Editing Nobledark Imperium Xenos (section)

=== Blanks and the Pariah Gene ===

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66,000,000 years ago, the aristocracy of the Necrontyr Star Empire had a problem. They were in danger of losing the War in Heaven. Although they had the might of the C’tan and the Dolmen Gates at their back, the war was growing increasingly bloody as the Old Ones threw uplifted species after uplifted species into the meat grinder. And despite the Necrontyr’s understanding of the material realm, the Old Ones had the raw power of the illogical, irrational realm of the Immaterium at their disposal, which the ancient amphibians were the virtual unchallenged masters of. The Necrontyr needed some way to neutralize that advantage.

Several Crypteks came up with one possible solution: genetically engineering Necrontyr soldiers and eventually the entire Necrontyr to have an inverted Warp signature, canceling out the immense psychic power of the Old Ones and their servant races. However, although such this plan was possible for the Necrontyr Star Empire, the empire’s aristocracy was uncomfortable with the idea for several reasons. First, it would require mass-cloning Necrontyr soldiers in the billions, and would effectively make their entire standing army (not to mention all living Necrontyr) obsolete. Additionally, and more importantly, although the Necrontyr’s rank and file would be safe from psychic attack, it did nothing to stop the Old Ones from decapitating the Star Empire’s leadership by simply assassinating the Triarchy. The Necrontyr aristocracy, in their vaunted superiority, didn’t think very highly of a plan that benefited future generations but didn’t benefit them. Ultimately, the plan was shut down and cast aside in favor of the idea of biotransference, the brain child of Mag’ladroth but presented to the Necrontyr aristocracy by Mephet’ran. However, not everyone forgot about the project. At least not Mephet’ran, the Deceiver, nor his shards that escaped containment in the millions of years after the end of the War in Heaven while the Necrons slumbered.

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Millions of years later, as humanity’s Great Crusade rediscovered numerous human worlds thought lost during the Age of Strife, they came across an interesting phenomenon. On many worlds, there were occasionally individuals that were not only immune to the touch the warp, but in many cases were capable of actively suppressing these effects. These individuals, who came to be known as blanks or pariahs, were always very rare in a population, often in ratios of billions to one, and almost always seemed to exist as outcasts or hermits, or at best lived in small isolated communes far away from any major population center. Further investigation found that these blanks, who ranging from Jenetia Krole of Sibar to the nightmarish blacksoul assassin Spear, gained their strange warp-suppressing powers from an even more unusual source, a complete lack of what would conventionally be called a soul.
 
Blanks work by emitting an inverted warp signature, rather than the positively charged soul of most species. Their inverted warp signature interacts with background positive warp signature of the universe like the union of matter and anti-matter, creating a null aura that cancels both signatures out and creates a zone of no warp signature, either negative or positive, at all. Normally blanks are capable of funneling the energy from this reaction to their own ends. However, unlike normal humans, blanks are capable of surviving being completely disconnected from the Warp as their bodies are adapted to exist in the null zone their inverted Warp signature normally produces. Although they have an inverted warp signature, the null aura they create means they effectively have no soul.
 
Being in contact with a blank’s null aura is not a pleasant experience, and the experience typically gets worse the more psychically sensitive an individual is. To psykers, having their connection to the Warp muffled by a blank’s null aura produces actual pain and a sensation which some have described, usually after they finish screaming, as “sensory deprivation of a sixth sense” or “a feeling akin to losing a limb”. Only extremely strong psykers are capable of overwhelming a blanks null aura with minimal effect, but the only psykers capable of something like that are being like Magnus the Red or the Emperor of Mankind. However, such negative effects are not only limited to psykers. Any being with a soul is instinctively capable of sensing the void that blanks represent, and the muffling of their soul leads to an uncanny valley effect and feelings of dread and existential despair. This uncanny valley effect manifests itself in different ways. In some it causes migrane headaches, while in others it leads to anxiety attacks, while in others it manifests as a hard to define but odious stench. More subtle behavioral alterations have been suspected as well. Although some blanks have learned to weaponized this null aura, in the days before null-collars this often made the life of a blank short and miserable.
 
After much research, ranging from psychological to metabiological, the Imperium was able to connect this soullessness and anti-Warp aura to a genetic factor, known as the pariah gene. The pariah seemingly makes no sense given what is known about genetics and metaphysical biology. Humans with the pariah gene are rare, to the point that one is lucky to find one individual with the pariah gene on a planet with a population of billions. Additionally, because of their aura, blanks have a hard time finding mates and therefore producing offspring. This means that if the pariah gene originated during the Age of Strife, its carriers should simply disappear from the population due to random chance and genetic drift. But they don’t. If the pariah gene were recessive, it is easy to see how the gene could remain hidden in the populace for generations, only occasionally producing blanks. But it isn’t. The pariah gene is dominant, with individuals with two copies known as blacksouls. At least some parts of the pariah gene appear to be genetic: it is heritable and is disproportionately more common in women than men, suggesting a link to the X-chromosome. But the fact that it appears seemingly at random throughout the population has led many to wonder if the pariah “gene” is actually multiple genes (a recessive gene to turn the effect on and off, and a dominant one to control the intensity), or if the actual pariah allele is a symptom, rather than a cause.
 
