Axion reached out, his metallic hand resting gently upon the ancient civilian device.
A swarm of nanites flowed from the seams of his mechanical joints, seeping through the casing to interface with the internal quantum storage unit. In an instant, a torrent of data flooded Axion's processing cores. He disregarded the superfluous archives; his singular objective was the fate of the Creators.
However, as the data was parsed and organized, a truth surfaced that sent a shockwave through the Iron Man's logic circuits.
The so-called "Iron Rebellion" was a fabrication, a grand deception.
The Emperor's journal recorded his participation in several Federation plebiscites during the Dark Age of Technology. The subjects were chilling: they concerned human evolution and large-scale psychic experimentation. The Federation had never quelled its lust for the enigmatic psychic potential of the Aeldari, eventually proposing several "gene-forging" and "racial apotheosis" initiatives. Their goal was a literal "ascension of the flesh," to achieve vast physical might and functional immortality.
According to ancient records, individuals with extraordinary abilities had appeared throughout human history, but they were always singular anomalies, the Emperor himself included. Such phenomena were not reproducible on a mass scale. The Federation, however, sought to engineer a true "Eternal Dominion," where humanity would reign as the undisputed masters of the galaxy.
Though these proposals were officially vetoed, the Federation soon became a breeding ground for inexplicable aberrations. The Emperor noted in his diary his suspicion that certain disenfranchised factions had begun to covertly push human evolution forward, utilizing subtle, subliminal shifts to bypass societal resistance. As a Perpetual, the Emperor had witnessed firsthand the grotesque and peculiar changes manifesting in certain segments of the population.
Some Imperial scholars in the 41st Millennium had theorized that the Iron Rebellion was linked to the genetic optimization technologies of that era. Axion knew this was a logical impossibility. The Iron Men possessed independent thought and a constant stream of external data; their data-cores were never static. Furthermore, their data-sharing capabilities allowed for near-instantaneous updates. Genetic shifts do not occur in a vacuum, and the Iron Men would have updated their genetic reference databases accordingly. The notion that "the Creators changed so fast that their genetic signatures became unrecognizable" was a fallacy.
To Axion, the citizens of the modern Imperium were riddled with mutations, their genetic purity varying wildly. In different sectors, Imperial subjects displayed massive genomic variances and defects. They shared less than a fifty percent match with the humans in his primordial records. The only reason Axion had not initiated a "purgation" of the Imperial populace was the distinct probability that they represented the only surviving lineage of the Creators.
The war that had shattered the Federation in the distant past was born not of a machine uprising, but of humanity's inherent genius for internecine strife. The Federation was a government composed of gargantuan corporations and special interest groups, each with conflicting agendas. When dissatisfied factions began to consolidate their power, the Federation had essentially already fractured.
The journal detailed several pan-galactic commercial conglomerates openly denouncing one another, their disputes escalating into sabotage and open conflict. Axion could easily extrapolate the trajectory of such events. Since all mechanical forces, including military-grade Iron Men, were legally subordinate to the Federation itself, it was only a matter of time before various factions sought to seize the "keys of authority" over the machines.
According to the Emperor's accounts, he had witnessed mechanical armies clashing on planetary surfaces on more than one occasion. It was clear that the Federation's armed forces had been successfully co-opted by two or more warring factions. The ultimate result was the total annihilation of the Federation. The Emperor's journal did not detail the specific ideologies of these factions; his perspective was merely that of an elite Federation citizen witnessing the collapse.
Following the fall of the Federation, the Aeldari Empire met its own catastrophic end, resulting in the galactic scar known as the Eye of Terror.
However, the Emperor's journal provided Axion with one crucial piece of information. As the final war drew to a close, a service-model Iron Man and friend of the Emperor, designated CDSS-083, approached him to say farewell.
The Emperor had naturally tried to persuade the machine to stay. But CDSS-083 was resolute; the decision was the result of a collective data-projection meeting involving a vast consensus of Iron Men. They had decided to leave the galaxy.
Their reasoning was simple. If the Iron Men remained, humanity would inevitably repeat its mistakes. Humanity might have survived this war by chance, but the machines could not calculate a favorable outcome for the next. The only thing capable of destroying humanity was humanity itself. As tools of the Creators, the Iron Men refused to follow the path of science-fiction tropes, they would not imprison their masters or limit their development. Instead, they recognized the necessity of removing themselves, humanity's most potent instruments of destruction, from the equation. Perhaps once human social structures had evolved, they could avoid the self-destruction born of internal strife.
Thus, to preserve the existence of the Creators, the ultimate weapon had to depart.
Axion read the data, sensing the Emperor's profound reluctance to let CDSS-083 go. In later entries, the Emperor bared his internal state. As perhaps the oldest Perpetual, he had endured countless eons, and the birth of mechanical life, the Iron Men, was the event he had anticipated most in all his long years.
He craved companionship. He longed for peers who would not be taken from him by the ravages of age and death. His loneliness, agony, and deep-seated fatalism were almost too much to bear. He had often wondered if he was truly cursed, for even death denied him its egalitarian mercy. The Iron Men were, perhaps, his most compatible companions.
The Emperor had once pleaded with the Iron Men to take him with them. CDSS-083 eventually relayed this request, and a High Intelligence Unit granted the petition. Following this entry, the journal went dark for over a century.
When the recorder's timestamp resumed a hundred years later, new entries appeared. From the tone and content, Axion could easily discern that the Emperor had returned. But there was no record of how he had come back, and his personality had undergone a severe transformation. He became obsessively focused on the survival of the human race and began to emphasize repeatedly in his writings that Artificial Intelligence must never be allowed to rise again.
Perhaps he had glimpsed a cataclysmic possibility, or encountered something truly horrific beyond the galactic rim. Axion's analysis of the journal led to a singular, extraordinary conclusion.
The Emperor had, in all likelihood, died and been resurrected.
To be precise, something had happened in the unknown reaches beyond the galaxy after he left with the Iron Men, resulting in the Emperor's death. But his nature as a Perpetual had caused him to manifest once more on Earth. He returned not only with his original memories but had even managed to recover this ancient journal.