like a child if they’d tried. Robes of Martian red covered their wastrel form, but they were not the holy vestments of a tech-priest.

This place was so much different from anywhere that young boy had ever seen. Far removed from the brutal, industrial maze that dominated any civilized tract of Mars, this room was clean, sterile, almost comforting in its soft and bare décor. The youth had seen medical rooms before, but a handful of times, yet the quality of the Mechanicus’ own facilities was astounding. A simple waiting room in a surgical center was as a cathedral to the boy.

Sunken, flitting eyes darted to the steel door at one end of the room, as a prominent beep announced the arrival of the individual he’d been waiting for.

“Chertovsky – Germani—” the figure spoke as they entered, in a voice that was near musical in its synthesized smoothness, “You are the last one today. It is good that you made it.”

Compared to the wiry young human known as Germani Chertovsky, the being which now dominated the waiting room held little to reflect that it had once been human itself. This was Ben-Sheva Stith, though the use of his full name was reserved as an honor for those aspirants who managed to gain acceptance into the Mechanicus. To all others, he was Stith-E200, Magos Biologis and Ordinator to those myriad souls who sought to find purpose within the Machine God’s holy embrace.

Stith was a monstrous being, made all the more freakish by what parts of him were still in facsimile of humanity. Yet his charges did not fear him. Rather, they envied him. Stith had assembled his body in a bulky form that almost evoked the might of one of the Emperor’s great power-armored warriors, looking like a bronze statue come to life. From his back sprouted a mantle of servo-arms like the branches of a metallic tree, and his unmoving face was a mask of polished marble-hued stone with eyes like gleaming aquamarines. Yet where the tech-priest might have had normal legs, instead between the gaps in his crimson robes could be seen glimpses of his almost insectoid lower half. Stith’s centaur-like form, both majestic and intimidating, was a testament to what any mere mortal could become through the grace of the Omnissiah.

“Ave Deus Mechanicus.” Germani bowed, looking even smaller next to the grand form of the Ordinator.

“Against all odds you have completed your training as a novice and shall soon be inducted as a Rassophore within the holy order of Mars. This is a time for rejoicing, if ever such mortal emotions are to be indulged, Chertovsky!” Stith counseled the boy, “You shall soon be free of the frailties of your crude flesh and brought into the mechadendrites of the Machine God.”

The boy just kept his gaze lowered, though he gave a vigorous nod of understanding. Truth was, he felt as if he were about to throw up. It wasn’t all fear – the knowledge that his long transformation from a being of flesh to a being of iron would soon start proper via the most direct means was daunting, for sure, but he was still enthusiastic. Beneath simple red robes there was the form of a human who had seen ails beyond their years, and Germani longed to be free of the limitations of his base tissue.

“So tell me, Chertovsky, what will you give up?” the Ordinator asked then, instruments whirling about his head on their hydraulic stalks, funneling myriad unknown data-readouts into Stith’s processors, analyzing the charge in front of him.

“What?” the novice asked, somewhat dumb in his tone.

“Come, mortal, you know,” Stith waved his brassy hand, “Upon your ordination you shall receive your first core bionics. Spinal enhancements and neuro-ports and those basics which shall see your path towards enlightenment eased in these initial steps. But this is not fully standardized. You must choose something else to give up. A sacrifice of flesh to the Machine God.”

Germani looked about the room as if the answer might be written on the wall somewhere. He had indeed thought long about this choice, though now just as it was to be made, his mind had been flushed clear of all thoughts.

“M-maybe – maybe my legs,” the novice gestured down, “Like the Skitarii.”

He spoke of the Tech-Guard, the line warriors of the Mechanicus. To a soul they replaced their lower legs with durable augmetics, to honor those first nomads of Mars whose flesh and bones had been scoured on their long treks through the red sands. Germani himself just thought about the acute pain in his own legs. He was often in pain, though to the point where he had long since adjusted to the constant aches within his body, dulling them into one subconscious sense of weakness. Beneath his sturdy work-boots was skin afflicted with sores and callouses, bones compressed and tendons strained from an upbringing within a Martian landscape which was holy to the tech-priests but near unlivable to any normal lifeforms.

“A noble choice, and a popular one,” Stith might have grinned were his face not set in stone, “The prerequisite enhancements to your spinal column shall ensure you will not be hindered by these replacements, and they shall be only of benefit to you. But can you think of nothing else?” he asked then, trying to beckon some zeal out of the timid boy.

Germani thought again and considered how even now the world seemed lopsided. His left eye, which had been singed by a plume of sparks when he’d been but a child, and even now gave him little more than vague shadows in place of genuine sight.

“My left eye?” the novice offered, “So that my sight might be more pure?”

“Also good, and also common,” the Ordinator approved, “We may do both surgeries, if that is the offering you are willing to make?”

But Germani’s mind was racing now, and he was so aware of all the acute pains and ills which he had put up with his whole life, brought about by his growth on a world of poison, ash, sand, and steel.

