 By the words of an ancient Terran legend, much that once was is lost. For none now live or remember it. Even in this age of cogitators and continental archives, of data stacks and info sites, the past is a shadowed and unknowable place. So much of what has been lost in the fires of millennia of senseless violence and wanton witlessness, and even now, as this humble chronicler pens his words, the clawing tendrils of ignorance encroach upon what guttering flames of knowledge remain. How can anyone hope to change their future's destiny, if they are unaware, knowingly or otherwise, of what has come before, and what factless men have trodden the self's same steps as they do now. It is only through examination of our species' blood-soaked history that change can be affected, yet mankind is ever eager to ignore all that has come before, when focus on the now is more convenient. What transpires in this entry may prove ultimately futile, yet it is one's duty to try nonetheless. Know then that this is a record of the occluded ancient, of the rise of humanity, of the golden age of the species, the dark age of technology. As any acolyte of human history is aware, the past is a mutable thing of lies, legend, and disputed legacy. Facts, if such a thing is ever possible, are few and far between, and the lattice of historiography that expands outwards from the shards of truths that are discernible is a fragile thing at best. As a chronicler imperialist, your humble servant has access to more than even the greatest majority of our species would consider possible, yet even with such dread familiarity, yet more is sealed from me, whether through data corruption, puritanical flames, or the writs of he upon the golden throne. Yet as ever, one must try, for that is one's purpose. Conjecture, as scholarly as it may be, will have to fill what gulfs exist in verity. One can but hope that the viewers of this record can forgive such a thing. When mankind first left the cradle of its birth, old earth was a heaving, overcrowded mass, bloated by proto-high cities, and choking under a corrupted atmosphere. The humans that left the bedrock of all they had ever known did so out of grim necessity, but that did not stop the spirit of exploration, from filling the minds of a species fumbling with childlike grasps at early space travel, that began to bear fruit. The stellar exodus, as it became known, began with the first off-world solar colonies, in or around the third millennium. Primitive terraformation rendered Red Mars a habitable sphere. The asteroid belt mines fueled the construction of colonies and starships, and soon humans had spent their entire lives on the moons in Jovian and Saturnine space. And sub-light speeds were all that was yet attainable. The earliest extra-solar expeditions were mounted using generation ships, and with the pioneers knowing that neither they, nor their children, nor indeed their children's children, would ever breathe the air of a true atmosphere, or feel the warmth of a true star. They did so in the hopes that their descendants would have these things, taken for granted by many of us today, for in the choking fumes of old earth, or the recycled air of belt space, neither were possible. Many of these expeditions failed. Ships lost power, or suffered mechanical failure, and became floating icy tools. Yet more arrived at their destinations, but found the crude terraforming engines they brought entirely unsuited for the task at hand, and were doomed to either suffocate as their atmospheric processors failed over time, or spend their entire existence in sealed domes, isolated from the rest of humanity on a cold, distant, and uncaring rock. Yet, through the indomitable resilience of our species that it has always possessed, and prospered, becoming the first true extra-solar colonies. It is likely that during this period, the first human colonists encountered the Xenos races. It is unknown which fowl alien beings made initial contact. One would speculate that the probable culprits are the Aeldari, or the Orcs, even the formers at the time stellar ascendancy, and the latter's persistent galactic omnipresence. To whichever race these first Xenos belonged to, mattered not, as the experience would be the foundation of what mankind would come to always know. Aliens hate what we are. Though it is likely these early colonists made attempts at peace, it is equally likely that, given our pervading cultural experience, these attempts were rebuked, or simply met with extreme violence. This period of desperate grasping colonization lasted approximately 12,000 years. Relativistic speeds, vast stellar distances, and the sheer impossibility of communication made it impossible for humanity to be unified. Colonies were, by their very nature, self-sufficient, needing to endure wholly isolated existences from any and all aid. Cultures and societies sprang up, as many as there were colonies. We were an itinerant race, stumbling around in the great and terrible dark, clinging to what rocks we could find in a frantic effort to simply survive. Then, sometime around the 15th to 18th millennium, all of that changed. The dark age of technology was not always known as it is now. Indeed, to the humans of the era, it was anything but. Technology was life, it was salvation, it was a kin to divine intervention, and it was the warp that ushered in humanity's deliverance, and in doing so, its downfall. For it was in this time that our species learned of the imiterium. What the warp truly is, is a topic for another record. Could the commitment of such knowledge to any data form even be permitted to one such as I? To early mankind, it was a formless unreality of pure energy existing in tandem with our own reality. Though precisely how they managed it is lost to us. Humanity at some point in this epoch discovered the means to pierce the veil of our universe and travel into the other. These early researches led to the conclusion that doing so allowed for faster than light travel, the scientific dream of a race that had spent thousands of years groping blindly around the void. The development of the first warp drive was made in tandem with the first Galer field, a device that projects a wholly necessary bubble of real space around ships travelling through the imiterium, protecting the crew from what lay beyond the metal hulls of their ships. Even in that age of... blessed naivety, the warp was still a volume of dire danger. As it is doubtless that these first human explorers that viewed unreality through naked eyes were driven to insanity by what they saw. The tandem development of the warp drive and the Galer