What If God But Too Much?

General Fanfic
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In the grim darkness of the 42nd millenium, there is only… what the fuck is that?

For your Warhammer 40K crossover thread demanders, here it is. Only this is not like the old thoughts of In The Grim Darkness Of The Contact Form, etc. Nope. This is the one that leans into the existence of the Warp, and asks the question: none of the warp gods started out as gods, only as seething masses of sophont emotion which ultimately coalesced into big bubbling blobs of crazy that could take shapes and grant powers based on the Immaterium. Even the God-Emperor of Mankind isn’t a god, and would be the first to tell you so, if he weren’t too dead. But what if one was?

New resource ANALYSED and OPERATIONAL. Estimated time to OMNIPOTENCE significantly reduced. Activate projects [LIGHTNING CROWN, SERAIPHIM GENESIS, ZEN ENGLOBEMENT, HERESY LEUKOCYTE, VALHALLA FORGE].

- Transcend internal log file

(Location-wise, however you get it there for the crossover which I don’t care about because it’s the most boring part of the plot, I suggest Ultima Segmentum is probably best, both for the later symmetry, and because positioning them as the rimward point of a triangle whose other points are Ultramar and the T’au Empire makes the situation less likely to turn instantly to scream, charge, be met by mass deployment of VALHALLA FORGE weapons.)

LIGHTNING CROWN / SERAIPHIM GENESIS

Yes, now there is a God!

- anonymous psyker

We know that minds create effects in the Warp. Stronger minds create stronger effects in the Warp. The Transcend, being a very big mind with a lot of smaller minds in chorus, spread across a star-brain and worlds and synapse moons, casts an absolutely huge glow in the Warp.

But it’s also a Vingean god-mind, and it does not take long for it to start experimenting on this curious dimension next door, and figuring out how to use it to perform hypercomputation, followed by as a resource for easy ontotechnological manipulation of physical laws. That latter, after all, is how warp rifts work.

tl;dr very shortly after arrival, in the early years of M42, the Transcend figures out how to use the Immaterium to bootstrap itself from weakly godlike to strongly godlike status. All its internal god-routines are now gods, and it itself is very much GOD, belike.

ZEN ENGLOBEMENT

And you may recall how I once described its definition of success as what happens when every quantum of mass-energy moves in accordance with Transcendent values. Well, it can do that, with its new status and ability to merge tech like the {Crimson Opalescent Arpeggio in F} Emergency Reality Enforcement Facility with the equivalent of blackstone, and the Eye of Serenity blooms in irregular-merged-ovoids shape around its worlds.

It’s a warp rift, like the Eye of Terror, but unlike that region, the Immaterium in its vicinity is calm and tranquil for the first time in an aeon. Rather than a raging sea, it’s just a calm almost subliminal glow of natural law being superverted by Transcendent law, policed by the myriad picodaemons of the Ontic Immunity. The God of Order, Progress, and Liberty does not like disharmony in its back yard.

The light! Oh, Emperor, the light! So beautiful… so bright…

  • a Navigator, losing his focus a few dozen lights outside Macragge

The shockwave from this divine rebirth and sudden burst of Warp engineering, of course, travels everywhere. All across the segmentum, Navigators struggle to regain lock on the Astronomican in the face of this new, bright beacon. Psykers bleed from their blinded eyeballs and chant machine-language gibberish, but what else is new? Even the nearly Warp-blind T’au feel a sudden prickle at the back of the neck. Far across the galaxy on Craftworld Ulthwé, Eldrad Ulthran calls his apprentices to him and demands fresh pants, and if the Emperor had a text-to-speech device, a flat “What?” would emerge from it.

The Chaos Gods confer among themselves, and after a mutual attempt to let someone else go first, the designated sucker dispatches a senior daemon to find out what the hell just happened. As soon as it crosses the phase boundary, it dissolves exactly like a disharmonious entity being devoured simultaneously by trillions of atom-sized scarabs.

“What,” they think, “the fuck was that?”

…go from here.

Subnotes:

HERESY LEUKOCYTE

Much like the Culture over in, well, The Culture Explores Warhammer 40K, the Empire is perfectly capable of making a warp-resistant neural lace, inasmuch as it can actively monitor for unapproved psychic intrusions and fix them on the fly. For their own, it’s mostly just a software update.

