Next up is a set of servo-skulls. Three of them are from Anvil (the smaller ones) and two are old GW ones (the larger pair) that I got as part of a set of Inquisitorial acolytes that I picked up on eBay a while back. I wanted at least one each that would fairly obviously pass muster as gun, sensor and medi skulls for Necromunda purposes, which would require a bit of light converting.
On the left, the sensor skull received Anvil gunsights on either side of the skull and a bit of fuse wire as a cable from one of the sights at the rear. Next is the medi skull, which had a manipulator claw added (made from the loop antennae from a Cadian comms backpack, with a section cut out) and a fuse wire syringe added to the left hand tool. The brazier skull and small gun skull are straight Anvil. The right hand skull had a new muzzle added to its gun and an Anvil hat (with the head below it cut off and hollowed out) fitted to make it a bit different. The two GW skulls also had trailing cables added (de rigueur for the fashionable servo-skull about town) from the offcuts I removed from my Blackstone Negavolt Cultists.
I then got slightly carried away with the background story as to why servo-skull 86-RH13 is sporting a hat. “My name’s Genghis and I have a narrative 40K problem.” (Story below.)
Other than the physical skull itself, nothing remains of the person that was. Be they a mighty hero of Imperium, honoured with the opportunity for service even in death; or the lowliest of criminals, whose corpse was to hand when a new servo-skull was required, the skull is separated from the body, thoroughly cleansed, polished and fitted with whatever sensors, tools or cogitators it’s future role demands. But that’s all the skull is, a vessel for its manufactured components. The idea that something of the individual remains, a trace of their soul perhaps, or a fragment of memory, is ludicrous. One might as well suggest that servitors are sentient beings with a right to liberty. But how else to explain servo-skull 86-RH13?
In life, Jon Pine was unremarkable. He was a night watchman at a mid-rise hab block in a respectable enough workers habclave. A middling man, doing a middling job in a middling location. One night, whilst confronting a Spook dealer pushing his product in the lee of the hab block, things escalated and Pine took two shotgun blasts to the chest, dying almost instantly (he went down fighting, however, the dealer was found half a block away having bled out from stub gun wounds). Other than with his family, and those few residents who stopped to pass the time of day with him (or, more aptly, night), Pine’s life left no imprint upon the world. In death, however, he is most remarkable, an enigma whose mystery excites debate far beyond the planet where he spent his life in worthy anonymity.
Servo-skull 86-RH13 was built as a standard pattern light security/patrol system, with a basic sensor suite, compact autopistol and general purpose manipulator arm. Assigned to roving security patrol duties at a series of largely unimportant locations that only warranted the most minimal of protection, the similarity to the skull’s former owner’s duties went entirely unnoticed and unremarked. At first, 86-RH13 carried out its duties within acceptable parameters, but after a few months, it began deviating from its patrol routes and, upon investigation, its internal records covering most of those periods were discovered to be corrupted beyond recovery. They tried bringing 86-RH13 in for servicing, and even scrubbed and reprogrammed its cogitator, but the aberrant behaviour persisted.
One night, at the end of its designated patrol cycle, 86-RH13 returned to the servo-skull sheds with an old night watchman’s hat atop it. The duty maintenance adept assumed it had been put there as a joke by some kids playing a very dangerous game, or perhaps some sort of gang initiation – by rights, such interference should have triggered the self-defence protocols, but 86-RH13’s autopistol remained unfired. She removed the hat and threw it on the top of a charging station, out of the way. The next night, the same adept was somewhat bemused to see 86-RH13 return sporting a similar-looking hat – was this about to turn into an ongoing joke with whoever was putting the hats on the servo-skull? If they could figure out why the self-defence protocols weren’t activating, it would come to a stop very quickly. She removed the hat and made to throw it up with the other, but it was no longer there. Puzzled, she instead locked it in the adepts’ office, and made a mental note to ask the day shift if they’d moved the hat.
