How Imperial Life Is Worse Than You Can Imagine
How Imperial Life Is Worse Than You Can Imagine
They say that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, but they never mention that those who continually repeat history are forced to live a life of abject squalor and experience horrors beyond comprehension, so pay attention for Emperor’s sake.
In many stories we often we overlook the little man, but for good reason, in an alternate universe composed solely of gargantuan war machines and men larger than most trees; who among us can blame our diminishing attention spans? Statistically a fourteen foot Goliath armed with a chainsaw tends to draw somewhat more attention from the general public than an unknown cobbler named Bob, that’s just a matter of Science™. Just like trying to draw the gawking attention of a group of teenage boys from a Titsplosion, or asking Michael Bay to not film said explosion, some forces in the universe are just irresistible by law.
But besides to continuous toil of countless wars and the perpetual threat of a Xeno invasion so horrifying in scope that it caused H. P. Lovecraft to cry himself to sleep, what’s so bad about your life? You live on a cushy planet orbiting a stable star in the midst of the Segmentum Solar, the most heavily garrisoned and highly prized quadrant in the Imperium. You live in a nice house with a nice normal family and a regular job. What do you have to complain about?
#5. Overcrowding
Many Imperial worlds are designated solely for the use of agriculture, with any luck you’ll spend the majority of your life sowing seeds, harvesting corn, sipping Moonshine in the afternoon sunlight and breeding with your Cousins who will no doubt be attractive beyond compare on a planet populated by just a few million custodians. Then again, you could be the citizen of a hive.
As the name suggests, hive worlds are planets that possess extremely dense populations measured in the upper billions, with each hive being essentially an individual nation composed solely of vast complexes that extends from the bedrock to the stratosphere, urbanizing the entirety of the surface from pole to pole. Of the species present in the universe, only the humans of the Imperium are known to live on such worlds, since living in your own filth and squalor is apparently below the standards of the other uppity races (Snooty Eldar and their “standards of living”). The world outside the hives is usually a heavily polluted cloud of smog and debris, desolate of all but a few life forms, in fact most hivers live their entire lives without ever having seen the outside of the tunnel network of their hive.
In fact the vast majority of Imperial citizens will never once witness natural sunlight, breathe unpolluted air, touch a real tree or never once comment that their homes don’t stink of hobo crotch (Breathing through your mouth is always recommended). Whilst to many here this would seem to be a hermit’s wet dream, there’s a reason no one opts to live in a cramped domicile beneath the feet and backsides of billions upon billions of other humans on trash day. Next time you think the cramped subway is a nightmare beyond human equation, count your blessings.
#4. The Adeptus Arbites
As an addendum to the above point, who here has ever thought to themselves? “Gee, I wish someone would clean up the filth in this town.”
Well someone out there in the vast universe agrees with you, except their standards dictate that they would rather use an Imperial Officer armed with a Laser pistol and a license to kill on sight rather an animated disposal unit dispensing cautionary advice on littering. Meet the local (Albeit unfriendly) Arbitrator.
Whilst administrating justice and the prevention of crime in a complex civilization is a no-brainer, the Imperium being the sharing and caring types that they somehow always manage to push the envelope beyond the conventions of sane earthbound law. Incur a minor soccer riot? You and everyone else involved can expect immediate execution without trial. Steal a hand bag? Expect a laser diode pressing against your temple faster than most can pass bowel movements. Commit murder? You’re promoted as an Officer in the Imperial Guard.
Jokes aside, the Arbitrator is legally employed to uphold Imperial doctrine by any means necessary, by utilizing an arsenal that would give even a cybernetically altered Commissar a raging erection. Walking on the grass, exceeding public noise levels, accidental littering, chewing too loudly, forgetting to pray at the altar of the Emperor (Terminally ill children are not excused – So stop asking) and obscene body odor are all considered punishable offences in Imperial society; with sentences ranging from the execution of you and your family, lifetime imprisonment on a slave labor planet to serving a penal battalion in the Imperial Guard, where you are offered the opportunity to redeem your stinking hide in the eyes of the Emperor.
What the pamphlet usually fails to mention is that redemption mostly comes at the price of an Ork driven Battleaxe to the face.
#3. Big Brother
In 1949 George Orwell conceived the most commonly cited tale of government paranoia in the modern zeitgeist, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The novel has become widely renowned for its portrayal of pervasive government surveillance and control, and government’s increasing encroachment on the rights of the individual. Since its publication, many of its terms and concepts, such as “Big Brother,” “doublethink” and “Newspeak” have entered the popular vernacular. The word “Orwellian” itself has come to refer to anything reminiscent of the book’s fictional regime.