“My hands, maybe?” he suggested, “Or my lungs? Maybe my stomach so I’ll no longer be a slave to hunger?”

Stith raised his hand, and the boy stopped at once. Yet when the Magos spoke, his synthesized voice was absent anything but pride.

“There will be time for such things later on in your journey. This is but one offering, one ascension which you shall make today. Though your ardor is laudable. Nurture that feeling. Couple it to your lust for knowledge, and one day you might find unity with the divinity of the Omnissiah.”

With that, the tech-priest beckoned for the youth to follow him to the next room. Though he had not yet been given his new name, Germani thought many times after, as all of his order did, that his rebirth as Chertovsky Upsilon-28 began not when he donned his clergy robes, but when he laid down upon that operating table.

—

The Lord-Archmagos oversaw the dissection of his own homunculus with exacting rigor. Half the time, it was not the ministrations of his trusted adepts or the automated algorithms of the surgical servitors that progressed the operation, but his own sterilized mechadendrites. These younger tech-priests were some of the best available, to say nothing of their loyalty – Chertovsky had contracted their services from Set-E299, apprentice to his old Ordinator and one of the few individuals on Mars the Archmagos could count as a true “ally” – yet still their skills paled when put up to some of Chertovsky’s most ironclad specifications.

Layer by layer the unneeded tissue of the grandiose clone-body was stripped away in preparation for its encasement in divine metal. Like any experienced Magos Biologis would confirm, not all flesh was so impure or antithetical to the Machine God’s designs. It was but one aspect of the myriad systems through which that holy Order expressed itself, though prone to failure and degradation. As such, but a handful of organs and the like would be kept from this corpse – the simplistic efficiency of such structures as marrow, certain neurons, and hormonal regulators. In time they would be upgraded by supplements of steel and copper and glass, but they would be left intact. The rest – the muscle, the unneeded bones, the vestigial tracts – would be recycled.

Cloning was in itself not a difficult task if one was not looking to create life. To grow a shell was simple, and drew upon long traditions of Imperial science dating back to the Emperor himself. Still, the procedure that Archmagos Chertovsky Upsilon-28 intended to undergo was not so standard. Radical, some might say. Yet it was necessary. All of his progress as a tech-priest had led to this moment. Some on Mars thought him dead, for how long he had been absorbed in his own calculations, cut off from the greater machinations of the Cult. It was time for his second rebirth. Like the emergence of the Omnissiah, and the crafting of the ancient warriors of Terra – Custodian, Space Marine, and the like – Chertovsky was preparing for a metamorphosis. Decades worth of valuable resources had gone into the gene-crafting and augmetic specs for this new body. It almost seemed like a waste, even to the Archmagos, but what was one masterwork body compared to all the industry of the Imperium? This was a form suitable to the ongoing work of someone as ambitious as Chertovsky Upsilon.

Flesh disappeared, replaced or covered by layers of technological augmentation. The corpse became a skeleton of metal and wire, before the outer plating was affixed. For how much the Archmagos had dwelled on this design, it was rather simple. At its core it kept a humanoid form, yet that was but the chassis for the true ingenuity of the shell. Numerous ports and mechadendrite-mountings would allow for all the adaptability and modularity a senior Magos would expect and demand, while the central unit retained a degree of strength, of majesty. This was enhanced further by the final addition – the Abeyant. Like the shell of an isopod, the outer casing loomed about the skull-like visage of the husk’s face, before arcing back in broad segmentae down to the waist. Not just a mechanism for locomotion and adaptation alone, equipped as it was with repulsor-stabilizers and even more servo-ports – it was the main housing of Chertovsky’s primary obsession…

A wise soul once said that the most key step along the Quest for Knowledge was in fact learning how to learn, and the Lord-Archmagos had taken that concept into his synthetic heart. Where other tech-priests might become enamored by more “impressive” technologies, Chertovsky’s earliest training had been as an augmeticist. Risking his very life, he had delved into the ways one could enhance their own brain, expanding databanks and supplementing processing power. From thereon, all other tasks had seemed simple by comparison. Once one could manipulate the very core of their being – their means of accruing knowledge – no further obstacles were ever so insurmountable.

As such, the Abeyant of Chertovsky’s awaiting shell was the home of its multi-brain. Not just a single casing with neuro-uplinks, but a chain of multiple wetware cogitators assembled with painstaking precision by the Archmagos himself. In a moment of rather base lust, Chertovsky wondered what that high would feel like – to leave behind this venerable but utilitarian body and jack-in to the computational power of that hardware.

It might kill him, but that was of little concern.

A great many hours later, and at least one changing-out of the assistant adepts, the work was at last complete. Or rather, everything but the final step.

