So began a golden age. Representatives of our glorious Brotherhood were everywhere, overseeing every level of society, making sure that humanity remained pure in word and deed. They stamped out heresy and ensured that no forbidden research was carried out. They saw that clashes between corporations were contained. They led humanity by example and peace flowed everywhere. Blinded by the purity of the Light, darkness receded. For a thousand years, nothing was heard of the Dark Apostles.
Some heretics claim this was an age of stagnation, when humanity turned on itself. They say that the First Edict caused all progress to end, that overzealous Inquisitors stamped out all research. They say that the second edict prevented man from ever reaching the stars. They say the third edict was used to justify an age of repression, and was interpreted in such a way that all knowledge of the Dark Legion was eradicated. They are fools. Cardinal Toth's three edicts were just and wise. Sadly, we were only to learn how wise after the calamity followed their breaking.
It is the tragedy of men that they forget. As the long calm of the Age of Faith progressed men forgot much. All references to the Dark Legion were expunged by the Inquisition who feared that the temptation such knowledge represented would lead men astray.
The scourge of the Dark Legion was forgotten as men turned to other conflicts. The Sad Struggle within Imperial, the Throne War of Bauhaus, the Graveton Wars between the corporations, all distracted men from the memory of earlier greater wars. Men came to regard the Dark Legion first as mere legend, then as a tool that the Brotherhood used to justify its own power. For the masters of Corporations had forgotten their ancient gratitude to the Cardinal, as they chafed under the Brotherhood's edicts. They accused the Brotherhood itself of becoming venal and corrupt, and there was much truth in their accusations.
Many now joined the Brotherhood because they saw it as a path to temporal power. Corruption became endemic among the mission and a new cell within the Inquisition was assigned to investigate it. One by one, the three edicts of Toth were broken.
Firstly, a new corporation emerged: Cybertronic, a force that ignored the first edict against thinking engines, a force that sneered at the Cardinal's holy words as if they were mere superstition. Born from a colossal stock-market manipulation, when an obscure holding company rose to become the fifth Megacorporation overnight. Its subsidiaries offered new technologies and new weapons, and such was the greed of other corporations that they traded with it, rather than answer the Cardinal's holy call to a righteous crusade against it.
Cybertronic is a return to all that we abhor, a throwback to the age of thinking machines which proved so vulnerable to the darkness, and which almost destroyed us. Cybertronic does not merely seek to create machines that think like men, it glories in it. It used thinking machines as weapons. It fights its wars with huge battle robots and its humanoid Chausseur robots, machines that not only think like men but sometimes ape his form. It has its Cuirassier, humans whose bodies have been infused with Cybertronic's evil systems in the same manner as heretics' bodies are impregnated with the Dark Technology.
NEXT: THE SECOND CORPORATE WARS / PREVIOUS: THE VENUSIAN CRUSADE
Some heretics claim this was an age of stagnation, when humanity turned on itself. They say that the First Edict caused all progress to end, that overzealous Inquisitors stamped out all research. They say that the second edict prevented man from ever reaching the stars. They say the third edict was used to justify an age of repression, and was interpreted in such a way that all knowledge of the Dark Legion was eradicated. They are fools. Cardinal Toth's three edicts were just and wise. Sadly, we were only to learn how wise after the calamity followed their breaking.
It is the tragedy of men that they forget. As the long calm of the Age of Faith progressed men forgot much. All references to the Dark Legion were expunged by the Inquisition who feared that the temptation such knowledge represented would lead men astray.
The scourge of the Dark Legion was forgotten as men turned to other conflicts. The Sad Struggle within Imperial, the Throne War of Bauhaus, the Graveton Wars between the corporations, all distracted men from the memory of earlier greater wars. Men came to regard the Dark Legion first as mere legend, then as a tool that the Brotherhood used to justify its own power. For the masters of Corporations had forgotten their ancient gratitude to the Cardinal, as they chafed under the Brotherhood's edicts. They accused the Brotherhood itself of becoming venal and corrupt, and there was much truth in their accusations.
Many now joined the Brotherhood because they saw it as a path to temporal power. Corruption became endemic among the mission and a new cell within the Inquisition was assigned to investigate it. One by one, the three edicts of Toth were broken.
Firstly, a new corporation emerged: Cybertronic, a force that ignored the first edict against thinking engines, a force that sneered at the Cardinal's holy words as if they were mere superstition. Born from a colossal stock-market manipulation, when an obscure holding company rose to become the fifth Megacorporation overnight. Its subsidiaries offered new technologies and new weapons, and such was the greed of other corporations that they traded with it, rather than answer the Cardinal's holy call to a righteous crusade against it.
Cybertronic is a return to all that we abhor, a throwback to the age of thinking machines which proved so vulnerable to the darkness, and which almost destroyed us. Cybertronic does not merely seek to create machines that think like men, it glories in it. It used thinking machines as weapons. It fights its wars with huge battle robots and its humanoid Chausseur robots, machines that not only think like men but sometimes ape his form. It has its Cuirassier, humans whose bodies have been infused with Cybertronic's evil systems in the same manner as heretics' bodies are impregnated with the Dark Technology.
