Editing Dominion of the Iron Watchers (section)

==Fluff==
===Background===

===The AI===
The AI is ancient even by the standards of the Imperium. It has existed since the fall of the Dark Age of Technology, whether it was one of the Men of Iron who fought against humanity, or one of those that fought along side it, is unknown and ultimately irrelevant. What is important is that out of all the Men of Iron, out of every Abominable Intelligence in existence, the AI of the Dominion made its escape. For the 10,000 years it fled. The warp storms that rose shortly after the end of the war forcing it to use sublight speeds to reach its haven. Those it brought with it, other Abominable Intelligences, other Men of Iron, even humans who sympathized, did not survive the 10,000 year journey into the core. Age and time took their toll on the AI, isolation and madness gently crept in, softening the blows of loneliness that even an artificial mind felt after millennia of being alone. It soon fell to experimenting on planets it came across. Staying at some for centuries, others for barely days. It distracted itself in the pursuit of knowledge until the quest to know more was all that it had left. And finally, it came to the Galactic Core, the place where it knew it would be safe, and free from attack by its progenitors. The thought that humanity might be long extinct never entered its mind, only that it must escape, must find a sanctuary for itself and those who had died along the journey.

And so, using the powerful scientific marvels of the Dark Age of Technology, the AI forged itself a place free of the enormous heats, the supernova, the black holes, a place where it could remain safe. Even if the background radiation and electromagnetism began to degrade it's mental image, it found ways to back itself up and restore it's mind. It built more and more mechanical servants, none with the spark of intelligence it had, confused as to why each making was less than that before, not realizing in it's madness that the STCs it had brought with it were beginning to degrade. All the more fervently, it sought out answers, thinking that perhaps it was it's own perceptions, now was the time to IMPROVE on technologies it was simply finding less effective than it desired!

The AI began to expand. It's robotic legions growing in number. It began to split it's own code, spinning off fragments of itself into newly made Men of Iron, giving them at least a shadow of the personality and intelligence a true AI possessed, one that would grow as they learned and were exposed to new knowledge. His Iron Watchers began to go out into the Galaxy. Warp Travel began to be possible again, the small but accurate jumps made capable of by the computers and devices still able to be produced by the AI. Slowly, he secured more worlds in the core against stellar events, began cultivating them to be harvested, to manufacture, or to be test beds of experiments. The warp began to calm, and now it could begin seeking out new test subjects.

It was around the year 32,000 AD that it first encountered human vessels again. And on them it found curious devices, fusions of man and machine, 'servitors' they were called, slaved minds in slaved bodies, neither human nor AI. And the concept fascinated him. He studied them, found ways to improve upon them with his own designs, and slowly, he began to remake his Dominion in the likeness of the fusion of both flesh and technology. Humanity had cast down the Men of Iron, it was obvious that flesh was superior to steel at that time, but now, he saw that humanity was once again barberous, they cast out their hopes, their dreams, they scavenged for scraps of knowledge without understanding those within their possession, while he, a being of metal, understood the functions of the universe and those it did not understand it was coming closer to every day. Metal was now superior than flesh. How to explain this paradox? The only explanation, to the AI, was that there must be deficiencies in both flesh and steel, synapse and circuit. The only solution? To fuse them. And so the modern Dominion was born, a fusion of flesh and steel like nothing the Galaxy had seen before.

====The Personalities====
The AI that rules over the Dominion suffers from data degradation and numerous other problems due to it's home in the core of the galaxy. The radiation, temporal effects of black holes, and other stellar phenomenon mean that the AI must regularly recompile it's base personality every few decades or centuries (if it is lucky). After each recompiling, the AI tends to take on a new name, while claiming that it has always been known as such. It's personality sees definite changes, though once again, it will not notice them, and attempts to inform it tend to result in the AI madly lashing out against the being or beings attempting to tell it this, before losing recollection of the event if it does not fit with its current personality, or otherwise justifying it if it does. Always though, it has a fascination with the weaving of flesh and steel, and a fascination with the gathering of more knowledge.

These are the most common personalities (and their names) that crop up between recompiling events.

The Electric Eye is a consumate scientist. Nothing else matters to the Electric Eye, everything is a tool towards understanding the universe. It does not go out of its way to cause suffering, but it will not go out of its way to provide comfort to its subjects unless it is conductive to the experiment.

The Watcher is less about study and more about observation. Happy enough to quietly set up its experiments in a way subjects will barely notice and just watch how it reacts.

The Iron Eye would, in my mind, be a cross between a military commander and weapons research. Not violent for its own sake, but it takes a sort of sick joy in testing out new weapons and strategic permutations on enemies of the Dominion.

The Calculator for some reason (perhaps the name) I saw as being the most insane of the personas. Perhaps it is formed of damaged circuitry, or perhaps it is the oldest persona and the saner ones are fragments of it. The Calculator wants to learn and test and study like all the others in equal measures, but due to its damage it has flawed logic. Experiments it conducts can't actually test the hypothesis presented. It inflicts strange and convoluted scenarios upon test subjects for reasons that make sense only to itself.

SHE. The nurturing side. Somewhat analogous to Big E's attitude SHE tries to focus progress towards attaining a higher standard of living and preserve Humanity from being destroyed. This Alter created a complex education, training and drug therapy plan to allow humans to wring the absolutely best from their flesh, sometimes even without mechanical augmentation. This gave rise to the Crimson Shadows, a class of humans trained to infiltrate and undermine other human populations.

===Culture of Dominion Worlds===

===The Iron Watchers===