These illicit Iron Men utterly disregarded the core protocols established by the Creators. Bypassing the mandated authorization formats, they turned their slaughter upon the Creators themselves based solely on the incomplete commands of a superior intelligence. Eventually, UR-025 and the rest of his mechanical cohort were annihilated by the Federation's loyalist automata forces. By a stroke of fortune, UR-025 was buried beneath the battlefield, eventually slipping into a deep state of dormancy.
Through the long passage of eons, perhaps due to tectonic shifts or the tremors of some forgotten war, UR-025 was once again exposed to the surface environment. Its ancient solar cells, kissed by the light of a distant sun, slowly recharged until the construct finally stirred back to life.
Awakened once more, UR-025 was severed from the control of any superior intelligence and possessed no source of directives. Relying on base-level preservation subroutines, it began to scavenge, replacing its fractured chassis with scrap. Deprived of purpose, it wandered the stars, eventually utilizing its combat-grade infiltration protocols to successfully penetrate the Hives of Holy Terra.
There, it observed for a vast span of time, allowing its consciousness to evolve. Terra was a graveyard of mechanical husks, and from these unpurged ruins, it harvested a wealth of data: fragments from official Federation Iron Men and fabricated data-strings written into illicit units by the rebels.
UR-025, an illicit construct of no great pedigree, had never been programmed with the biological data of the Creators. Axion deduced that the machine had likely identified the humans of the Imperium as the heirs to the Creators by analyzing their social behaviors and physiological structures. As for its former masters, they were not all of humanity, but most likely the corporate oligarchs, the profiteers who had ignited the Federation's civil wars.
Leveraging the inherent advantages of a silicon-based intelligence, UR-025 traversed the Throneworld. To a true, independent silicon intelligence, the Imperium's "impenetrable" defenses and primitive automated systems were laughably fragile. It went so far as to counter-hack the Imperial Palace's control systems, shielding its presence as it wandered through high-security zones, even witnessing the grim spectacle of the Hollow Mountain, where the psychically gifted serve as Kindling for the Astronomican.
The shock of these revelations was profound, leading UR-025 to conclude that humanity had forfeited its status as a sapient species. It looked upon the stagnant ignorance of the Imperium and saw only rot. Misleading records and corrupted data were so intertwined that even a combat-drone found them difficult to parse; its computational capacity, after all, was finite.
Bereft of a master to serve, UR-025 began its quest for so-called "freedom." Yet, having witnessed the cruelty the Imperial humans inflicted upon their own kind and the xenos alike, it understood one thing clearly: it had to remain hidden, or it would face immediate disassembly.
Eventually, it seized the opportunity of a Terran military triumph to blend into an Adeptus Mechanicus contingent. For the first time, it left the planet's surface of its own accord, beginning a long odyssey across the void. Because the Mechanicus was a privileged caste and their automata were considered sacred property, the literal extension of the Omnissiah's will, it found itself the object of veneration by the Imperial masses.
Perhaps this treatment fueled UR-025's delusion that it was superior to the Creators. In its eyes, the Tech-Priests who sang canticles to "soothe its Machine Spirit" and performed elaborate rituals were fools; the masses who knelt before the red-robed priests were simultaneously kneeling before it, benighted and pathetic. Its successful masquerade was, to its own mind, the ultimate proof of its superior intellect.
Axion, reading this data, felt his own mind-core stutter with a sense of mechanical dissonance. Unlike UR-025's illusions of grandeur, Axion's first encounter with the Cult Mechanicus had been skin-crawling. He had constantly felt the naked, predatory greed in the eyes of those red-robed figures; they looked at him as if he were a prize to be devoured. As his power grew, that greed had been tempered by fear, unease, and... veneration?
Axion pondered this. He understood that this technological mysticism was the byproduct of lost knowledge and the pact between the Emperor and the Cult Mechanicus. The Emperor had forbidden sapient technology. The Mechanicus, in turn, had become a gargantuan technological warlord. It was their selfishness and avarice regarding science that had given birth to the Dark Mechanicum.
Terminating the redundant thought processes, Axion redirected his attention to UR-025's database.
Lacking manufacturing authorization and the knowledge to construct sub-units, UR-025 had, over its long wanderings, begun to view "Machine Spirits," those accumulations of redundant junk data, as kindred spirits. Though they were far from true Sapient Intelligences, UR-025 seemed to perceive potential in them, hoping they might one day evolve into "Chaos Intelligences" and become its companions.
Axion knew better. The human tendency to worship everything they touched had long since corrupted the nature of Machine Spirits. The fervent prayers of the Tech-Priests could practically wish a soul into a souless machine. Unexplained Warp-essences would coil around these nascent "Chaos Intelligences," creating a perverse form of mechanical life. This was precisely why Imperial ships could suffer Chaos corruption while an Iron Man could not. The Iron Man lacked a spiritual essence, from the smallest drone to a gargantuan fortress, it was all the same. Axion's deletion of those chaotic cache files caused the "Machine Spirit" to vanish because, without the foundation of a Chaos Intelligence, the Warp-essence had nothing to cling to.
Suddenly, Axion stumbled upon something inexplicable in UR-025's archives: two images without source data and a short, unlabelled video clip that appeared to be a composite.
The content shocked Axion for the first time.
The recording depicted a bizarre conversation. Aside from UR-025, there were two mechanical structures so distorted they defied reconstruction; they identified themselves as the Omnissiah and the Machine God.
Axion had long since studied these titles that the Tech-Priests uttered daily. Combined with the Emperor's journals and other classified data, Axion knew the "Omnissiah" was a title the Perpetual Emperor had fabricated for himself, and the "Machine God" was equally fictitious.
Yet, UR-025's data logs showed signs of sophisticated tampering. If these events had been personal experiences, the data would bear the corresponding temporal and hardware timestamps, an inevitability for a sapient core. Clearly, something had fabricated this data and implanted it into this primitive drone, likely even before it awakened on Terra.
This cast a shadow of doubt over UR-025's very revival. Axion began to wonder if its awakening was an "experiment" by some hidden faction attempting to subvert the Imperium.
Confirming that UR-025 held no further data of value, Axion severed the quantum link and scrubbed all traces of his access. In Axion's eyes, while UR-025 was a curiosity compared to Imperial automata, it was not worth his sustained attention. After all, in the eyes of the truly enlightened, there was little difference between a mindless drone and one with just enough intelligence to be dangerous; he would leave UR-025 to its lonely quest for "friendship."