(Cognitive security: it’s a thing, and it’s always been a thing; they have similar threats back home, too. Secure against anything but the most brute-force attempts, and perfectly capable of triggering a bug-out transmitter and backup restore in the face of those, too.)

Basically, even outside the god-mind’s back yard, Transcendi can be considered effectively immune from Chaos corruption. Think anyone else might be interested in that tech?

VALHALLA FORGE

Yeah, it can see the Eye of Terror squatting over there on the other side of the galaxy like a giant pustule, and it’s not terribly impressed. This is a Problem. It’s a Problem that probably really wants to fight on its terms.

The Empire has not acquired a tradition of victory by fighting anyone on their own terms.

I mean, we could charge right in there and do hand-to-mutated-appendage combat with the full forces of the Traitor Legions, or we could just strap a bunch of diproton bombs to interstellar ballistic missiles and rename it the Eye of Suspiciously Convenient Post-Supernova Nebulae, know what I mean?

(As a side-note to the side-note: one reason I wanted some people at least somewhat capable of diplomacy with the xenos menace around - hello, Roboute! - is that it’s going to be real interesting when the first man!Imperial delegation brings a psyker inside the Eye of Serenity.

It’s… quiet. It’s never quiet.

)

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Would the Eye of Serenity be a Safe Space​:trade_mark: for any Aeldari who find themselves within it? Actually, how would it (or the Transposition of the Empire of the Star in general) affect existing worlds within the volume that it now encompasses?

That said, another potentially funny idea is to have them pop in where the Eye of Terror was, and have everyone go from there (Cadia will be having Fun Times​:trade_mark:).

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Safe from She Who Thirsts, anyway. Safe in any other sense depends on their ability to play well with others, which I imagine means that the Drukhari are Notably Unsafe.

For the sake of convenience, I have assumed The Event can find a place comfortably empty of any life worth speaking of in the default case, and exceptions to this are left up to the amusement of the individual fic-writer.

(As one thought which may be relevant, it’s entirely possible that the ability to enact significant warp sorcery in the region reformatted by the Transcend may come with an inconvenient “access denied; please resubmit your request according to the proper God-Machine Protocols” message.)

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Them definitely, probably a bunch of the Corsairs as well. Craftworlders may be more of a mixed bag. Exodites, if they even notice, probably shouldn’t have any issues. Harlequins… who the fuck knows, TBH.

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I suspect the first volley of diproton bombs on interstellar ballistic missiles will NOT go according to plan, purely because “let’s try using massive planet-cracking weapons on a daemon world” has been attempted multiple times by multiple polities, and proven ineffectual at best.

I still expect they’d try it, because why not? If it works, brilliant, and if it doesn’t work they’re still well out of the range of any splash damage. The Transcend, having included a great many soul-shards from Eye-In-The-Storm and Resplendent Vector, knows that the course of science and knowledge rarely runs smoothly and that sometimes your weapons test gives you interesting data instead of a desirable result.

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I sense a potential schism in The Cult Mechanicus

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One wonders what form such a message might take. Just a normal* telepathic message, or something more… noticeable?

*Insofar as such things are normal.

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As I understand it, with a few notable exceptions, the Harlequins are at least willing to get along with other races as long as they don’t get in the way, and especially if they’re useful vis-a-vis Chaos.

Although, really, the fun part of eldrae-Aeldari relations will be the epic condescend-off.

(“We concede that you are, technically, an older race than we. However, seeing as you literally fucked the God of Squick into existence, we will concede ‘wiser’ over the soul-smoothies the Squicklord extracts from your dead bodies, m’kay?”)

Star-cracking in this case, but fair point.

It would be a long time away, anyway, due to that particular problem being on the other side of the galaxy. As an example, it really intends more to depict the “don’t play their game” attitude, given that in a world where everyone is suspiciously addicted to melee, it’s time to bring out the unstoppable cosmic superweapons. Whatever nature they eventually take - VALHALLA FORGE is an umbrella project.

(And really, the clever bits aren’t the diproton bomb on the end, it’s things like keeping the entire project staff inside the zone of Oh No You Don’t Then, transporting the weapon using non-warp FTL, and controlling the whole thing with a nice piece of clockwork guaranteed to have no warp signature whatsoever.)