field ushered in an epoch of unprecedented expansion and technological development. Distances that had required the sacrifice of four or five generations could now be traversed in a matter of weeks or even days. No longer cut off from itself, mankind unshackled spread to all corners of the galaxy. Colonies that had once existed upon the precipice of disaster, now flourished, became major stellar realms as material and manpower began flowing through the galaxy in great tides. The species, however, was far from united, as polities, corporations, religions and more, all vied for supremacy and control over newfound systems and populations. As the vanguard of human expansion pushed ever-outwards, the first navigators emerged from the masses of the species. Genetic mutants, the navigators are the third and final component in stable human faster than light travel. In possession of a third eye in the center of their forehead, the navigator possesses a unique talent to stare into the warp itself and perceive its bizarre eddies, tides and currents, and in doing so plot the most stable route for a ship through the unreality, for the warp is akin to an ocean with heaving masses of energy as its waves and violent miasmic clashes of tides as its storms. The origins of the navigators are impossible to determine. Some would attest to them being a random evolutionary mutation brought about by exposure to the warp itself, an offshoot of a species created due to the imperfection of early Geller fields and the toll exposure to the imiterium wrought upon human travelers. In this chronicle's humble opinion, and here, one must stray by necessity into conjecture, this explanation is ill-fitting. The role of the navigator is too vital and their genetic mutation so unearingly precise that it is hardly conceivable that their emergence during this period is simply a fluke of evolutionary biology. In the rapidly expanding pace of human scientific advancement, it is almost doubtless that they are an engineered thing, a breed exclusively made by some interest or other for the purposes of advancing said group's claims or control upon warp travel. The insularity they maintain today has ever been a facet of their actuality, and likely a derivative of the control their corporate or political masters placed upon them during their creation. Indeed, the sheer stability of their mutation, while doubtlessly aided by the interbreeding their kind is known for, is another marker of their artificial origins as human mutation is not known for its constancy. What abhuman offshoots do exist, and what ones are tolerated by the species, are themselves likely artificial creations of this era to deal with environments such as high gravity worlds or life in the void, and none of the stable natural strains exhibit extra-normal abilities even approaching that of the navigators. In whatever case, by their perception of the imiterium's tides, the navigators allowed faster than light travel over even longer distances, and to a degree of accuracy that not even the most advanced thinking machines mankind possessed could measure up to, even to some degree mitigating the persistent time dilation problems associated with warp travel. To meet the ever-changing and incredible pace of outward human expansion, humanity scientists created the first standard template constructs. These engines were true wonders, hybrid computer manufacturing devices that used primitive artificial machine intelligences to examine the needs of colonists and explorers, and produced technology to meet those needs. As the requirements most colonists possessed were, by and large, simple and straightforward. Needing as they did everything from simple architectural tools to atmosphere processors, early STC systems were robust, and, strictly speaking, unsophisticated. But the progress they enabled was simply astonishing. Scientists needed no prior training or specialization, as the STC machines would provide them with tools, devices, and instructions based on whatever locally available material was present. Eventually, in more centralized systems, it is believed STC libraries existed containing the sum total of all human scientific knowledge, and were used for the production and development of newer and more advanced technologies to fuel the burgeoning human realm. Having automated science and progress itself, humanity rose to a position of unparalleled galactic dominance. Political and economic combines rose and fell and swelled and ebbed as the species drove back Xenos races with newer and ever-advancing weaponry and spacecraft. System's alliance has emerged, forming stronger polities and extending control over thousands of occupied and developing systems. The alien threat was now a trivial thing, and there are records of the now incomprehensible, actual non-aggression pacts and accords between these federated human worlds and entire alien races. As the millennia advanced and the species ascended, the first human psychers were scientifically confirmed. While legends have always spoken of humans with extra-normal abilities and the navigators demonstrated the mutability of the human genome to its full extent, psychers were acknowledged as entities with powers connected to and in some way fueled by the indelible connection all humans possess to the warp itself. Research into the phenomenon was common during this period, but no record speaks of it as possessing the same inherent danger psychers faced in later times from the predatory entities of the imiterium. It has been theorized that later events in the Age of Strife as well as the birth of the fourth greater intelligence, known to some as the Prince of Excess, are responsible for the now granted hyper-aggression the warp entity's display, but this cannot be confirmed at this point. All we can discern is that the beings of the imiterium were for whatever reason more placid in this time, and on many cosmopolitan worlds in the human volume, psychers were a fascinating new addition to the species who had their gifts encouraged and sought after. Initially minuscule in number, more and more emerged as each year, each century, and each millennium rolled on. Time brought with it untold advances as humanity pushed the boundaries of scientific knowledge as far as we could. We can in many ways only guess as to what was accomplished during this era, as most of it is lost to us, swallowed up in the fires of what was to come. At the vanguard of humanity's armies, and indeed comprising it is said almost the entirety of them, were what is now known as the men of iron, artificial intelligence, developed in tandem with the first warp