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He had to keep hawking up the mucus in his throat and it tasted like iron. His vision swam and his head pulsed. He was in a cage in a stone built warehouse. Somewhere high above there were windows or lumens, he couldn't tell which, and from them came a fuzzy champagne light that cast a warm grey sepia tint over the glistening black walls. His face fell slowly into a frown and he could feel his lips tremble and then the tears came. Despair, sadness, like an ache in his soul. He felt hollow. Powdery grit on the floor chafed his knees and the arches of his feet as he half crawled, half dragged himself into a corner. He didn't have the strength anymore to even throw himself down, he just spread out. It was hard to breath. His mind was trying to protect him, throwing up fleeting images of happy times, nice things but his new reality was too all encompassing. He kept getting another image, of a man in black, choppy water, drowning, gasping for air as he surfaced, going under again, water pushing up his nose. The man could see light on the shore, so close, people were talking, but they couldn't hear him choking, couldn't see him trying to claw his way up into the air for just one more breath. The man was alone. The man was dying.

All around there were moans and occasionally harsh barks and coughs of static which grated on the senses like squeezed styrene foam. There was a constant, distant rumbling and clanking. They had beaten him often and brutally. They had hung hum by an arm, by a leg until the limb was swollen and purple. They had pressed brands onto his flesh, snipped him with shears. It had been hard and strange to see pieces of himself dropped to the floor. The assaults on his body were painful, but it was the blows to his head that hurt him the most. Emotionally, mentally, they were the wounds that cut deepest; hitting his face felt personal.

He heard the scrape of the key spike as it was fumbled into the lock. The gate trundled open on a greasy rack and pinion. The hooded thing looked for him almost blindly and clomped into the cell. It drooled a constant growl of electric feedback, like some lonely thing made mad after too long by itself. Eyes like coals tracked him as he shuffled up against the cage bars. A pneumatic arm shot out and clamped onto his calf. It was a poor grip but the steel jaws just squeezed harder to compensate. The crushing pressure on his leg felt like fire and ice, heavy, he could feel the muscle tearing. He howled, begged. This was degradation, humiliation, this pitiful state he was reduced too. It was the fact he knew nothing he did or said would stop what was happening that was the most demeaning part of it all but there had been too much pain for defiance to last.

He tried to stay limp so that it was easier for the thing to drag him, so that it didn't needlessly jerk on his pained leg. There were more cages like his, more people just like him. How could they treat human beings in this way? How could they stomach it? The cages were laid out in a grid and every so often there was a gap to allow for passage. One such break in the endless ranks of plasteel bars gave him a view of a raised platform. Everything was made of stone, black stone, and the platform was no different. It comprised a series of steps topped with iron sconces filled with burning oil that gave off a smoky, hellish light. There was a symbol on the wall. It looked like a wheel or a disk with evenly space pegs or spikes radiating out. It was the activity on the platform that drew his attention most though. There were more of the jailor things there, robed and cowled. Their limbs were thick with muscle and threaded with tubes and machine parts, the skin looked sickly and grey in the fitful fire light. One of them was methodically beating a naked woman. She was not chained, nor was she held. She had been beaten too badly already to attempt escape. Feebly she tried to curl into a foetal ball and her stick thin arms tried to fend off the blows. The beater, pushed her legs away, forcing her to uncurl before snatching her up by the shoulder. Another jailor cut off her arm with a pair of shears. As he was dragged past and the platform became hidden from view, he could see the shears snipping away at the woman's chest.

It wasn't until his head hit the first step that he looked around. He was being dragged onto another platform. He soiled himself as this information revealed itself to him. His jailor walked with a halting motion, as if each leg was operated separately: one leg up and forwards, second up and forwards, repeat. It meant he had perhaps half a second of stillness between each step which was more than enough to see everything waiting for him on the platform. There was a wooden chair, made from thick timbers; there was a wheeled metal trolley; there were blood channels leading to a clogged drain cover with sweaty brown creatures the size of his thumb scuttling along, stopping to examine every lump and crust of detritus. He was hauled up and slammed down into the chair. Before he could even think of escaping a brass mallet slammed into his face and then something took an ear off. There came swiftly the sound of a drill and this went down into his ear canal. Then a spike under a plate was driven in. This was then riveted to his skull. There were no words to describe this pain, this violation, only sounds.

From some hidden depth came a sudden strength and he began to kick and squirm, his blood pumping hot through his chest as this madness took him. It was useless of course. One or other of the jailor things thrust a face into his and screamed static and nonsense words. It took his leg in one still human hand and the touch of its skin on his was loathsome. From beneath the robe a spindly arm emerged and a buzz saw whined into life. Like a ham slicer in a butcher's shop, the saw took his legs off just below the hips. Then it took his left arm. Well, almost took his arm, it was still attached by a flap of skin and he watched as his limb was flensed back to the elbow before complete separation. This long flap of skin was crudely stitched to the stub of his shoulder with another spider legged tool from beneath the robe. The excess skin was neatly sliced away. He was lifted then by the back of the skull and taken over to tracked machine. A bulge of a ballast weight along one side acted as the counterbalance for a telescoping drill arm that was as thick as a tree trunk. There was an oval hole near the front and his torso was lowered into this. He felt a hundred teeth clamp onto his leg stumps and then punches into his stomach and lower back. He felt something trickle over his buttocks and realised that something within the machine had stabbed into him.