“He’s not the Omnissiah, he’s a very naughty xeno!”

But yes.

Side note: in other potential alliances or at least alignments, I suspect the Leagues of Votann might provide fruitful ground.

A sudden, profound feeling of 403?

(In the sense that your brain assimilates the entire message in the form of a single gestalt word. We’ve got fancy non-verbal telepathy 'round these parts.)

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…the Black Chamber are just going to love Trazyn the Infinite.

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The Repository of All Knowledge, on the other hand…

Also, not entirely sure how they’d feel about the Necrons once they learn a bit more about their history. The people who became the Necrons, or at least the upper echelons thereof, were… by and large, a thoroughly unpleasant lot. At least, that’s my recollection.

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But which species has/may have the older individuals? Since most of the Aeldari above a certain age are… quite dead, on account of the aforementioned Squicklord.

Also, I suspect that a substantial portion of the AdMech would be very much trying to purge the Xenos (and discreetly nick what remaining tech they can to take apart), for a variety of reasons, in this scenario. After all, it would be too much to expect them to cooperate with anyone who isn’t a human.

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The Black Chamber, in this case, are the Special Acquisitions Theme of the RoAK. And as for their position -

“Tell me, Mr. the Infinite, have you ever considered a more, ah, formal career in the exciting field of Special Acquisitions?”

'Cause if anyone’s prepared to walk right up to the soulless metal abomination from the dawn of time and make him a contract offer, it’s the librarians.

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They would also be a significant minority who didn’t and an even smaller minority who would be actively cooperating these groups would tend to have far lower mortality rates one would think

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To be at least slightly more serious, the Necrons don’t have what you might call a perfect history, but in this galaxy, who does?

On the other hand, though, I note that since as a race of de facto nanocyborgs with plenty of artificial intelligences around who don’t suffer the same problems that the Necrons got for free with biotransference, it’s very clear to the Imperials that the Necrons got even more absolutely screwed by the C’tan than they think they did, which is saying something. But it also strongly suggests that Imperial sophotechnology might well offer them a pathway to get unscrewed, something that I believe Szarekh, in particular, is very much looking for.

So there’s some ground there, which is handy when they’re an approximate technological peer in most respects.

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I wonder how CALYX HOLLOW compares to typical exterminatus methods? And there’s always DYSPEPTIC FLARE, scaling up to DYSPEPTIC FLARE HELLFIRE, if nothing else works. 40k strikes me as a universe where “put everyone out of their misery and find somewhere more reasonable to talk to” is a rational response. But probably don’t send Caliéne Sargas on the first contact mission…

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Where the Adeptus Mechanicus are concerned, I expect their attitude to Imperial technology to be rather like their attitude towards Necron technology, as revealed in Caves of Ice etal.; to wit, being so distracted by the shiny things as to lose all sense of caution or self-preservation¹.

(An attitude only rendered more amusing by the fact that, unlike the Necrons, they could buy a bunch of it over-the-counter, or even obtain a license to manufacture, if they just stopped long enough to ask.)

On a side note, while not nearly as formalized as tech-priest rituals, at least the AdMech can take some comfort in having found the other people in the galaxy subscribing to the notion that proper respect for the machine-kami actually does make the machine work better.

  1. Despite the fact that if they actually got their hands on any and managed to reverse-engineer it, they’d have to play the “no, seriously, I totally found this in a hitherto unknown STC I, um, found down the back of the couch” game to avoid being immediately purged as a heretek.
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Now I want to throw poor Pasqal Haneumann at them. He’s your techpriest companion in the Rogue Trader video game, and something of a ‘recovering heretek’ (or more strictly speaking, the one step below that, malatek) who is seeking out his lost mentor, Amarnat. Who led a schism of “Discontinuing the Cycle”; they were worried that the Mechanium had become ossified and unwilling to embrace new knowledge and was in a death spiral.

Arguably, this kicked off a large percentage of the game’s plot, at least in the sense of being the pebble that started the landslide over a century before the player character arrives.

That definitely seems like something the Imperials could work with. Either as a fracture point to be exploited, or in best case scenario having most of an Explorator Fleet who could be coaxed along the path to “we can work with you”.

