SERVITORS: I HAVE NO VOX AND I MUST SCREAM | Warhammer 40k Lore 

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Best title for a podcast so far! I love that short story.

Reminds me of a moment from a Ciaphas Cain book, where Cain is walking with this Tau diplomat who suddenly starts breathing rapidly, walking faster, and seems to be on the verge of a panic attack. Cain can't figure out what is wrong, not realizing it was because they walked past some servitors. The fact humans were lebodomizing and mutilating their own people was, rightly, entirely horrifying to the Tau, while to Cain, like everyone else in the imperium, it is just normal.

The Drukari will turn you into a foot stool. The Empire will make you a light switch.

Tech Priest: [Congratulations, you are being rescued.] Imperial Guardsman: "Oh good, I just got small cut from cleaning the knife. I just need small medkit." Tech Priest: [Don't worry, we have great health care program. You will be brand new in no time.]

It’s important to note the difference between Cogitators and Servitors. Cogitators are just computers and have no human brain. They show up all the time in the Eisenhorn and related spin off books. But anything that has a brain in it is a servitor.

Ah, yes. The incredibly easy question of which death is worse. Warhammer 40k edition: 1. Being turning into a flashlight by the Imperium. 2. Being turning into a fleshlight by the dark aldar.

Skitarii are as autonomous as their tech priest wishes. In the book Skitarius, the skitarii are actual individuals because their tech priest believes it would be more advantageous to their missions. And ruststalkers are just veterans who have more augmentations.

Ya’ll never talked about my boi Pinchy. This servo-skull was made to locate missing socks. However in a startling oversight from the tech-priests who made it, the skull was incorrectly programmed and could not distinguish between socks that were missing and socks that were definitely not missing and still, in fact, attached to the feet of their owner. The soldiers of the barracks it was assigned to didn't seem to mind though, even going so far as to name it "Pinchy" and declare it "indispensable to company morale." Pinchy never actually did find any missing socks though.

The best servitor story is from “Hellsreach”. Where one is tasked to sweep the church everyday and it can’t rest until it’s done. It’s broom breaks and nobody is around to replace it. So, it exhausts all of its energy walking around making sweeping motions until it dies because it can’t finish sweeping. They throw it off the wall in to the cemetery that he used to be the grounds keeper for.

11:10 The rare case of DK being right and Bricky being wrong. Servo-skulls are made of loyal adepts or zealous servants of the Imperium, who after death, have their skulls taken to be used in the creation of servo skulls. Like this, they may continue to serve the Imperium even in death.

"Basically anything in 40k that's a robot." Except for the Kastellan Robots, which are actual robots except they require a specialized tech-priest to run along next to them and shove updated control chips into them every time they need to do something different. I always imagine one of these guys accidentally snapping one of the wafers in half when putting it into the slot, USB stick style and then being unable to shut the rampaging murder machine that's still acting on the last chip of "kill them all" down...

Rogue Trader has a random event where you can discover that a group of your servitors has spontaniously regained some of their memories and emotions. Like, they glitch out, wave at you/mimic your actions, and when you take them apart to find out what is wrong the others react with visible fear. You have the option to mind wipe them again, just chuck them out the airlock, or you can mercy kill them in order to free them from the hell they've awoken to, while noting that they "honorably finished their service" or some such. There is also another servitor you can find in a side quest where the guy who made it *deliberately* ensured it was not mind wiped and was fully aware, just unable to control itself. The horror that represents...

The actual backbone of the Imperium.

In my opinion the most terrifying part about servitors is that not all of them get their minds completely wiped, and still maintain a lot of their higher brain functions. So in that case they end up basically being a mind trapped inside their own body, unable to do anything with their body on their own and having no hope of being relieved from the torment. aka literally endless suffering.

Fun fact: in Lords of Mars, a main character (normal human with minimal augmentation) is given a chance to interface with every single servitor on an Ark Mechanicus at once. He quickly finds out that servitors are *not*, in fact, mindless. They are, instead, mind *locked*, with fragmented memories. All he can hear are screams.

Lets not forget, Dark Mechanicus also makes servitors, imagine chaos servitors

Skitarii are not servitors, but are basically a step above them. They have their own rank structure, and there's a Mechanicus novel that follows one of their marshals as the protagonist. Theyre heavily cyborg'd out and have a lot of brainwashing in place, but are capable of taking initiative and retaining some individuality.