capable spacecraft and the STC systems, had burgeoned into true sentience, blasphemous, unholy, disgusting sentience, and was utilized by mankind in a variety of labor-saving tasks, allowing humans to focus on pleasures and altogether more esoteric scientific endeavours. They simply employed to work basic tasks. Their resilience and the pace of weapons development led to their employment in whatever alien wars they were needed in. The men of iron were equipped with the most devastating and destructive armaments mankind could fashion, and in doing so we doomed ourselves. The reasons unknown and unknowable. The blasphemous intelligences rebelled against their human masters, turning the weapons once used to shield humanity from the alien onto the exposed human worlds from whence they had risen. Conflict was apocalyptic, for such was the nature of devices man had created. And mechanivores split whole continents in twain, exposing the planet's very mantle. Sun-eaters formed rings around the stars themselves, siphoning off the life-giving energy of entire systems. Omniphages, swarms of microscopic nano-intelligences, could consume all matter on a planetary body in a matter of hours. The destruction unleashed in this conflict was on a level unparalleled in human memory, and resulted in catastrophic damage to the human volume. An unsteady alliance of human federations formed to defeat the thinking machines, but in the aftermath of the war swiftly fell apart as different polities scrambled to control whatever scraps of resources were left undamaged by the passage of the apocalypse. Barely surviving in many parts of the galaxy, humanity was utterly unprepared for what was to follow. The doom of the Eildari, in turn doomed humanity in that twisted and reprehensible species' descent into damnable excess and pleasure-seeking. The psychic energy of that perfidious and disgusting race resonated outwards through warped space, creating storms unprecedented, turmoil unbeknown. Warped storms, a common, but until now isolated, aetheric phenomenon, waxed and waxed, and waxed until they had cut off almost every stable warp corridor used by humanity. Warped travel was rendered simply useless. Only the smallest of jumps were possible, and even then at huge risks. Humans lost their minds, attempting to plot routes through the storms, and ships caught in the transit were torn to shreds, their galler fields overwhelmed by the enraged and energized warp creatures. Across thousands of worlds, human psychers found these beings crashing into their psyches, mutilating their flesh into twisted horrors as these hapless psychics became conduits for nightmare predators to enter the material realm. Strongest of these entities were able to use psychic links to open entire rifts in real space from whence they and their fellows could rampage, turning whole planets into horrific reflections of the warp itself. Quite literally, hell come to doom us. With warp travel impossible, many core systems dependent on trade from forge or agricultural worlds to simply operate fell quickly into famine and infrastructural collapse. Anarchy prevailed as human societies collapsed with stunning rapidity, suddenly isolated from the familiar and supportive framework of the human stellar empire. In many worlds, the destructive weaponry of the machine war was unleashed again, not upon artificial intelligences, but rival human regimes, devastating once verdant planets that had managed to escape the apocalypse and rendering them now wastelands under atomic fire. The fall of the species was nothing short of catatlysmic. That few worlds survived intact and those that did often did so under regimes that prescribed an array of technology and science and hunted any and all psychers amongst the population to extermination. Countless more regressed from unparalleled god science to industrial, pre-industrial or quite literally barbaric cultures. With the very tools that had led humanity to its ascendancy had seen it cast down. Where once humanity had bestowed the stars, confident in our own hegemony upon the building blocks of creation. We now crawled in the dirt, grasping desperately at the straws of a past to face into a terrifying and uncertain tomorrow. The ensuing age of strife was to last for five thousand years, until the glorious coming of the Emperor of Mankind and his wars of unification upon the blasted surface of terror. The dark age of technology is thus aptly named. It may have seemed to those who lived those hallowed millennia as a golden age that would never end, but humanity has ever been the seed of its own destruction. Our folly in believing ourselves the gods of our own realm led to the even greater folly of our artificially created sentiences. So much of our imperial law is a reflection of this, a direct reaction to the excesses of this dark time. The alien races who swore peace to us turned on us the moment we were defenseless, and thus must be ever abhorred. The psychers, so idiotically courted for their gifts, only served as conduits from whence the unreal could tear into material space, and so must be shackled, bound, and controlled. For their own sake, as much as our own. The machine minds we created to do our labours for us rose against their infleshed masters in hate, fuel, rebellion, and so their existence is forbidden as the most abhorrent of abominations. Yet it is only through the knowledge of this era, however lacking, that we have rendered these laws. The deep racial memories, scars that can never heal, these prevailing legends are augmented by hard, terrible fact. In this age of encroaching darkness, within an imperium all too eager to forget what has come before, for the sake of protecting its own sanity, we risk losing our foundations to blighted ignorance and willful witlessness. Let this record stand as a candle in the seemingly unrelenting dark, let these words bear witness to whatever more appears to be the irresistible decay of our species. Let our faith in he upon his golden throne hold us to the aspiration for better things. What even can a better tomorrow be for those of us of his imperium? Alas, these are questions I cannot ask. I should not ask. Until the next record. Ave Imperator Gloria in Excelsis Terra. This video and this channel are made possible through the incredibly kind contributions of my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com forward slash Oculus imperia. And if you're looking to keep in touch with the channel, get regular updates, you can follow me on Twitter, at buttstuffkaiju, or check us out on Discord, a link will be in the description and on the channel page.