Prologue: My Story
For the last ten years I’ve worked at a production plant on a nondescript Industrial World that chiefly manufactures petrochemicals. My official title has always been some form of “Inventory Manager”. The top brass keep changing the title of my position every few years so they can claim that I don’t have the necessary experience to warrant a promotion.
Maybe they knew that I knew that I wasn’t in any sort of position to be able to do anything about them exploiting me. You’d think I would be upset by this, but staying in my overlooked role is exactly what I want.
Please know I am fully aware of how lucky I am. I’ve lived an unassuming life that is also the envy of most citizens. Many billions of poor souls spend all their days dealing with the constant threat of war, famine, and disease. Usually it’s all three at once. Every day for the last ten years I’ve spent nine hours checking inventory logs, managing data reports, and inputting various numbers into various cogitators.
I’ve read reports of Forge Worlds pumping toxic gases into the atmosphere to such an extreme degree that the average life expectancy is a tenth of what is standard, which is already an abhorrently low number to begin with. Most days, my biggest issues involve following a trail of bread crumbs and enduring the same nightmarish bureaucratic hellscape any member of the lower bureaucracy has to deal with. An example of an “absolute highest priority” situation at my job would be me needing to figure out why a ship was loaded with 450,000 pounds of chemicals when the Bill of Sale called for 500,000.
It’s my job to discover the root causes and then fix the problems, and it’s never anything interesting: no corporate espionage, no embezzling, nothing being clandestinely smuggled for nefarious purposes, nothing like that. It’s always “the machine spirit stopped responding” or “there was too much gunk in the line so we had to flush it” or any other number of by-the-books reasons why a chemical production plant encounters issues with production.
Because I have a stable job that pays me well, and because I am not a bad person (at least I hope), I have been blessed to have friends, and hobbies, and disposable income. But there’s only so much I can do when I know in the back of my head that I need to remain under the radar. So just like my professional life has been dominated by routine, the same is true for my personal life.
Every day after work, I meet my friends at our favorite bar. We grab a table, share some drinks, share some laughs, eat some food, talk, watch the latest Imperial propaganda, and just have a good time. We never stay longer than two hours. No one drinks to the point of drunkenness. No one gets into any fights. No one goes home with any mysterious strangers.
All of my friends have loving wives or dedicated husbands and wonderful children. I’m always the first to volunteer whenever somebody needs a babysitter. My friends deserve an occasional night out to help keep that spark in their marriage alive. Plus their kids are great, so babysitting is easy.
I don’t have any children of my own, and I’ve never even had any meaningful relationships. But this is simply a price that I am willing to pay in order to stay concealed. And it’s hard to picture myself in a lasting relationship when I’ve always known that I may need to flee this world at a moment’s notice.
Sometimes I find myself bored by the monotony of my life. But I do have some hobbies: I enjoy walking in my local park. I enjoy building models of spaceships. I enjoy swimming. As an orphan myself, I occasionally volunteer at a local orphanage and spend a respectable amount of my disposable income helping them.
I am… a good person.
I hope.
At the very least, I believe I have convincingly pretended to be a good person for the last three thousand six hundred and fifty days.
I crafted and carefully maintained this life in order to hide one simple yet inescapable fact: I’m extremely dangerous. I’m an unlicensed, escaped psyker. It started when I was just a baby: technology has always worked in unusual ways whenever I am near. Since a child, my powers have never stopped... evolving.
That feels like the right word. My powers have evolved to a point where I can now understand and communicate with machine spirits using my mind. But that’s only where it starts. I can sense their emotions. I can look through their eyes and see what they see. I can look further, into their very spirits, and see their entire life’s story. I can influence them.
I can heal them.
My name is Jonathan Willis. This is my story.