Imagine a vending machine servitor, like multiple dudes stitched together so the actual goods are where their ribcages/guts would have been. And you inserts coins/tokens in their mouth or scan your credit card with their eyes. then they hand you your snack. And they would be able to move (4 legs being more stable than 2)... Servitors are such nightmare fuel, and I love them for it.

Ah yes, Servitors; The Squigs of the Imperium. You can make them into WHATEVER you need! Like Squigs!

You know, it's impressive that in an episode about servitors the most unsettling thing I saw was Shy editing the sword wiper to be cleaning the Great Clean one.

Note that while a lot of servitors are criminals, most aren't. Most are just people deemed 'surplus to requirement' and the Admech have a really nasty track record of receiving refugee ships and just mass processing everyone inside into wetware.

Oh boy, the sheer level of humans being devalued to becoming semi sentient forklifts. My favorite!

30:03 "I know most people who get servitorized are like heretics and criminals...." Oh, DK, you sweet, sweet summer child.

Servo-skulls are generally only created from people that are considered to have served the Imperium well in some capacity, it's literally a honor to be made into one after death. They are sort of like the closest thing regular humans get to being interred in a dreadnought, if that makes any sense? Also there is at least one Space Marine servo-skull in the codex.

Honestly, battle servitors have it the easiest of the bunch. At least the enemies of the Omnissiah can grant them the gift of death.

In the 40k kids books the main character thinks that all servitors are vat-grown, but the book acknowledges that she has a bad feeling it's a lie her parents have told her.

I'm gonna say that Skitarii are definitely _not_ servitors. They are humans with heavy cybernetic upgrades, but closer to tech-priests in that they retain their individuality, their ability to communicate, their self-awareness. They know their names. In the most recent Cain book, we meet a Skitarii senior officer who has a sense of humor.

We need Dark Mechanicus rules with heretical xenos servitors. Imagine being a guardsman, and you're fighting off some chaos cultists, then the servitor venomthropes show up.

Bricky forgot the missile servitor, the servitors who control the missile guiding system from the missile itself (sent from voidships)

Fun fact: Despite Adeptus Mechanicus being the most recognised users of servitors and their new codex having multiple sections about them, as of now Adeptus mechanicus can't use regular battle servitors as units (But do use special variants of them)

Servitor: What is my purpose? Mechanicus: You open doors. Servitor: Oh my god.

One of the most disturbing elements of the Imperium is just how needlessly cruel they are, and how clinically this cruelty is. The vast majority of humanity lives in squallor, little more than thralls for a great bureacratic machine that is long dead but continues only through inertia and scale. They toil, ceaselessly, and when they can toil no more, their flesh is made into meat or machine for the sheer utility of that their bodies are a resource that someone desires to utilize. There are more humans in the Imperium than have ever existed in our timeline. And yet the value of human life is so infinitesimal that it barely even registers as a thousandth of a percentage. Entire generations are churned out as soldiers or servitors or foodstuffs to perpetuate something that should by all rights- by all justice and righteousness- have died long ago. And yet it does this because it claims it is necessary. But is it? The pain the Imperium inflicts on its populace, the sheer evil it commits in banal mundanity, eclipses everything else in the setting. The Imperium is a nightmare. No one in it can even be said to be human anymore, for how often can they be said to be alive? Everyone- from the lowliest hive worlder to the highest born noble- are merely resources. It is necessary because someone long long ago declared it necessary, and it has continued to be because of stagnation and decay. It is a cannibal eating its own flesh. Are there horrors in the grimdarkness? Of course. None can deny the terrible machinations of the drukhari, the aloof elitism of the Eldari, the unstoppable revanchism of the Necrons, the single-minded conflict of the Orks, or the all-devouring tides of the Hive Mind. But it is the Imperium that is the greatest horror, the greatest evil, because it treats people worse than even we treat livestock. There are those who say things would be different with the Emperor in charge, but it was the same thing as it is now: cruelty, disguised as necessity, lies twisted into truth by sheer repitition over endless time. What was the fate of the Interex or the Diasporex? What was the fate of all who crawled out of the Age of Strife with what little hope they had, what little desire they had for a better world? Annihilation, pure and simple. Why? Because it was "necessary". Because it was "required". Countless excuses fueling endless cruelty because one being- one "Man"- desired galactic domination at any cost. The Emperor was no different than any other petty warlord on Terra beyond the fact that he won. But this victory was not born from righteousness, or justice. It was born from cruelty, from intentional ignorance, from the distortion of the basic concepts of truth and necessity and worth. Humanity is dead in the 42nd millennium. There is nothing left but rotting bones.

