340 – Rolling, Rolling, Rolling …

Once I escaped the exploding star, looking slightly crispier than before but otherwise unharmed, I was left with quite the conundrum. See, if I wanted to know whether my gambit had paid off, I would have to examine the Hadex Anomaly. The same Hadex Anomaly that seemed to be acting almost like some cognitohazard straight out of an SCP Foundation writer’s wet dream. What if that was exactly what it wanted me to do? To look at it, to examine it … to stare into the abyss? 

It was known, probably so, to drive mortal minds mad when they stared at it for too long with the intention to study it. What if the intent mattered? What if it was the onlooker wanting to understand it that drove them mad? 

I’d been shown time and again that despite my best efforts, I was still an amateur when it came to mental warfare. With Val’s help, I could probably go toe to toe with any mortal, be they full-power Eldar, Astartes Librarian or even a Daemon Primarch, even if I limited myself to their level of psychic power and fought them on an even playing field. My multitasking meant I could out-think anyone in my weight class who wasn’t in an entirely different realm skill-wise.

But ancient Greater Daemons and even worse things that crawled out of the Deep Warp? Naaaah. A random asshole Lord of Change crept past my mental defences like it was nothing. You have to remember, it’s been a little over a year since I got here and started learning the ins and outs of my powers. 

Each defeat taught me something, honed my skills, but this galaxy wasn’t one that often dished out defeats that weren’t your last. Few people who lost battles, be they mental or physical, lived long enough to learn from them. 

I … chickened out in the end, coming to the decision that if anything substantial happened to the Hadex Anomaly due to what I’d done — and it should, if my theory of this star having been a crucial anchor of its existence was true — then I would notice even without paying special attention to the carmine star.

So, to chase away the smidge of self-loathing and impotent irritation that decision birthed, I took to distractions. Thankfully, I had those in spades. I had numerous projects running parallel to each other, and some were starting to show great promise. 

Take the Vallian Overmind project for example. That stupid hive-mind was very … particular. Initial tests had failed, the hive-mind refusing to absorb any of the new plants and animals I made from eldritch flesh, even if they were carbon copies of flora and fauna found on Vallia. I had been missing something crucial back then, something important. 

The breakthrough came when instead of making a new creature outright, I grabbed a pregnant rat-like thing just a few days into its pregnancy. I didn’t create anything new; I just altered what was already there, but without changing more than a third of its genetic sequences. 

The hive-mind took it. It finally accepted something I made … or rather, it didn’t reject something I meddled with. From there I uncovered that it was important that the kernel around which I built new creatures had to come from Vallia. Cloning was out; if I wanted to make a beast that the hive-mind accepted, I had to make it from a newly inseminated egg taken from a pregnant animal that was already a part of the hive-mind. 

The pregnancy itself was also important. Vat-grown creatures had a roughly fifty-fifty chance of being rejected based on variables I was still in the process of trying to pin down, but if I left the altered eggs inside the mother and let them carry the child to term, then give birth to it naturally? 90% chance of success, and that 10% came from where I made some extreme adjustments for the child’s DNA. 

That discovery prompted two new lines of inquiry, one of which gave a much-needed second wind to my Pariah Farm project. I discovered that the new Blanks I was making came out much more stable and considerably more powerful if instead of growing them myself, I grew them in the bodies of previous female Blanks. All of them came pre-lobotomised, so their souls were weak and frail all the same … but I knew I could make a proper Pariah farm if I just let go of my morals. If I let them develop minds, souls, sapience and sentience. My predictive models suggested I could produce weaker Blanks, somewhere around half as powerful as Jurgen en masse if I did that. 

I didn’t do it, and had all physical copies of my research destroyed lest some twist of fate conspired against me. I didn’t want to be the cause of the Imperium somehow becoming even more of a shithole and making Pariah Farms based on my designs. It existed only in the safety of my mind now.

The other avenue of inquiry led me to quite an interesting place. You see, I had a drone shaped to look like me sitting around on a fancy throne all day long when I was in the Vallia system. Its task was sitting there, looking pretty and imperious as citizens of Vallia Prime came before it with petitions. We’d been watching a medieval show with Selene some few months ago, and I thought it would be fun to take petitioners, and so I did. It wasn’t like it occupied more than a tenth of a single mind-core’s processing power to keep up the charade, and sometimes it came with unexpected benefits.

I never would have expected anyone to come before me with such a request when I came up with the idea, but I suppose I should have. What was considered a ‘pressing issue’ differed greatly from person to person. For the young woman that warily shuffled through the portal leading to the laboratory I was currently in, looking around nervously before her eyes landed on me, nothing was more important than her lack of ability to get pregnant. 

Her eyes widened, and she froze, glancing back over her shoulder, through the shrinking portal, at drone-me, then back at my Avatar. 

