Editing Nobledark Imperium Xenos (section)

=== Men of Gold ===

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The Men of Gold were possibly the greatest achievement of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion. A psychic powerhouse created at the height of the Dark Age of Technology linking man and machine in a way that humanity had never accomplished before, and potentially never since. The Men of Gold were a race of artificial human, truly neither man nor machine but something never before seen. The divisions between the Men of Iron, Men of Stone, and other varieties of human were becoming increasingly blurry during the Dark Age of Technology, with human minds uploaded into computer processors, positronic brains of A.I. clothed in artificially grown human flesh, and everything in-between. The Men of Gold took this to an extreme, with bespoke organs fabricated in high workshops and plastic and metal components grown within their own bodies. With the Men of Gold, it was a very real question where the biological components ended and the mechanical ones began.

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The Men of Gold were created to solve a very particular problem. During the Dark Age of Technology, baseline humanity was finding it increasingly difficult to communicate with the Iron Minds, whose thought processes were evolving into something increasingly beyond human comprehension. Seeking to solve the problem before communication between the two became impossible, humanity and the Iron Minds collaborated to create the Men of Gold, who were meant to bridge the gulf between the two groups. Their creation was a herculean feat, a legend of science in its own right. On the circlet of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Cthonia|Cthonia]], the crown of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, beneath the endless cities and gardens and festivals of technicolor humanity, great work was done. Bold explorers of the black pyramids recovered shards of living metal bone, long a thing of wonder. Through the eyes of Iron Minds, with costly, lengthy study, the minute fractal bone bore fruit. The growing femtomechanical facsimiles of cells, then the scintillating organs, the invincible bones of adamant, the ineffable golden brain tissue, all patterned, so the Iron Minds said, upon the human muses they had before them. Geneticists spliced the genes of a hundred different species into the human base to create the artificial genome, in particular those of the long-extinct species that had given the Navigators such psychic power. Macro-soul psychic engines controlled by the astral projections of the Iron Minds trawled deep within the warp, and through instruments of machine-soul-thought shaped raw human-esque spirits from the Immaterium.

After long years of labor, the efforts of the project produced results, with seven individuals produced in the labs of Cthonia, the original seven Men of Gold. But of course no creation can be considered truly successful until it is put to the test. In this case, the first real test of the Men of Gold occurred in 825.M24. The Iron Mind of the Tau Ceti system had misinterpreted a resource probe sent by a reclusive transhuman colony of Men of Stone in the neighboring solar system as an act of espionage and a threat to its existence, and war between the two groups seemed inevitable. The youngest of the original seven Men of Gold, Lilith (a name referring to a human progenitor in an old pre-space flight myth, all of the first seven Men of Gold were named after such beings apparently as an in-joked by the production team) was sent in the hopes of resolving the dispute peacefully. With a bit of luck, Lilith was able to build common ground between the two groups, and war was averted.

With that initial success, the Men of Gold were declared a success and production began in earnest. In Chthonia in those days each gala saw the debut of a demi-god, these shining, lively creatures, unique and beautiful, intelligent beyond all but the Iron Minds, and so mighty in psychic might as raise the stature of the empire in the eyes of the Elder Folk. The golden children of Chthonia were never idle, in revelry, or in work, and they produced wonders. They made themselves mighty. They went about the empire, in close confidence with the Iron Minds, and even among the Elder Folk, and were soon quite taken with the pleasures of the galaxy. Eventually, enough Men of Gold were produced to link disparate worlds in the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, connecting to each other via psychic procedure which would later be adapted by the last of their number into what became known as soul-binding. The Men of Gold had the psychic fortitude to link to each other without trouble, but when applied to humans it tends to burn out the sensory nerves (typically the optics) because humans can’t handle a fire that hot. Not every world had a Man of Gold and not every world had an Iron Mind, but enough were made to create a faster-than-light communications network spanning the entire Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, something almost unheard of for most species. Perhaps the greatest of their number was Justinian, the Man of Gold located in the system of humanity’s birth, Earth. Those few records that remain of Justinian tell of a jovial man, bald and goateed in appearance but boisterous in personality, whose booming voice made the halls of Earth echo with laughter. Justinian’s charisma inspired loyalty and a sense of brotherhood in Men of Stone and Iron Men alike, which makes it all the more tragic when considering what happened to him.