I highly recommend reading the forges of Mars series, it goes into the horrible treatment of menials and servitors by the mechanics while also having large scale conflict and higher tier problems

Every week, I check to see if they are making Bricky's forehead just a little taller each episode

DK and Bricky are basically shay's servitors. They just aren't aware of it.

With cherubs its probably most like many things with 40k nothing is standardized so there probably are still worlds that use actual babies

In one story, a Space Marine scout sniper disobeyed orders and took the shot. The ork boss had a force field, and the scout's Captain died in the ensuing fight. The council of officers at the hearing (which did not include the acout) decided on conversion to a gun servitor, "so his skills could continue to serve the chapter." This was the lenient compromise of a sentence.

The process of becoming a servitor reminds me of Strogification from Quake.

There is this one servitor that sisters I think can role out on the table top that the story is during a battle sister were fighting along side the imperial guards and the sister who was carrying the flag died but a guardsmen jumped into action and took up the banner before it touched the ground and the sisters were so moved by this they made him into a servitor to carry the banner into battle

You've just been Strogged. 34:05 Guntank.

I think one of the most horrifying parts of servitors isn´t the body horror of being turned into one, but how ubiquitous they are in the entire imperium. Lobotomization and mutilation en masse is seen as normal.

In the grim future, servitors toil, Machinery melds with flesh, a relentless coil. Mechadendrites whirr, augmenting the weak, For the Imperium's will, they tirelessly seek. Half-human, half-machine, in unending labor, Silent servants, no rest, no time for flavor. Forged in the foundries of Mars' sacred forge, They march 'neath the banners of the Omnissiah's gorge. Tech-adepts guide them, their minds intertwined, In the dark corners of the Mechanicus mind. A fusion of flesh and cold metal alloy, In the 41st millennium, they're the Emperor's ploy.

Cherubs are now usually vat grown , however especially Rich people still get themselves the "real deal" Basically using them as a symbol of status / artworks

Shout out to all door servitors out there, you fellas are the real ones, without everyone in the imperium would have to... To.... *shudders* to use d o o r k n o b s

In one of the Forges of Mars books, they discuss the surgery of servitors and arcoflagellants in a very up close and personal way

Just a thought: By putting people into every machine the Ad Mech are physically implementing there dogma that every machine has a "machine" spirit. They don't seem to understand that the malfunctions they observe to be signs of spirits in all machines are likely coming from the people and not the machines. One can see the line of thought trail from necessity during mar's isolation (snow piercer style repairs) to tradition honoring the sacrificed to the religious ritual of actions as knowledge of the why of it was lost.

I knew it would be the thing from flesh and steel before they started the quote! Book was great! The process is worse than what they're referencing, I believe they did all the augment surgeries removing limbs and grafting on tools, and the last step was the mind wiping process. The whole book made it clear servitors have enough of their identity left to HATE their existence.

Bricky: in everything is servitor Cawl: yes there are definitly servitors in all my automated devices

The truly terrifying aspect of servitors is how close they are to what has been done historically to cognitively disabled people. We have lobotomized the disabled to try to "cure" them (cure in quotes, because if your disabilty is a developmental one, that's just part of who you are and you have to learn ways to cope with it). We also have tried to (and still do try to) essentially mentally reprogram developmentally disabled people into being pale imitations of "humans" (quotes as, no joke, the pioneer of such therapies Ivar Lovaas wrote in his book about it that his patients were not human otherwise). It really isn't that much of a stretch to apply such techniques into making servitors in the 40K universe😊.

People wonder why the Mechanicus always seem to lose in their own books. Then you read their lore and you remember they’re almost as evil as the Drukhari. They don’t usually deserve to win.

My favorite servitor fact is that it doubles as the Healthcare program for guardsmen with too much PTSD to fight. You get to the therapy planet to heal, and if you haven't miraculously recovered from lifelong trauma in the first few weeks they send you next door to the servitor assembly line. Hey, if the only thing preventing them from fighting in the Emperor's name is their weak human brain, simply remove their brain.