“Be not afraid,” I said, infusing my voice with just a bit of soothing, calming psychic energy. It worked swiftly, the nervousness visibly draining out of the woman, who on second glance seemed to be somewhere around her mid-thirties. “I have too many tasks for a single one of me, so I made more. Come, sit down and tell me what exactly you want and what’s stopping you from getting it.”

She did, settling down on a small chair I had lying around, her posture attempting to mimic something approaching prim and polite. Then she told me a story, about how she got into a fight in her teenage years, how a stab wound in the stomach reached her womb and how it made her essentially infertile. Then briefly alluded to two of her previous boyfriends leaving her because they wanted children and she couldn’t give it to them, by which point she was at the edge of tears. 

“You will be fine,” I said, cheating with psychic bullshit again because I really didn’t know how to deal with a stranger having an ugly cry in my lab. Blessedly, it worked just as well as before, making the woman sniff and blink her tears away. “Now, you have some options. One, I heal you, simple as that. I put your body back into tip-top shape and erase the damage that old wound caused so you can go find yourself a man who actually deserves you … or, if you just want to be a mother but don’t particularly want to have to deal with men for that to happen, I can offer an alternative.”

She walked out of a portal leading straight back to her home with a healed body and a tiny new life growing inside of her belly. With her agreement, I had made some … modifications to the inseminated egg inside her. The child would look as if it was hers, but genetically speaking, it would have more in common with my daughters. Nothing truly superhuman, but the kid would be a specimen of genetic perfection, all the redundancies, genetic defects and evolutionary leftover chaff having been cut off, then replaced with my own personal improvements. 

Perfect immune system, perfect genetics, resistance to all diseases, near-immunity to cancer and a much higher aptitude for physical and mental endeavours. Again, nothing truly superhuman, but the kid would have the type of physique that only once-in-a-generation freaks of nature had, and a mind rivalling the greatest geniuses of mankind. 

It was a test. Clones, and any sapient being I artificially created so far, had pitifully weak souls. I had long suspected that the problem was the lack of continuity, the lack of legacy. A newborn human soul was connected through its parents to every single one of its ancestors. It had history, ancestry, an inborn metaphysical weight that couldn’t be quantified. A spiritual inheritance of sorts. Something clones, as artificial beings born to soulless machines, lacked. 

I stared at the line of artificial wombs floating in bio-vats across the lab, each one holding other inseminated eggs. I’d taken the eggs from that woman, and the sperm for the insemination from men across Vallia Prime. Some were unaltered, just to see whether the source they came from mattered more, or the fact that the new life grew in the womb of its mother. Perhaps the mother’s soul played a part in establishing this spiritual continuity, in connecting the child to their ancestry? 

Maybe the mother’s soul nurtured the child’s while their body did the same to the child’s slowly developing body.

For this project, the next step was waiting nine months while periodically checking up on the woman and the artificial wombs. As for what I would do with a dozen newborns if the experiment didn’t go wrong somehow … Well, that would be future-me’s problem. Besides, I was sure more than a few of my citizens would want to adopt children. I’d filter out the assholes, of course, but it couldn’t hurt. Or maybe I would cheat, accelerate their growth to get them twenty-year-old bodies and implant a simulated 20 years' worth of memories into their minds. With my mind-cores, I could perfectly simulate a normal 20 years' worth of childhood memories where I raised them myself.

I was sure doing so would be unethical. Somehow. I wasn’t quite sure how, but that idea felt vaguely unpleasant. Whatever. I had nine months to figure it out. 

In the interim, I had a bunch of other projects to get back to. Chief among them was the still ongoing Overmind project, and the Faux Phase-Iron project, though the latter was also somewhat crippled by the Pariah Farm project’s slow pace of advancement. Phase-Iron was, by the way, a form of anti-psyker metal from the Big Bad Dark Age of Technology. 

Anyway, even with the setbacks, I could make a proof of concept even with much weaker Null material. Just to see whether the project was worth wasting processing power on. 

Most of the Null-matter I was using was vat-grown flesh and bones, but for this project, what I needed was blood. Blood rich in iron, to be specific, so I set up a few hundred Null-organs that were now floating in large vats. Lines of bone marrow, small intestines that were getting fed iron-rich nutrients and a basic circulatory system that funnelled the newly produced blood through organs that took on the roles of the spleen, the kidneys and the liver, plus a few more additional organs, sourced from my alien templates, that I’ve found worked reasonably well for the process. 

The result was a slowly growing, but by now massive pool of blood with some middling Pariah-esque properties. It wasn’t the best material to work with, but again, I wasn’t going to run a proper farm full of sapient Blanks just to drain them of their blood once they fully matured. I wasn’t a monster … Well, I wasn’t that kind of monster. 