One of the jailor creatures tapped the metal disc over where he had once had an ear and the sound was loud and harsh, like someone knocking on a microphone in his head. Seemingly satisfied with this action a snaking cable extruded from the flesh of the jailor's arm, bringing little gobbets of grey flesh with it. This was inserted into the disk and he could feel it moving into his skull. The jailor rocked back on his heels and stared at the ceiling and a seemingly orgasmic shiver ran through the robed thing. There was a click though, from inside his head, and then the jailor began to make a squalling noise that pipped and hissed burbled. Then something happened in his mind. His body went ridged and his eyes locked dead ahead and a warm wetness began to ooze over his inner self. He was just barely aware of his nostril twitching as he fought what was happening but one last image of the drowning man came to mind, then blackness, then nothing.

The tendril pulled clear of the plate. The robed figure looked to its comrade and nodded. The other gave a short blurt of binaric cant and the fresh servitor activated. One track motionless while the other span made the tractor unit turn on the spot to face the Enginseer. He gave thanks to the Omnissiah and at the same time, in a sub-vocalisation, admonished the servitor for the misdemeanours in its old life that had brought it here. He dipped a brush into a dish of blessed unguent and flicked this across the bare chest of the servitor, consecrating it for its new service. A doctrina wafer was then inserted into the head plate and the servitor moved off down a ramp at the back edge of the platform to attend to its new function.

Golden, glorious radiance filled the holy temple of the Machine. Light streams of data flowed through the air with a constant update of the inmate manifest. One such parcel of data came to the Enginseer indicating that a punishment cycle had ended. With a heavy tread he moved down the stone steps, through the scintillating information cloud and off down the ranks of cells to locate the next mortal to be given a second chance to serve the Omnisiah and the Imperium.

Well, it's certainly better written than mine. I like the way you withheld the information about it being 40k until the end, quite nice.

Great story, really enjoyed it. You rarely see a story from the perspective of the Mechanicus and even rarer is a story relating to Servitors, especially their creation.

Bravo on selecting an interesting out of the box topic and executing it well.

Thank you all for the comments. I wanted to give the hint that it could be some kind of Chaos related nastiness since the Cog Mechanicus and the Star of Chaos are pretty similar in aspect.

I liked how you portrayed the brutality that is the Imperium of Man. Even though these people are criminals there is no way anyone deserves that fate and makes me shudder to look at all the Servitors that my Iron Hands army has in it.

This was something of an exorcism for me; all I will say is that tumblr (only just recently went on the site although I had heard of it) can lead to some very dark places...

However, servitors are represented as general machines and the fact that they were human in many cases (there are vat grown servitors too and what 'life' they experienced before they were turned into servitors I don't know) is often overlooked.

The other thing that has occurred to me about the lot of servitors is, presumably they can and often may retain many/all of their human 'parts'. Would servitors both male and female 'function' and would an owner make use of one of their servitors 'privately'. Hmm...

We know that part of the process is a full mind-wipe. We assume, due to the general nature of servitors as mindless drones that that process takes away more than mere memories. However, we also know that the process is used on Space Marines to shield them from the horror of having witnessed the daemonic and because it saves simply executing them to keep such knowledge secret. These Marines are supposedly reduced to an infantile state and in time recover.

I know there is debate about the level of mind-wiping going on, the depth of memory deletion but I would like to simply take the view of a full wind-wipe as outlined above. In that context, what manner of living heel to servitors inhabit? Is the recovery process artificially halted or is merely bypassed by programming, does a sentient awareness build up over time as the brain recovers but lives the new personality locked behind rote processes?

I think the lot of the servitor is pretty damn GrimDark when you get right down to it even if superficially they can be presented as just ornaments in the background of the 40K Universe that carry out their labour functions but receive little attention otherwise.

My real world visualisation for servitors, which is pretty gruesome, comes from the film 'Virus'. I don't say it's one of the most incredible films ever made but it's well worth a look.

I think it's where the idea that everyone knows about Chaos which you get in most Black Library novels diminishes the setting. You have standard horror movie fare just in the lobotomised criminal (and what level of 'crime' would justify servitorisation I wonder, probably nothing much in some cases) who now keeps the house clean, weeds the garden and makes all the meals. You don't even need daemons! Consequently Chaos should be pretty horrific and the way in which those who come into contact with it are dealt with by the Imperium afterwards equally horrid.