Vox in the Dark has one of the most terrifying stories ever about them. Also fantastic Night Lord stories.

Minesweeping is what the penal legions are for.

All computers and connected functions inside a ship being powered by given the size probably something like a million servitors cabled together gives a whole new outlook to the machine spirit concept.

Go DK for scoring one on Bricky with that Servo Skull knowledge. Hell, even I remembered that they’re honorable. :p

The servitor becoming self aware is similar to the failed exo facilities at bray tech literally tearing themselves apart in order to free their flesh from their metallic prison.

So, the lore for the Skitarii might have changed, but in the novel creatively titled, *Skitarii,* it's demonstrated that Skitarii soldiers do remember their previous life, and the main character was actually a former menial/security guard who "worked his way up" in the ranks It's not nearly as good as some other 40k novels, but the duology does a good job of describing how a tech-priest controls the Skitarii. It's not so much direct possession. Rather, the Tech-Priest constantly makes micro-adjustments in what the Skitarii unit as a whole are doing mid-battle. So an individual Skitarii will be fighting as normal until they feel the "Divine motive force" compel them to suddenly change tactics or fix a minor mistake in their aim. Then, the "motive force" leaves, and the Skitarii continues fighting having felt, for just a moment, the machine god's guidance. It's really conceptually interesting since it's not just a person without free will, it's a person who never knows when they'll suddenly and momentarily lose free will and has become completely inured to this state of being

I always wanted a short story where a servator is sentient and awake during their existence. Slowly growing angrier and angrier until they explode as a demon of khorn.

Theres no brains in servo skulls!

about the thing with small trauma damage being able to wake up a servitor a little. in the Mechanicus game, when a servitor takes damage, they get a cognition point. they integrated the idea in just that seamlessly

For anyone wondering the book “Flesh and Steel” a crime noir story and I hugely recommend it, it shows the world of 40K from a very human point of view, as well as a look at the hive cities, high nobles as well as the ad mech and their faith.

Space Marines do have servitors they can run… they’re listed as “Astartes Servitors” for their datasheet

The story " I am" is my favorite servitor story some real nightmare fuel

Just when you think Shy is gonna let DK off with this one it's quote time

22:00 Greetings from the Momo swarm, Bricky! Was great seeing a collab between two of my favorite creators.

Still mad as hell that the techmarine with servitors aren’t in print or sold anymore. Still hoping that GW makes a whole box of them just for admech for more disposable units than their skitarii

I heard wine servitor and my brain screams; “WINE TIMOTHY!!!!”

Cogitators are the peak of grimdark for me. Machinery literally fueled by death

I'm a little surprised they didn't mention the clown servitor which was literally a kids toy, or the pleasure servitors...you know what, kinda glad they didn't :)

Vox in the Void has an audio book/drama/thingy that has the process of being turned into a servitor, was called "abomination" iirc highly recommend

DK was right! There’s a story where an administorum priest had a servo-skull of his old teacher who he had a crush on, and he quite cherished it. And another story where I think a tech priest’s gf or bf (kinda) kept him company. I might be conflating two stories though 😅

I now understand, and have greater sympathy, for the genestealer cults

Just to clarify, basic Servitors seem to be moving to Legends for some codexes. Marines and Admech removed them with their codexes. It's possible guard will also remove them when their codex arrives.

18:58 In one of the Ravenor books (Gideon Ravenor is an Inquisitor that's so injured that he's confined to a super fancy wheelchair like Professor X, but he's also a crazy powerful psyker) we get a scene where he is scrying the area as a form of meditation, and he touches the mind of a servitor that's working in a warehouse. The line is something like "The servitor was having trouble stacking the boxes in the correct stacks, all the boxes were clearly labelled in huge letters."

‘I AM’ is a Servitor story found on RU-vid that left me heartbroken. Excellent story.

Humanity: "We circumvented the mysterious corruption of our AIs by turning billions of people into horrible servitors." Vashtorr: "Yep. That was totally your idea." ALSO "I don't want to be a servitor." "Your choices are bidet servitor or..." "Any other kind of servitor is fine."