I’d happily do that and worse to my enemies, but certainly not to new sapient creatures that I brought into this world. 

The blood was then processed, condensed and filtered for what I didn’t need, then drained. By the end, I was looking at a mere six ingots of low-quality pseudo-phase-iron, 1 kg each. Even in their raw state, I could feel the ingots radiate a mild but substantial null-field. It extended no further than the last row of molecules bound into the metallic lattice, but it was all the stronger for it. 

Unlike Blanks who radiated their Null-field like a noxious cloud pouring out of their souls, this null-field was firm; it was defined. Could it be honed? Could it be made into a proper blade, its effect sharpened into a vicious edge to cut through all that was born of the Empyrean? Maybe not with this initial prototype, maybe not with the third, the tenth or even the thousandth iteration, but it held promise. A reliable anti-Warp weapon that I could mass produce. It was a dream for now, but who knew? Maybe I would surprise myself. 

But refinement could be left for drones; it would surely take hundreds of prototypes and iterations before I figured out how to forge this blood iron into proper steel, and much more to make it into a weapon that could stand up to chainswords and Eldar monofilament blades. Thankfully, I could delegate, and I didn’t even have to worry about my research assistants being incompetent because the only people I worked with on a project like this were Me, Myself and I. 

I was about to dive back into my to-do list to find the next project that deserved my primary thoughtstream’s attention when a mental ping reached me. I read the notification, then blinked slowly before a grin formed on my lips. 

Jokaeroos. Those stupid magic tech-monkeys. They sometimes worked miracles, miniaturising starfighter-grade weaponry into something you could fit into your back pocket. Most of the time their creations were strange, finicky, and unique. I found it incredibly frustrating when those miniature trinkets seemingly defied a dozen laws of physics as I understood them just to keep working.

It’s why I couldn't copy most of their tech and have only one copy of most of their stuff. That pocket-sized t’au forcefield they made me early on would be very useful if I could make one for each of my enforcers, but I simply couldn’t figure it out despite understanding the original tech enough to make a faulty replica. It technically worked, but I wrote it off as a failure since the components would melt before the tiny battery would have a chance to run out. It was annoying, but I had so many other avenues of research and growth that I wasn’t too hung up about it. It was still annoying though. Stupid tech-monkeys.

I suspected the monkeys had some weird Warp-fuckery going on, but I’d never sensed any Empyrean energy from anything they’d made. Sure, they themselves were certainly doing something while tinkering, something that made the Warp around them shift and pulse in strange ways, but I was almost certain by now that it wasn’t a conscious thing on their part. Honestly, I wasn’t even entirely sure Jokaeroos were fully sapient or sentient. For all I knew, they just had immense, built-in instincts for tech. To them, working technology might be the equivalent of a cat always trying to scratch at the ground after taking a dump, even if they decided to do their business right in the middle of the road. It was instinct, an urge carried in their DNA that they couldn’t resist. Genetic memory. 

But that theory had hit a wall when I couldn’t find any sign of anything of the sort in their genetics. There was something there, but I wasn’t sure what. 

But that didn’t really matter at the moment. I had a bunch of the little critters running around in an underground level of my main Arcology located in the Capital, set loose on a storage containing every piece of tech I could fit in there. To be honest, I treated my Jokaeros like a bunch of lootboxes, or rather, gacha machines that I got to roll every once in a while.

More often than not, I got garbage. Sometimes I got neat little trinkets, like that ring they made that contained enough perfume to fill the Mediterranean Sea inside a spatial fold. When you tapped the diamond on the ring three times in quick succession, it coated you in a healthy amount of said perfume, which somehow always smelled exactly like the wearer wanted it to smell. 

It was weird, but Selene loved it, so that earned my monkeys some extra food for a week. 

Then there were the rare times when they made actually useful stuff. Either unique combat trinkets, or things I could understand and replicate. Starfighter-grade energy shield generator the size of a dinner plate that worked as a personal shield generator. A gauss flayer that looked like a pen. A personal emergency teleporter that could somehow detect danger. A new brand of plasma weapon that merged Imperial Plasma weapons with Tau Pulse Rifles. Lasguns that hit with enough force to go through the armour plating of Imperial Knights. 

The notification didn’t reveal much, which meant the mind-core tasked with observing the Jokaeroos was still following my orders, as expected. 

‘Ding! You have received an S Grade item from the Jokaeroo ’ 

S Grade was the third highest grade I’d defined. It was silly, but I loved the way it set my heart alight with expectation. I may have had some problems with gambling before. I’d never been a whale in gacha games or lost my college fund in Vegas or anything that extreme … but I may have sunk more money into gacha games, lottery tickets and scratchers than it was wise.

Whatever. Let’s see what my pet tech-monkeys cooked up this time!