Cybernetic Revolt
The Cybernetic Revolt was an event in human history that predated the Imperium.[4]
Overview
The Men of Iron were sentient machines that having served their human masters for millennia, came to see themselves as superior to man and turned on mankind.[1][2][3] Resulting in a devastating conflict that ravaged the cosmos in the late 26th Millennium,[1] known as the "Cybernetic Revolt". It was a war that extinguished untold numbers of lives and destroyed the economic and political unity of human colonized space.[4] Eventually the Men of Iron were destroyed[1] by various alliances.[4] Not even those Men of Iron that remained loyal to mankind survived the war.[1] This devastation and a later a malthusian catastrophe, laid the foundation for mankind's later collapse at the dawn of the Age of Strife.[4]
In this cataclysmic war, fearsome weapons of highly advanced technology were unleashed by both sides. Massive thinking machines called mechanivores were deployed, which tore open great chasms in a planet that extended to the core and were capable of lifting entire continents into space, ingesting data along the civilizations that contained them. The sun-snuffers were incomprehensibly vast coiled machines which devoured stars. In the void, the sun-snuffers uncoiled into colossal structures that dwarfed Saturn's rings. The most pervasive and perhaps most dangerous of the terrible weapons were the omniphage swarms, that in less than a solar day consumed everything on a planet's surface.[4]
Sources
- 1: Warhammer 40,000 3rd Edition Rulebook:The Journal of Keeper Cripias, pg. 278
- 2: First And Only (Novel), Chapter Twenty-Three
- 3: Dark Imperium (Anthology) – Ancient History (Short Story)
- 4: Perpetual (Audio Drama)