From a metaphysical perspective blanks and the pariah gene are no less strange. In theory, it should be possible to evolve from having a soul with a strong positive Warp signature to one with a negative Warp signature like a blank. Indeed, the Tau have a particularly low Warp signature, and have displayed significant resistance to Warp corruption (though at a cost of being relatively helpless when a particularly powerful Warp entity like a daemon decides to focus its attention on them). The ancient Necrontyr are believed to have been the same way. The problem with this hypothesis is it requires a species to pass through a stage with a warp signature of zero, meaning a body that is alive only at the cellular level with no sentience. The only way to get around this hurdle would be artificial means, a species with positive Warp signature engineering individuals with an inverted one, though other explanations have been suggested. The fact that the pariah gene independently appeared in populations that should have had no contact with each other during the Age of Strife, and only in humans (though Kroot blanks have also been produced through the usual ways in which the Kroot assimilate traits) has also made many suspicious, though few would disagree that an adaptation to shut out the Warp would prove useful for an age when the galaxy was in chaos (and in Chaos), and desperate attempts at genetic engineering for survival were rampant in the early days of the Age of Strife.
 

Many people in the Imperium were disturbed by the idea of people without a soul. The Navigators in particular, being a race of all psykers, were especially disturbed by the existence of blanks, believing they were an attempt by the rest of the Imperium to create a contingency plan to wipe them all out. The Nobilis Navigo tried to whip people into a frenzy to kill the blanks by playing on the unnatural dread blanks produced until the Steward and the other High Lords told the Paternoval Envoy point blank they weren’t going to persecute an entire group of people who were not warp-tainted just because they looked different, no matter how much the Navis Nobilite screamed, rather unsubtly hinting between the lines that any excuse the Navigators made to persecute the pariahs could be easily turned around to apply to the Navigators. Though, the Imperium’s reasonings for defending the pariahs were not made out of simple compassion. The Navigators and pariahs were both useful resources, and the Imperium needed every advantage it could get in those days. If that meant wielding fire and anti-fire in accord, so be it.
 
As might be expected, the eldar were also horrified at the idea of blanks. Due to being a psychic species, the idea of life in eldar culture had become inimically tied to the idea of having a soul. To the eldar, the idea of being alive and thinking yet without a soul was uncomfortably close to the idea of being undead or a philosophical zombie. The only things the eldar had as a cultural comparison were the Harlequin Solitaires, and those were artificially created, rather than born. The implications of what Solitares represented and how they were created only made things worse. Today, blanks are by far the most discriminated against group of humans by the eldar. One just doesn’t see it firsthand very often given both parties are unable to interact except over a vid-screen. Opinions and prejudices towards humans vary from Dorhai to Ulthwé, but blanks are always treated worse than normal humans. Even the most tolerant eldar still see them as tragic monsters, people who didn’t want to be born as abominations against the natural order but ended up that way regardless. Kind of like they do Solitaires (only replacing “freaks of nature” with “necessary evil”).
 
When they awakened from their sixty-six million year sleep, the Necron Star Empire were also interested in the blanks. In particular, they were extremely suspicious as to how a species could develop a feature that almost exactly resembled the old mothballed Necrontyr research project, down to some of the smallest details. Szarekh’s chief cryptek, Illuminor Szeras, is particularly interested in the blanks and the applications of the pariah gene. The idea of making specialized soldiers to use as mobilized suppression devices and hunter-killers against psykers and daemons is an idea too good to pass up.
 

The largest living population of Blanks can be found on Pluto and Charon, close enough for the Imperium to have its anti-Warp weaponry close at hand, but far enough away for them to not block the light of the Astronomican. Indeed, watching Pluto cross the Astronomican, like an exoplanet slightly dimming the light of a far-off star, is a popular activity for young Navigators, though the Paternova has issued warnings telling people not to stare directly into the light of the Astronomican. Because the colony’s true reason for existing is to continue to exist and keep producing blanks, in order to keep the population of Pluto and Charon occupied they have been given exclusive mining rights over anything in the Kuiper Belt or stray rocks in the Oort zone that they lay eyes on. Both Pluto and Charon have been hollowed out and built on to the point where they are now not recognizable. To anyone else looking it now just looks like a private space port with manufactory rigs and a small docking yard. It does appear on the official maps, but only because not doing so would be more suspicious. It's a "private enterprise" on the charts and not open to the public, with the official story being they were claimed by an early Rogue Trader (whose “dynasty” is actually a shell corporation for the Administratum). Life on Pluto and Charon is a terminally boring experience, though on the positive side at least its inhabitants no longer have to fear the possibility of being lynched.

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