Listen to "I Am" from Vox in the Void. It's about the life of a Servitor that was left fully conscious. Its very good and very disturbing. 😁👍

With how ubiquitous psykers are in this setting you’d think it would be a bad idea to use human brains as wetware computers.

The bit about the servitor passing butter reminded me of a RU-vidr that’s trying to make a circuit board from human neurons to control a robot that passes butter.

46:12 shy scares me sometimes with these Easter eggs

Why do we have so many lobotomy cyborg mass production assembly lines? Because this is the most efficient way to make doors. Praise the Omnissiah.

30:07 Did this man just say "Oh my GOD?!" Mr. Electric, servitorize this man!

A great example of servo skulls being more honorable is in the book Outgunned. The main character, who is a propagandist, is allowed to have 3 different servo skulls who fill different roles and still have some of the curiosity and skill of the old honored propagandists that they were made from

You better keep the wiping servitor on the end scene, it's too important to leave out now

"Was that sound Bricky's balls dropping?" "Nope, that was him laying the pipe."

If you want a good experience what the conversation feels like, listen to "Abomination" by A Vox in the Void. Really punts into perspective how horrifying the Mechanicus actually is.

I think my favorite mind of servitor, just to show how messed up the Imperium is, is the one that pilots some sort of war machine that isn't safe for usage, so at some point, the poor sap piloting it dies from energy burn out or environmental damage. At which point the machine opens, the body is chucked out like a spent shell casing, and someone else is commanded to jump in and resume piloting it

This is the best episode title you could've come up with, amazing stuff. 🎉🎉🎉

I remember there was one story where a guy insults the mechanicus and gets secretly servitorized as a punishment. They frame it as a "tragic accident" all while the tech priestess who ordered it smiles in smug satisfaction. The most horrifying part of it is they intentionally leave the actual "lobotomization" part for last specifically to torture this guy.

I bet the choir servitor sounds like the sardaukar singer from Villeneuve's Dune.

Would love a series on Necromunda. It seems like tons of hidden gems (including miniatures) that even long-time 40k fans and players don’t even know exist. Maybe start off with “All factions in Necromunda) and then spin off from there

Bricky would pose as an Ecclesiarchy servitor just so he could be a servant to the Sisters of Battle and bring them things. He would be so submissive to them that they wouldn't tell he isn't a servitor until he slips up.

Skitarii troops are different from Servitors in many aspects, but more in a sense how they are perceived by Adeptus mechanicus: They are soldiers of the machine god, just as replacable as imperial guard soldiers, but augmented to specific needs of their tech-priest. There are still susceptible to morale issues, just to a lesser extend than other troops. They are considered to be higher than servitors, but not by much In regards to their strength, they range from slightly above regular guardsmen to almost-scion level. And sicarians (So ruststalkers and infiltrators) are the same skitarii who lost too much fleshy bits, but were not honored to become skitarii marshals, resulting in being turned into agile murder machines

If that Factor company doesn't make a Corpse Starch flavored meal, are they even really trying?

some fun notes: 1. servitors are anything with a brain, cogitators are actual computers 2. archoflagellatns are a fun system for a robot, where not only is it brainwashing but the person isn't still "there", before you use them, you have to scan everything in front of them and identify friend and foe, THEN give a killword, and you will bear witness to that flagellant go on an unstoppable rampagn of psychostim fueled rage and endurance until each and every marked "heretic" is dead. 3. Skitarii are actually there in those brain buckets, a LOT of them are autonomous however most of them are also tied to their commanders and believe the order they receive mentally are those given by The Machine God itself, not the commander. Ruststalkers are veteran skitarii, heavily augmented, and even MORE free thinking, it's actually quite common (by 40k numbers) for skitarii to become priests/commanders in their own autonomy 4. the tau HATE servitors, as such the admech know this and use them a lot against tau 5. servitors are the perfect use for criminals 6.cherubs are MOSTLY vat grown clones, and that's from the lore itself, "mostly", you'll never tell which is what tho

I like how its hinted even though they've been mind wiped an lobotomized some part of their soul is trapped in there.

If they are linked to their owner by a psychic link, aren'tt hey technically familiars instead of servitors?

"Servitors: In case you were thinking if the Imperium was just the misunderstood good guys."

Another good "Making of a servitor" story is Stephen Duxbury short story "Abomination" @voxinthevoid has a great reading of it as well as another great Servitor story called "I Am