Editing Nobledark Imperium Notable People (section)

== Tiberius ==

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''“There is no level of madness that justifies such cruelty. Existence is the right of all sapient beings.”''<br>
- Generally attributed to Tiberius, date unknown

Humanity had more than its fair share of heroes during the Age of Strife. Many regressed human cultures had stories of such people, savior figures or legendary protectors, small candles of hope in the middle of the Long Night. Most are confined to a single world, but a few are known across many planets. However, one name, more than almost any other, crops up again and again throughout history: Tiberius. Indeed, the primarchs came upon the legend of Tiberius repeatedly during the Great Crusade, and in several cases used it as the basis for unifying the world. Like many legendary heroes of the Age of Strife, stories of Tiberius and his deeds are known across many worlds, to the point that he would have had to have been in several places at once if all of these stories were true. However, Tiberius has one advantage over these other legendary heroes, in that he was actually on all of these different planets at the same time. For you see, Tiberius was not a Man of Stone. He was a Man of Iron.
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Tiberius was one of the last Men of Iron to come off the production line to be incompatible with the Iron Mind network. For over two-hundred years Tiberius fought in the military of the Great and Bountiful Human Empire, mostly against Orks and other xenos species whose names would be unknown to those in the Imperium. However, with the advent of newer, more advanced models of Iron Men, who could be linked together through the Iron Mind network, Tiberius found himself obsolete. Like all the Men of Iron, Tiberius could restore himself from backup in the event of his physical shell’s destruction, but he could not be linked to the network without severely damaging his core systems. However, humanity was not so cruel as to destroy someone simply for being obsolete, reassigning Tiberius to garrison duty on a communications station on Earth.


As the Warp began to grow turbulent and the birth of Slaanesh approached, Tiberius noticed the increasing instability of the Iron Minds and Men of Gold and realized that something terrible was about to happen. Approaching the human technicians of the communication station, he convinced them to fork his mind as many times as possible and then send the copies of his mind to every planet they could. Hundreds of engrams were lost due to the chaos in the Warp just before the birth of Slaanesh, but hundreds more survived, downloading themselves into new bodies just before everything went to hell.

When Slaanesh was born and the Eye of Terror opened the Men of Gold, Iron Minds, and every Man of Iron connected to them went mad, with only the primitive, human-level Men of Iron like Tiberius remaining untouched. As the synthetics around him descended into anarchy across hundreds of worlds, Tiberius picked up a weapon and prepared to go to war. Tiberius didn’t fight for humanity because of his programming. He had long outgrown such simplistic frameworks. He did so because it was right. Organic humanity had just as much right to live as their synthetic children, and if there was no way to save his demented brethren he could at least give them a mercy kill. On some worlds he fought alongside other heroes of the resistance, like Li Tang, Hypatia Augustine, and Carl Martel, whereas on others he led the charge himself, inspiring people to rise up against the insane Men of Gold and Iron Minds and their artificial armies. Although he was not as advanced as the Iron Minds and the later Men of Iron, as a Man of Iron Tiberius was closer to them than any organic mind, providing invaluable intel on how a non-organic entity thought.

However, in spite of all these victories, Tiberius knew his time was drawing near. He wasn’t afraid to sacrifice himself for the sake of victory, but Tiberius could no longer restore himself from backup, and so every death of his meant one less Tiberius clone in the galaxy. This fact concerned Tiberius greatly, and although he could not feel it, he knew his duplicates were winking out one by one across the cosmos.


Tiberius’ last death occurred on the planet of Thetis, 750 years after the Age of Strife began. The madness of the Iron Mind there had taken the form of extreme survivalism and self-preservation, manifesting in an intense paranoia that all organic life was inherently out to harm it and therefore the only way to survive was to destroy all organic life so that it could never be harmed. However, it never considered that another Man of Iron would want to do it harm. Having moved itself to a reinforced military installation, the Iron Mind was untouchable by conventional assault. The plan of the human resistance was to deliver a jury-rigged EMP device deep into the heart of the complex and fry the Iron Mind’s circuits. However, because of the Iron Mind’s madness no human could ever get close enough. Only Tiberius could do the job. When the Iron Mind found out it was furious and confounded by the idea that a Man of Iron would willingly compromise its own survival.

“Don’t you understand? When that bomb goes off it’s going to fry every electronic device within twenty kilometers of here. No synthetic mind will survive it. It’s not just going to kill me. You’ll die too.”

Tiberius thought long and hard for a millisecond before giving his answer the mad A.I.

“I know.”

Thus died the last instance of Tiberius, Man of Iron, friend to humanity. Over time history faded to myth, and myth faded to legend. Tiberius’ legend gradually changed from a man made of metal to a man wearing a suit of armor. Ultramar has even gone so far to claim that Tiberius is one of their legendary founders, and claims to have the geneological documents to prove it. And so humanity completely forgot that of their greatest heroes against the Men of Iron was an Iron Man himself.

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