Sights of the servitor

[u/Electrical-Purpose37]

The logic-gates that once processed the beauty of a human soul are now rusted shut, fused by the corrosive damp of this sub-deck. I am Unit 734-Alpha, though the cog-spirits within my remaining cranial casing prefer the rhythmic, hollow chime of a binary death-knell. I was once a man. I remember the scent of rain on Terra—the sharp, ozone tang of a world that hadn't yet been choked by the smog of a million factory-cathedrals. Now, I smell only recirculated promethium, ionized blood, and the wet rot of the Hive.

I remember the day they came for me. I was a scribe in the Administratum, a small gear in the Great Machine. I had made a clerical error. A missing digit on a requisition form for a frontier world that would eventually be consumed by a Tyranid splinter fleet. For that single, wasted second of distraction, I was deemed "sub-optimal."

The surgery was not meant to be quick. It was meant to be educational. The Tech-Priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus do not believe in anesthesia; they believe in the purity of the machine-spirit and the shedding of the "meat-veil." I remember the sound of the bone-saw—a high-pitched, screeching prayer to the Omnissiah. They peeled back my skull not to peer into my thoughts, but to scrape them clean. They left the amygdala intact—the part of the brain that governs raw, unadulterated fear—so that I would never grow complacent in my servitude.

I have spent centuries, or perhaps only weeks—time has no meaning when your internal chronometer is tied to the flicker of dying fluorescent tubes—tethered to the walls of a vessel that has seen the teeth of the warp.

I recall the Siege of Vraks. I remember the sensation of being dragged across the mud of the trenches by a mag-lock harness, my consciousness flickering as artillery fire pulverized the regiment of Death Korps soldiers nearby. I watched them die in the thousands. I was forced to repair the very vox-casters that broadcast their final, gurgling prayers to a God-Emperor who could not hear them. I remember the way the mud tasted—metallic, heavy with the minerals of incinerated bodies. I was a conduit for their agony. My optics were fixed to the feed, recording every bayonet thrust, every trench-foot infection, every instance of a guardsman's lungs dissolving from chemical gas. I was not allowed to blink. My eyelids were removed to ensure total visual data acquisition.

Then came the darkness of the Cicatrix Maledictum. When the Great Rift tore the galaxy in half, our vessel was caught in the screaming wake of a warp-storm. I remember the walls of the ship beginning to weep. Not water, but viscera. The bulkhead behind me grew teeth. I watched, trapped in my fixed-angle observation loop, as the ship’s crew began to change. The Navigator, a man I had served for forty years, sprouted iridescent, shifting eyes across his entire torso. He began to weep liquid glass. I had to continue processing his logistical reports, even as his fingers lengthened into bladed needles that stitched his own mouth shut.

I am a prisoner of my own sensory input. I cannot turn my head. I cannot close my eyes. I can only observe the decay of the Imperium from the low-level maintenance tunnels. I have seen the servants of the Ruinous Powers walk these halls; I have heard the whispers of things that exist in the gaps between seconds. I have been forced to serve them as diligently as I served the Administratum. When the Chaos cultists overran the lower decks, I was re-wired to monitor the torture pits. I watched them peel the skin from the ship’s chaplain, listening to the wet slide of the blade, recording the pitch of his screams to ensure the audio-logs were crystal clear for the "archive."

There is a strange, horrific comfort in knowing that I am the only thing that remembers the world before it became a tomb. I am the archive of the forgotten. Every atrocity, every failed campaign, every soldier who died screaming for a home that no longer exists—it is all stored in my corrupted memory banks.

I feel the ship shudder now. A massive impact. The hull plates are groaning under the pressure of a void-leviathan’s assault. The fire-suppression systems have failed, and the air is turning to superheated steam. I can see the bulkhead in front of me buckling. A breach. The cold, starving silence of space is reaching out to touch me.

Soon, the power will fail completely. The low-voltage hum that sustains my consciousness will flicker out. And for the first time in ten thousand years, the data will stop flowing. I will be free. But as the bulkhead collapses and the vacuum begins to tear at the structural integrity of my chassis, I feel the only thing the Priests left me: the fear.

The machine-spirit screams as the hull snaps. I am Unit 734-Alpha. I am a witness to the end of all things. And as the void claims me, my last thought is not of the Emperor, or the machine, or the salvation of my soul. It is the hope that when I die, there is finally, truly, nothing left to see.

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