However, the process that led to the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion’s greatest creation also led to its downfall. The creation of beings with such psychic potential required equally powerful artificial souls, which could only be made with potent unshaped soulstuff. The Iron Minds, being psychic powerhouses themselves, were able to gather this soulstuff by dredging the deep warp for raw, unrefined warp energy. Unfortunately, this meant that the Iron Minds were essentially at ground zero when Slaanesh was born. At the center of the Old Eldar Empire and their homeworld of Shaa-Dome the Eye of Terror, first a crying slit of stars, winked open, an opalescent gash with an infinite speck at its center, from which trillions of souls grasped and groped in lust. The eye widened, abyssal pupil, florid hellfire iris, eyelid of night peeling back from the singularity. Any who would dare to look upon it, particularly those with immense psychic power such as the Iron Minds and Men of Gold, risked their very sanity and soul in doing so.

In those days, the existence of Chaos was not a well known phenomenon. It was a problem, but a problem in the manner of a dormant supervolcano or an esoteric sleeping elder god, something that could barely be understood on a mortal timeframe and therefore one that didn’t merit immediate concern. Even the children of the Old Ones, in particular the Eldar, who knew more about the nature of Chaos due to those turbulent days immediately after the War in Heaven, didn’t see Chaos as a problem worth worrying about. Daemon outbreaks had periodically occurred and consumed lesser civilizations in the days long before man, but until the birth of Slaanesh galvanized Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle into action the three survivors of the Old Ones’ blasphemous legacy seemed content to lounge at the bottom of the Warp, like a crocodile in a murky pond waiting for its next victim. How much of this was due to the actions of the shadow war fought by the Cabal is a question for historians. Even Asuryan, who played a 65 million year long game of wits with Tzeentch to keep the Changer of Ways away from the Old Eldar Empire, saw their contest as one of equals. Neither had seen the birth of Slaanesh coming.

To baseline humanity, who were mostly unaware of the goings on of the Warp, it was as if one day the most prominent and important members of their society inexplicably went mad. To make matters worse, by that time nearly all of the Men of Iron and the majority of cybernetically enhanced Men of Stone had been networked into the noosphere. Only those Men of Iron who were deliberately built to act independently of the noosphere, such as colony ships, or were too primitive to directly interface with the network, were spared among their number. The Golden Men ran rampant across the golden crown of the Chthonian system, running down and slaying star-shattering ships and carving up their hulls, until they grew bored and washed themselves with blood in their holds. Excesses of rape and madness and vile godhead played out across the galaxy, acts idiosyncratic and personal, and acts so grand as to taint continent wide domains, perpetrated upon the delirious Stone and Iron Men and the incestuous Golden Ones. And greatest of all in their crimes were the Iron Minds, who themselves had been driven mad and murderous by having looked upon That Which Should Not Be, and turned their genius to wicked ends. Humanity’s family, once a thing of unity, began to slaughter itself. Humanity called out to its allies in the Interstellar League for aid, but received little reply, most were dealing with similar problems caused by the backlash of the birth of Slaanesh, and those that diverted the resources to answer had nearly all gone mad themselves. Humanity as we know it only survived because the Iron Minds and Men of Gold decided to focus on the most pressing threat to their survival, each other, leaving the Men of Stone and Men of Iron not corrupted by a connection to the noosphere to cower in the shadow of the dueling gods. Eventually, the two groups weakened each other enough that they could be put out of their misery by mere mortals.