I on the other hand (As a passive observer) declare Big Brother to be a conceptual vagina, with Europa being a liberal utopia in comparison. Surveying humans at a distance has limits, after all intent and emotion can be hidden rather easily behind a blank expression or a graceful act of duplicity; but what if the fragile barrier that transcends thoughts could be read? What if they betrayed us?
Miles above Imperial worlds, legions of Psychic agents pervert the minds of the human populous, detecting and recording the subtle or sometimes overt thoughts and feelings of billions of citizens in a single sweep, and just generally forgetting to wipe their feet as they mess with your mind. Where the vast banks of data are processed remains a mystery, but one can only imagine a Planet out there in the Imperium of Man dedicated solely to cataloguing, indexing and transcribing this stuff on a constant basis. One can only imagine how many failed undergraduates moved to this sector following the failure of their first novels. Knowing that your every thought is being monitored by the Government is certainly bad enough, but what if you mistakenly harbor a minor hatred for the regime even for a brief second, what if you don’t love the Emperor as much as you say you do?
There are no guarantees about life expectancy in the Imperium, but do expect to perform a Jimmy Hoffa during the middle of the night if you so much as hang the Emperor’s portrait at a crooked angle. Re-education is painful, but not as painful as:
#2. Planetary Defence
We’ve all heard the slogans over the years, if you love your country; you fight for your country…With taxes.
Taxation in the modern context is the simple and convenient solution of imposing a financial levy upon individuals so that the government may expend national treasure on education (When they see fit), the enforcement of law and public order, protection of property, construction of economic infrastructure and war; although in the case of a galactic scale civilization bound to a perpetual holy conflict with dozens of advanced sentient races, the latter takes a rather depressing precedent in the social order.
Nothing is sacred to the Imperial war machine and everything is expendable, therefore all resources available to a planet are frequently diverted away from the hands and mouths of citizens and right into the pockets of Imperial armies, kicking ass in the name of the Emperor as they go. Therefore under Imperial law a planet is indoctrinated to bequeath (Without second thought) all material goods where necessary, which can include food, local currency, private property, the planetary treasury and even their own lives in service to the Emperor.
In fact Imperial Guard doctrine dictates that all draftees (Over seventeen – So pop that Space cherry while you still can) are to be transferred to off-world assignments without exempt, where they are bound to never return to their home worlds for as long as they live. Many scientists (E.g. Not us) would logically come to the conclusion that this is most likely a means of propagating the dominant human genome throughout the galaxy in an effort to avoid genetic stagnation throughout the colonies. We just see it as an effective means of dicking with their heads. That’s right, we said dicking.
#1. Everyone hates you
At several points in your life, you’ll look up at your cubicle wall (Or the Strip club/Brothel/Janitorial closet many will find themselves working in) and realize that our lives have so far been a futile endeavor. As Pink Floyd correctly surmised “All in all you’re just another brick in the wall”; little do we understand that in the context of the Imperium of Man, you’re less than a brick in the wall. In fact, if the Imperium was represented by a brick wall stretching from one end of the galaxy to the next, you’d be less than the flecks of granite and mortar between the actual bricks themselves. In comparison, you and your entire genetic lineage is no greater than a single fingernail sized scraping of said mortar. I bet you feel pretty small now.
Yet despite the crippling anonymity, each and every day for tens of thousands of years, Imperial citizens will work twelve to twenty hour shifts in facilities that they may never see the entirety of; such as the several hundred mile expanse of their cubicle floors, in office complexes larger than most small countries and employed under an managerial hierarchy measured in generations rather than rank. If you work on a data relay planet, you spend your remaining days crunching numbers with billions of other drones. If you work on an industrial world, the factory line will most likely be your station for life, in which you’ll most likely marry the person besides you out of convenience alone; even if his/her name is Boris and their staggering list of hobbies includes “growing hair”. If you’re assigned a position on a porn/alcohol/pet store planet, then you are one lucky son of a bitch who quadrillions of fellow drones would willingly murder to replace.
Each day you are ground down to a literal stub, working to the bone for the loving Emperor until some poor bastard gives birth to an even poorer bastard who will inevitably replace you for the remainder of their lives. The worst part of Imperial citizenship is the absolute futility of duty itself, and knowing that tomorrow you will wake up to do it all over again.
Unless a heretical/mutant/xeno or even Imperial warrior you have yet to meet shoves the butt of his heaviest weapon through your face and delivers you unto the sweet release of death, of course. Hey, it might be time to start looking into that whole Weaboo Space Communist thing- it could possibly suck a little less.
… Oh yeah, hail the God Emperor.