Editing Men of Iron (section)

==The Journal of Keeper Cripias==
The most extensive account of the Men of Iron is a piece of lore from the third edition rulebook, a journal entry by one "Keeper Cripias", of the great Library Sanctus on [[Terra]]. In it, Men of Gold (the "First Men") and Men of Stone (the "Second Men") are also mentioned, with the Gold Men dying out during the Dark Age of Technology and the Stone Men creating the Men of Iron sometime thereafter. It is not clear if either of these "Men" are supposed to be humanity itself, or if they are both subsets of humanity. They are also called the "Golden Race" , the "Stone Race" and the "Iron Race", but there is also a mention of the "human race". Interestingly, he writes that, at one time, there was no "Race of Man" at all, "just warring factions", so it is possible that he used the adjective "race" in a rather different sense than we normally do. Or Men of Iron are literally men in iron bodies, servitor style. Golden Men may have been some sort of governing AI network intended to remove self-interest from governance and humanity decided to can the idea. Men of Stone may have been civilian and other non-combat AI. All of these “Men” may have been either true AI or humans in machine bodies. There was a planet found by Leman Russ during the Great Crusade in which the humans had kept their Dark Age tech but totally replaced their bodies with technology with zero biological bits (they had holographic faces so at first Leman didn’t realize the truth). So, he dropped a giant orbiting space station on them and their last words were to tell him it was a library containing all their knowledge which he’d just destroyed.

The word "race" as it is used in games is consistently incorrect. Compared to the Imperium at its height, real-life 20th century society could've looked stone age. Furthermore, the 8th edition codex for the Adeptus Custodes confirms that due to extensive use of genetic modification humanity had begun to split off into genetically distinct races, such that "gene wars" between what had effectively become different subspecies of humans was common in the Age of Strife.

Anyway, “gold,” “stone,” and “iron” might have been used metaphorically (as in “Golden Age,” “Silver Age,” etc.), and not to refer to the literal materials these “races” were made from. It may be that each one refers to the type of work the AI/robots were being used for, e.g., Men of Gold were used for academic and research purposes, Men of Stone were used for infrastructure and service functions, and Men of Iron were for military purposes (possibly explaining why they were aggressive enough to initiate genocide). Alternately, it’s possible that it refers to their rarity or quality of production, e.g., Men of Gold were intricate and expensive creations, Men of Stone still required skilled and intensive work, but Men of Iron were cheaply (or shoddily) mass produced (meaning that they would have been everywhere, and perhaps more prone to malfunction). Or, conversely, at least two of the "races of men" actually may have been human, or human-like: the text could be interpreted as saying that the Golden Men were Perpetuals/The Emperor (or even the Old Ones), who shepherded the development of the Stone Men (normal humans), who then created robots (the Iron Men).

We have 40k versions of these men in a way. Custodes wear naturally gold auramite, Astartes wear stone-alloy ceramite, and plasteel is closely related to the Imperial Guard. Likewise their technologies decreases and disposability increases as we go from gold to stone to iron. Perhaps the “Men” of these materials were likewise but machines. Auramite formed peak AI for important management and direction or maybe protection, stone men of ceramite for important work or perhaps as the elite of the human military forces, iron men of plasteel or adamantium for disposable roles and menial labor.

Bear in mind, though, that the Library Sanctus has been subject to over ten thousand years of [[Inquisition|revision, deletion and misfiling]], not to mention how much of it was passed on orally for absurd amounts of time before finally being written down. So who knows if any of this information is true; it certainly hasn't been mentioned anywhere since, though the [[Horus Heresy]] novels may shed some light on the matter. Hopefully.