POV: Your Life as a Servitor Standing Six Metres From Your Own Daughter | Warhammer 40K

You are thirty-four years old, you have thrown a coupling pin under a gate that was coming down on a crowd, and the pin has skipped off the runner lip and taken out an eye that costs eleven thousand thrones. This is the whole life of an ordinary man in a hive stack, from a room four paces by five on Lane 9 to a name that is not a name. He is not a hero and nobody in the story ever calls him one. He fetches water, he goes on the belt at fourteen, he marries a rope-walk girl, he raises a daughter on four hundred grams of grain a day, and one winter morning in a ration queue his hand does the only unauthorised thing it will ever do. Nine people walk out of that chute on their own legs. The hearing that follows lasts four minutes. Nobody in it asks why he threw the pin, because intent is not a column on the form, and the sentence takes one line: ten years penal servitude, custody transferred to the forge, service in kind at the discretion of the holder. What the forge does to him is a matter of paperwork, and the paperwork is careful to list only the functions it is keeping. It does not list the memories. Memories are not stored where the cutting happens, there is no field in which to record that, and nobody checks. So there is a man behind the glass of a lifter for the rest of his working life, counting his own crossings of a corridor because counting was not worth taking. There is one thing a hand of his can still do, once a day, in belt-dust and in the condensation on a cold brick before first shift: two short upright posts with a shallow curve laid across their tops, the mark his household chalked on its door every morning to say that both of us are home. And there is a tally-clerk at the Weigh Gate, twenty-four years old on the day she takes the booth, who chalks exactly the same mark on her booth door before first load, fast, without looking at her own hand, because it came out of Lane 9 and her mother taught it to her. She keeps that booth for decades. For most of them she works six metres from him. She calls him old thing, once. This is an unofficial fan-made fictional composite created for entertainment and lore exploration. It does not depict one canonical servitor or an official process of servitor creation. The hive world Scoria, the hive Coldbarrow, the Motive Yards and all named characters are fictional. Warhammer 40,000 and all associated names are property of Games Workshop; this is unofficial fan content. Narration and illustrations in this video are AI-generated. Nothing in this story ever reaches the surface of the world, because a tool that works is not inspected. If somebody you loved were switched off in every way that shows on a form, and you were told that some part of them was still in there listening, would you want them shut down for good or would you want them kept running? #Warhammer40K #AdeptusMechanicus #40KLore