Across the crumbling breadth of the Imperium of Man, in manufactorums vast as cities and hive-factories that belch smoke day and night, a grim paradox endures. Gleaming machines—vestiges of a lost golden age—still churn, not through the mastery of innovation, but by the sweat, blood, and bones of the dispossessed. High technology endures, but it runs on flesh.
Once, these production lines were the apex of human achievement: fully autonomous, ruthlessly efficient, endlessly modular. Standard Template Constructs (STC), the miracle of the Dark Age of Technology, enabled a few hundred tech-priests and servitors to oversee the seamless output of lasguns, tanks, and hab modules in perfect mechanical rhythm.
That age is gone.
Ten thousand years of ceaseless war, decay, and ritualized ignorance have taken their toll. Even the most resilient STC-derived systems have buckled under entropy. Components corrode. Patterns degrade. Machine spirits grow temperamental or outright hostile. What was once a mechanized symphony has devolved into a dissonant grind—kept barely functional not by knowledge, but by desperation.
Where once a hundred specialists sufficed, now tens of thousands of menial workers are pressed into service to maintain a single production line. These are the forgotten multitude—indentured serfs, vat-fated laborers, debt-bound penitents, and the luckless masses. It is estimated that around half of the Imperium’s population exists solely to labor in these extraction plants, star vessels, factoriums and forges, ceaselessly and without hope.
They sweep blocked intakes, align cracked lensing arrays by hand, crawl into irradiated coolant shafts, and manually haul replacement gears along rust-choked tracks. A guidance servo, no longer aligning properly, is manually corrected every fifteen seconds by a blindfolded tech-thrall trained to work by sound alone. Where once a robotic arm delicately installed a micro-fusion core into a weapon casing, now a line of hunched workers pass it along, each doing one step without knowledge to understand the purpose of the whole.
Entire sublines of production depend on tasks so hazardous, so brutally inefficient, that they are effectively death sentences. Some are lowered into plasma-exhaust ducts between production cycles, scraping slag from vent cores while the metal still glows red-hot. Others wade waist-deep through unfiltered promethium coolant to clear blockages with their hand tools. In munitions foundries, clan of laborers manually align warhead detonators, knowing that a single misstep will vaporize them and half the line. In the upper levels, others cling to gantries kilometers above the floor, adjusting ancient cable arrays in storms of static discharge and radiation.
Many will last a few months. Some, only days. Their names are not recorded. Their deaths are not mourned. Yet without them, the machines stop.
This is the Imperium’s answer to technological collapse: not innovation, but attrition. The once-lauded modularity of STC designs—built for adaptation and resilience—has become a crutch, allowing for a thousand jury-rigged solutions, cobbled together by lives of those who no longer grasp the purpose behind the process.
Still, the machinery roars.
The tanks roll.
The lasguns fire.
The manufactorums keep on running, not with progress, but with the lives of billions. And so long as bodies remain to be thrown into the gears, the Imperium endures—not out of competence, but out of sheer, grinding sacrifice.
Ignis Aeternus WH 40K campaign notes 