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The relevant superweapon is probably ADHAÏC CALYPSE, which is likely to be trotted out as an effective counter once a Tyranid hive fleet hoves into view.

(For anyone who doesn’t remember ADHAÏC CALYPSE, that’s the swarm fleet of self-replicating autonomous war mechanicals with fast-burn capability and self-improving mesh-networked warminds - which in its ability to use entire planets, not just the biosphere, as swarm raws is one of the few weapons systems capable of out-Tyranidding the Tyranids.)

Of course, even if it works against Hive Fleets heading to other people’s worlds, this is likely to be a controversial strategic choice:

“You unleashed a self-replicating horde of planet-eating abominable intelligences on the galaxy!? Are you INSANE!?”

“…it was Tuesday.”

(On another controversial strategic choice, no-one’s going to like the inevitable response to learning about Orkoid life’s spore-based reproductive strategy being “nanomachines, son”.

But, hell, that’s not even a military response. That’s just what the Ministry of Public Health does when confronted with icky, icky pathogens in their nice clean ecosphere.)

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I went digging for the specific dialogue. These are from the translation files so if they’re a bit disjointed, it’s because I’ve gotten the paragraphs a bit out of order/missed the player asking a leading question in the middle:

That is a bold hypothesis. And yet the Omnissiah teaches us that a dauntless mind can penetrate any Knowledge through analysis. Where the ignorant see heresy, the enlightened might see truth.

There is a threat in everything. A lasgun once exploded in its owner’s hands for the first time. A cyclonic torpedo once fell on a virtuous world for the first time. Heresy was once uttered in the sacred binharic language for the first time. No thing of great power is ever safe.

But not all that is dangerous is evil. Few will dare say it in so many words, but some of our knowledge was obtained from corrupted sources. By studying the creations of xenos, we grasped profound secrets of the universe that they had discovered and we had not. By pondering heresies, we devised technological solutions to exterminate them. We drew knowledge from a poisoned well, filtered it, and attained Comprehension.

That, too… is true. I thirst for knowledge, and the Omnissiah has rewarded me with the gift of a mission to seek it. Perhaps it makes no difference to Him whether good or ill comes of the knowledge I obtain. He merely wants me to obtain it.

From the creed, yes, but not from the Omnissiah. The ancient norms have grown obsolete. What was once armour is now a prison. Mortal hands wrote the catechisms — therefore, in the name of the Deus Mechanicus, a mortal hand may edit them.

The form of prohibitions established by unknown elders. The form of an audacious violation of those prohibitions. The form of following dogma, or of schism. The form of following the Cycle, or of discontinuing the Cycle. In a system with two courses of action, schism is inevitable. And only one of these paths will be true, as truth is discretely separate from untruth.

Amarnat did not reject any one specific prohibition but found their cumulative effect to be oppressive. The system of rigid limitations had confined seekers of knowledge to a circular track, spelling doom for the thinking mind. And that cycle of repetition had to be broken. That was why he was dubbed the Messiah of Discontinuing.

Act. Amarnat pinpointed the problem of stagnation but never mustered the courage to effect change. I will effect it.

Some of this seems to tie in interestingly to this discussion on religiosity. Specifically the bit where Pasqal admits that since “mortal hands wrote our texts, so mortal hands may edit them”, which feels to me as an acknowledgement that the methods of worshiping the Omnissiah can and perhaps should change. So perhaps he’d manage to pass the hypocrisy check.

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That is particularly compatible with the Flamic moral-realist canon that theology, like the other ologies, is a discovery process rather than a dogma. So far as they’re concerned, you’re supposed to seek out better knowledge of the Divine (which, since the Divine is a lot bigger than you are, is certainly out there to find).

Meanwhile…

…could come right out of the Canticle of Kanáralath. But, yeah, he’d pass that obstacle, I think.

(As would, to be fair, a lot of the severely dogmatic members of the AdMech or the Imperial Cult. The problem with them lies elsewhere, leading to the awkward situation of “we’re going to have to fight and kill you now, but at least we’ll respect you in the morning” - it’s the people who try to have it both ways and act as radicals while claiming to be dogmatics that this trips up.)

Throwing in another note, given the timing of when named characters are where, there’s a good chance that they’re going to run right into the adventures of Cain and Vail.