The next morning at shift changeover, she was walking through the service area, handing over to her relief, who’d denied any knowledge of moving the hat. As they neared the adepts’ office, she could hear a rhythmic thumping; rounding the corner, they were met with the sight of 86-RH13 bumping against the locked door. They shooed it away and made to enter the office, but as she opened the door, the servo-skull darted past them towards the shelves where the hat sat. It proceeded to grab the hat with its manipulator arm and put it on, whereupon it bobbed about, gave a couple of merry beeps and then hovered there, somehow managing (despite its lack of expressive features) to look smug.
Puzzled by this behaviour, the adepts tried to grab the hat, but 86-RH13 drew away from them and started cycling through the warning phases of its self-defence protocols, prompting them to hastily back off. A subsequent diagnostics check showed nothing unusual with the servo-skull, other than the, now standard, blank periods in its records for the previous few nights. Not wanting to cause a fuss, the two adepts agreed to just pretend this had never happened and ignore the fact that one of their patrol skulls was now sporting a night watchman’s hat. That particular unit had already caused quite enough work for them with its erratic behaviour and theirs was a quiet servo-skull servicing unit that management rarely graced with its presence, there was nothing to be gained by drawing attention to themselves. This decision seemed to have been vindicated by the fact that, since finding the hat, 86-RH13 stopped deviating from its patrols, and the blank periods in its internal records ceased. Everything was back to normal. If you ignored the servo-skull wearing a night watchman’s hat.
In hindsight, relying upon that last caveat was a bit of forlorn hope; eventually someone was going to notice, and care enough to report, a servo-skull wearing a hat. Questions were asked, investigations made, experiments conducted - all gave the same result. Attempts to remove the hat triggered 86-RH13’s self-defence protocols if it was active. If the hat was removed whilst it was dormant, it ignored all commands until it had retrieved the hat. Scrubbing and reinstalling its programming would buy a few weeks’ normal operation, but eventually it would start looking for the hat again, and ignore similar-looking substitutes presented to it. Even wholesale replacing of the cogitator engines within it only gave a couple of months of normalcy, before the aberrant behaviour reasserted itself. (Throughout these experiments, without ever being discussed, it was tacitly agreed that no one would actually throw the hat away – after all, 86-RH13 operated normally when it wore the hat.) The upshot was much the same as the shift adepts’ original decision, the servo-skull was doing its job, so why not just stop asking awkward questions.
Eventually, on a wild hunch, someone dug into the skull’s history and made the connection to Jon Pine. Asking the new night watchman at the hab block, it emerged that they’d kept Pine’s hat behind the desk as a mark of respect, but that it had gone missing a few years previously. Thankfully, the Imperium never knowingly deletes surveillance data, and the pict-recording of the hab’s watch desk was still in the system. Pulling the feed from the night 86-RH13 first returned with the hat revealed a grainy clip of a standard pattern patrol servo-skull following the night watchman into the building as he returned from a patrol, then hiding until he went back out. The servo-skull then briefly disappeared behind the desk, reappearing wearing an old night watchman’s hat; it then discretely followed a resident out of the door and disappeared into the night. All this was deemed very interesting, but there was no definitive proof that the servo-skull in question was 86-RH13; there were thousands of servo-skulls of that pattern in this city, with no distinguishing features that could be made out on the grainy pict images. This was just a coincidence. To imply otherwise, would be suggesting that the servo-skull somehow retained memories of its former life, and that’s impossible.
To this day, servo-skull 86-RH13 still conducts its assigned security patrols within acceptable parameters. The adepts stopped trying to understand it, or take away the hat, long ago. The unit’s output was acceptable, so this was filed away as one of those mysteries the Omnissiah was not ready to shed light upon yet. Occasionally this tale rears its head, both on and off-world, but is generally dismissed as a myth. Everyone knows that other than the physical skull itself, nothing remains of the person that was. Right?
11 April 2013, 07:56:24 PM