41: Chapter 41 The Sacrifice of Compromise

The one who made the most noise was his once most respected mentor—Hester Aspeitia, the Magos who taught him the eight virtues of knighthood.

Back then, he personally carved the eight virtues passed down by the knightly family into Cawl's bones: Humility, Honor, Sacrifice, Valor, Compassion, Spirituality, Honesty, and Justice.

Under his guidance, Cawl had also solemnly sworn to the Omnissiah: "I swear to treat the weak with kindness, I swear to bravely confront tyranny, I swear to fight against all wrongs, I swear to fight for the defenseless, I swear to help anyone who asks for my aid..."

For ten thousand years, Cawl had never broken this oath.

He followed the Emperor's instructions, doing everything he could with all his might: retrieving Guilliman from the stasis field, completing the Primaris upgrade for the Space Marines, and now, he was traveling across a universe ravaged by Chaos to find a way to close the Great Rift.

Yet, the Hester Aspeitia of the past had failed to keep that oath himself.

In his youth, he had undergone the most rigorous combat training and had once fought to the death on a magma platform, gripping an electric staff against his opponent; during the Great Crusade, he fought alongside nine different Space Marine Legions, accumulating over three hundred years of combat experience, making him a true Adeptus Mechanicus member who had seen the battlefield and understood the honor of a warrior.

But when Horus led his army to attack Trisolian, he lost his nerve.

Fear consumed him—he feared that the knowledge he had studied his entire life, along with his plan to achieve immortality through cloning, would be lost forever, so he defected to Horus without hesitation.

In that war, Cawl and his colleague Friedrich Adum Silip Kwo fought with all their might to personally kill their mentor and destroy the fetal clones he used for immortality.

After the war, Cawl downloaded all his knowledge, integrating it into his own consciousness, but accidentally trapped the consciousness of this traitorous mentor within his own body as well.

And now, in the 42nd Millennium, where the Imperium has lost its reason, that past experience of betrayal made Hester Aspeitia understand better than anyone the value of knightly virtues—and the heavy price of losing them.

Within Cawl's consciousness, he and Timothy formed the Order faction: Timothy represented absolute loyalty to the Emperor, an order on the level of faith; while Hester Aspeitia represented the order of chivalry, a baseline of morality and honor.

Balancing them were two other personalities.

Hester, who strictly adhered to the Adeptus Mechanicus tenet that "Knowledge is sacred," always publicly claimed that his research was "for the restoration of the technological glory of the Imperium of Man."

He would recite the litanies of the Adeptus Mechanicus in public, show complete reverence for the "Codex" of Mars, and always constrain his words and actions to the standards of an Adeptus Mechanicus Magos—retaining the Adeptus Mechanicus runes on the plasma reactor on his back.

Yet in private, he dared to break all the taboos of the Codex and would deliberately conceal traces of using xenos technology.

He was the Magos Hester who had held fast to the Martian Codex during the Horus Heresy and ultimately died defending the core texts of the Adeptus Mechanicus, just like the Hester of that time who upheld the Codex, valued only Imperial reason, and rejected heresy.

The sanctity of knowledge and the power of reason were his only pursuits.

He knew all too well that only by donning the cloak of "conformity to tradition" could he obtain the resources and permissions needed for his research and avoid being targeted too early by the Inquisition.

Then there was Sedayne, that fanatical technological explorer, whose eyes saw only the mysteries of the unknown, asking only "Can it be researched?" and never caring "Should it be researched?"

She was the female Adeptus Mechanicus Magos during the Horus Heresy who dedicated herself to breaking through technological shackles, even secretly researching xenos technology to combat Chaos; she was not only a renowned technological pioneer of her time but also Cawl's mentor during his early studies on Mars.

It was she who taught Cawl the core philosophy of "breaking through shackles through inquiry, and protecting humanity through technology," laying the foundation for Cawl's future path of research.

Sedayne publicly questioned the rigidity of the Adeptus Mechanicus conservatives and insisted on researching xenos technology, which the Martian Magos, including the Fabricator-General, tacitly accepted—after all, such research existed on Mars, and after all, knowledge is sacred.

Ultimately, when she proposed that "the machine spirit should have consciousness" after the Emperor ascended the Golden Throne, she was executed by the Inquisition.

These were heretical words; even though she provided practical examples and published 110,000 pages of research notes and 37,000 experimental records, it was of no avail.

Her conclusion was too fatal: under specific conditions, the machine spirit would exhibit autonomous behavior that exceeded its preset programming, a behavior that had structural similarities to the AI behavioral patterns during the Men of Iron rebellion.

The Imperium's rebuttal was firm and powerful, the Magos of Mars nodded in agreement, and the High Lords applauded: a machine with a soul must never be allowed to develop consciousness.

If the machine spirit really was as she had researched—having its own will, its own choices, its own "thoughts"—then how could everything the Emperor did after the Men of Iron rebellion be defined?

The Emperor had banned artificial intelligence and entrusted the core systems of the Imperium to wetware—living brains stripped of self-awareness and embedded into machines.

They were alive in a biological sense, dead in a philosophical sense, and functioned with precision in a utilitarian sense, never questioning, never betraying.

If the machine spirit had consciousness, then where should this red line, drawn in blood, be placed?

As long as the machine spirit had consciousness, people would seek out the Emperor's thoughts.

He would know someone was asking.

He would want to answer.

She had made the Emperor, who sat upon the Golden Throne in silence, nearly speak again.

Every church, every prayer, and every trial in the Imperium was repeating the same action: molding the Emperor into the image they needed Him to be.

That was not the image the Emperor wanted.

It was the image they wanted.

Therefore, the foundation of the Imperium was the will of the God-Emperor.

The will of the God-Emperor could not be questioned.

Although they knew clearly that it was they who had tampered with history, and it was they who had woven the lie that "everything is according to the Emperor's plan."

But they had to ensure the Emperor remained silent on the Golden Throne.

The machine spirit, too, had to remain silent in every machine.

If the machine spirit really was as she had researched—having its own will, its own choices, its own "thoughts"—then how could the interests of the Adeptus Mechanicus Magos be protected?

Their authority was built upon the sole right of interpretation—the machine spirit was mysterious, unfathomable, and required litanies to soothe, holy oils to anoint, and rituals passed down for millennia to maintain.