The Subsector Project

  I’ve always enjoyed stories about the Adeptus Mechanicus- not necessarily for the depth of their characters, but moreso for their eternal desire to expand their knowledge. It speaks a lot to me of the key contrivance of the classic science fiction paradigm: the search for knowledge bringing ruin and enlightenment in equal measure.

For me, this story is about what happens when a dog catches the car it was intending to chase- congratulations, you have all the knowledge you could ever want. In fact, you have infinite knowledge and infinite time in which to gather it. For the obsessive Magos, what would that ability look like?

Well, I think it would be an immediate sensory overload, an immediate tendency towards gathering as much information as possible, to the detriment of the original goal (i.e. using that information as a weapon). To put it more simply, when you have infinite competing priorities, how do you rank and categorize them?

I originally envisioned this story as being about a unique alien species, but that became a little too complicated when considered in the wider subsector. Why would an omniscient alien, who knows they are omniscient, and can properly control that omniscience, have any interaction with the outside world? How would they ever lose control of that technology to lesser races (if indeed that was the goal, which I think it always would’ve been, because that’s more interesting)? No, instead, I left the alien race merely implied, preferring to give the technology to a Magos to deal with (and eventually, to fight over with other parties).

I envisioned time travel in a very specific way here. Time, as I’ve mentioned before, is a very important thematic characteristic for the subsector, and plays a large role in some of the narratives yet to come. In this case, I’m viewing time as simply another dimension of being- humans can walk around and interact in three dimensions, but aren’t able to meaningfully access the temporal dimension apart from moving through it in a linear fashion. Naturally, the Warp breaks that a little bit, as ships traveling through it can slip the normal reins of time, but for most, time will reassert itself once they’ve reentered real space, and feels to pass normally while they are experiencing that distorted timeframe.

If you are able to freely move through the fourth dimension in addition to the three normal folks can use, it stands to reason you would have to confront the nature of probability and potentiality. Every time you make a choice, you split yourself into another version of yourself- and every time you have the option to make a choice, one version of yourself would make that choice. Pair that with a space ship of any significant ability, and you end up as the Magos does, split across infinite potential futures and pasts across time and space.

It’s a brain-bending concept to wrap your head around, and I wanted to reflect that in the narrative. Even hooked up to a powerful cogitator bank, the Magos is unable to process the information precipitated into its brain, and has to crash out in an unexpected way, ending up on the surface of an unknown planet as its body begins to shut down.

Spoiler alert: that planet is the backwater of Peclene, and will precipitate a fair amount of consternation for the characters in the subsector. It’s certainly not the last we’ve seen of the Magos, as it was able to use the alien crystal tech to upload itself, so I’m certainly excited to see where that goes.

I imagine this as the equivalent of putting a gun on the table between four people who hate each other. Everyone who finds out about this ship, and the potential that the technology holds, will want to control it. I picture the skies of Peclene filled with warships, and the planet itself shaking as they fight over the power of omniscient control.

Will that actually be reflected immediately? Probably not, but it opens up a lot of interesting options and opportunities for expanding upon the motivations of each faction included. The Mechanicus, Imperial Navy/Guard, Chaos, and Inquisition, at the very least, are going to come into conflict with one another for control, fighting over jurisdiction (or just control overall) and might, in a way which is more than just territorial.

I suppose we’ll see how that works out when the alien tech gets more widely recognized.