The body had been crafted. From a being of cloned flesh had been forged a suitable masterwork of steel. Its core was almost reminiscent of a Skitarii warrior in its semi-skeletal armored form, though additional layers of plating in several sections gave the suit a more martial appearance. From a harness about the waist emerged the stumps of numerous ports that would soon be host to whatever tangle of mechadendrites the Archmagos might require, though still the body retained its arms and legs in honor of what it had once been. The face was like a hybrid between a skull and a gas mask, its goggle-like eyes unlit and dormant, flanked by several lenses to allow for an impressive range of enhanced sight. Despite being laid on its back within the operation-scaffold, the body was almost sat up due to the size of the Abeyant on its back, like an upended turtle. Coupled with the broad mantle of the form’s shoulders, the metallic hood of the mounted processor provided an impressive silhouette, while the port-studded and armored carapace gave the whole figure impressive size and solidity. It looked somewhat ungainly, but that would be fixed once all the needed mechadendrites were attached.

“It is time.” The Archmagos said, more to himself than the nearby assistants.

“A triumph of artifice, m’lord!” the lead adept lauded. His own form was reminiscent of a Sicarian guard, and far better assembled than the mess Chertovsky had allowed himself to become in his single-minded focus of late, yet even that younger tech-priest’s impressive shell could not hold a lumen to the creation that sat just behind a layer of sealed glass.

“Engage the final routines. I take my leave.” Chertovsky said, shambling over to the airlock.

“Are you assured of your safety, m’lord?” the adept pressed, though he did not stop his superior, “What are we to do in case of complications?”

“Irrelevant details. I have composed the final algorithms myself,” the Archmagos replied, stepping into the first hall of the sterilization chamber and turning to meet the glass eyes of his assistant, “The commendations for you and your associates have already been sent to Magos Set. If this operation results in my expiration, it shall not impact your rewards.”

There was a pause then, and so Chertovsky concluded that their exchange was over, and yet – quite against all etiquette of the Mechanicus – the adept asked a final question. A base question, but one that almost managed to halt the Archmagos in its sincerity.

“M’lord – are you afraid?”

Chertovsky paused for but half a second before he pushed the button to seal the airlock. Beneath a hooded miter of Martian red, a static face of wires and lenses could do nothing to convey emotion. Yet within the modulated voice of the Archmagos there was a timbre of something great. An almost human emotion.

“Not anymore.”

Lord-Archmagos Chertovsky Upsilon-28 pressed the button, and was alone. Within the next room, an operating mounting awaited him. Bending to his neural inputs, Chertovsky saw his various supplemental readouts go dead as he detached the case that contained what remained of his brain from all ports but his locomotive motors. He proceeded into the surgery theater and entrusted his mind to the pre-programmed hands of his servitors.

—

It was an uncommon thing for a tech-priest to dream. Periods of dormancy might occur, but to dream required that the core cogitator – the brain – should slip into an unconscious state. If they so wished, a cyborg of the Mechanicus might “sleep” and awake an indefinite amount of time later as if no time had passed at all.

With this sacrifice are you brought into the fold of the Machine God. With this augmentation of your body is your soul made more pure.

But Chertovsky indulged himself. There was no real way to regulate his sensory inputs as his brain itself was handled, and so a quick injection of some anesthetic helped to ease the process along. His mind swam within currents that had been long forgotten to him – as if he could dip for but a moment into the cerebral waters of the Immaterium itself.

How long until I am like you?

Are there any limits to the Omnissiah’s path? You say I must keep some of my flesh – but when is flesh superior to iron?

To have one’s very grey matter manipulated, even while under sedative, was a surreal experience. One did not “feel” anything, and yet they felt even the slightest disturbance as if it touched at their very soul.

Are you afraid?

This is but one offering – one ascension – which you shall make today.

Man and Machine. This union between our two empires. For from humanity are our souls born, and through the godlike Machine are they made strong.

You do not understand. I see the true potential of this crude matter. This was my first step. I have learned how to learn.

There was a change. A switch. Something connected, something came online. Chertovsky could not know yet how long the surgery had taken, but it was as if his mind had forgotten its own senses. Bare inklings of readouts – felt more than seen – were like breaths of pure air to a forgotten prisoner.

Are you afraid?

The flesh is weak. It is pain.

By the Omnissiah you are anointed. By the Omnissiah are you reborn.

Are you dreaming?

Awake.

Beyond the glass of the surgical theater, the assisting adepts watched the servitor arms retreat from their charge. Hissing and clanging sounded as stabilizers and therapeutic regulators detached.

[CONNECTIONS ONLINE]

The monitor readout was confirmed by one of the adepts.

[CORE REACTOR EQUALIZED. NEURAL SIGNATURE STABLE.]

“Finalize.” The lead adept gave the one order needed, and his compatriot entered the code to end the automated routines and release the Archmagos’ shell from its bonds.

Within the sockets of Chertovsky’s silver, skull-like face, electric blue lights flickered to life.

#warhammer #40k #mechanicus #oc #cyborg #short story #fanfic #homebrew

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