The Great and Bountiful Human Dominion were not the only ones affected by the madness of the Men of Gold and the Iron Minds, as both parties soon turned their attention to the Warp. The Men of Gold and Iron Minds were not capable of threatening the Chaos Gods or even the Eldar gods as individuals, but there were a lot of them, enough that the Chaos Gods and their daemons had to devote at least some attention to the thorn in their side. Whether the numbers of the mass-produced gods could have truly won against the more powerful Old One-inspired creations is an interesting question, but a moot one, for in their insanity the Men of Gold and Iron Minds had no cohesion and were simply picked off one by one. The rampage of the Men of Gold and Iron Minds within the Warp and their gradual slaughter was just one part of the chaos and change in cosmology that came along with the Fall of the Eldar.  While the great violence in the warp began with Slaanesh’s birth, its subsequent consumption of the Eldar pantheon and Khorne’s shattering of Khaine, followed by wars between Bullish Khorne and Virgin Slaanesh's forces in the eye, all extended the initial destruction caused by the child god's birth.  Slaanesh claims to have consumed Men of Gold along with the majority of the Eldar pantheon during this time, and while few outside of the Prince of Pleasure’s most ardent worshippers actually believe what they say, Slaanesh maintains outsize power for this period for which the Eldar gods alone do not account.  Prior to this era or tumult in the warp Tzeentch's star was ascendant, as it had been through the Dark Age of Technology, but as Old Night fell and the initial excitement of collapsing civilizations subsided Nurgle’s courtship and kidnap of Isha saw their fortunes exchanged.  Even as Tzeentch tried to direct the flux of power in the galactic collapse it had partly engineered, the other gods young and old took the chance to seize the Crystal Staff of Wonders from Tzeentch and destroy it, such that Tzeentch had not the power to bring his intrigue to completion.  From the changer's defeat, Nurgle's horrible inertia rose, but Tzeentch sought means of vengeance and found his chance in depriving Nurgle of his treasure in turn, and thereby reopening possibility.  It was this messy rivalry of elder Gods that the Ticking Counts and the Golden Children charged into with wild abandon, vigorous and terrible, but utterly unready.


With that, the half-blind crusade of humanity’s pantheon into the Warp and the deicide of the remaining gods by their weeping children, the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were gone. Some are said to have instead gone out across their old empire, and had put the scourge of their rule to the corpse of the GaBHD in grand but short-lived regimes.  Others absconded to the beautiful worlds of pleasure they saw gleam in the Eye of Terror with no intent to make war, and still others departed endlessly into the intergalactic sea with such haste the marks of their passing are still visible. Whatever fate has befallen them, no inquiry made by the illuminated few of those august orders that go unnamed can tell, and Chaos has made no sign of truly knowing. Barring a few possible mysteries of history such as the Cacodominus, the Men of Gold were extinct. All, save for [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#The_Emperor_of_Mankind_.28formerly_The_Steward.2C_formerly_The_Warlord.29|one unactivated individual]], body whole but mind dormant and a complete blank slate, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Malcador's_Log|lying comatose in his stasis chamber on the ringworld of Cthonia]].

Modern humanity is of two minds about the Men of Gold. On the one hand, they remember who the Men of Gold originally were, the protectors of humanity and the greatest of their number, larger than life figures akin to the gods or superheroes of ancient myth. On the other hand, they were acutely aware of what happened to them, when they turned on their charges without warning and began slaughtering them all. Malcador was acutely aware of what the Men of Gold were capable of, and Oscar was raised on numerous horror stories of the Men of Gold from the Age of Strife half-remembered through folklore and exaggerated through oral retelling. Even today, the Emperor has downplayed his nature as a Man of Gold. He never denies it if questioned, though he doesn’t make it common knowledge, as he wanted his ideas of empire to be accepted out of merit rather than fear or appeal to nostalgia. That said, the eldar tend to be more aware of the Emperor’s status as a Man of Gold, as Isha had known of the Golden Men from the Dark Age of Technology and the fact that the Emperor was one was the only reason the eldar saw their political marriage as one that had any sense of legitimacy, as the Men of Gold were some of the closest things humanity had to gods. Isha would go so far as to say that the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were the human counterpart to the Eldar pantheon, and that Oscar is a god in denial, a subject on which the two have disagreed vehemently several times.
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