Nobledark Imperium Fabius Bile New Men

THE NEW MAN

Fabius Bile, mad geneticist of Commoragh and personal vizier of Asdrubael Vect, is known for a great many things. Reverse engineering of the Mark III MP geneseed to provide the Fallen with a ready supply of new recruits. Concocting combat drugs that make the most potent medications of the Imperium look like aspirin. Creations of horrors for the highest bidder that make even the other inhabitants of the Dark City have a minor reaction of disgust. Most consider these acts vile abominations committed solely for the amusement of a twisted mind. Fabius Bile considers them parlor tricks done to pay the rent.

Fabius Bile’s actual goals, the ones he actually puts his heart and soul into, tend to be much more grandiose. He wants to be remembered for something beyond simply being the ringmaster of his own personal freakshow. He wants to create something that will far outlast however long he exists in this galaxy.

He wants to bring back the Men of Gold.

In Fabius Bile’s mind, humanity’s mistake isn’t that mankind created the Men of Gold, it is that mankind did not become the Men of Gold. Mankind during the Dark Age of Technology had the ability to create their own demi-gods, and yet they squandered this opportunity to merely create liasons between themselves and the Iron Minds. The Eldar are no better. Bile knows of the history of the Eldar from the Haemonculi of Commoragh. He knows how the Eldar were once little different from mankind or the Tau, before being uplifted by the Old Ones and then genetically engineered by their own hand. But then the Eldar stopped. They were on the verge of making themselves a race of gods, and then they stopped. The time it took them to reach even that state is also unimpressive to Bile. Whereas it took the Eldar millennia to engineer themselves into their modern state, Bile claims that a suitably intelligent and properly motivated individual could do it in centuries.

Fabius Bile’s most recent endeavor, the personal project that has shown the greatest amount of success, is the creation of the so-called New Men. Bile proclaims these New Men to be to humanity what the modern Eldar are to their ancient ancestors, the missing link between man and the Men of Gold. The New Men are all latent psykers, grow to adulthood in a fraction of the time of baseline humans, and are deliberately engineered to have a 100% compatibility rate with Astartes gene-seed. But Bile isn’t satisfied with merely recreating the Men of Gold. He wants to make something better. To this end, he has spliced in genes from creatures all over the galaxy, in the purpose of making the New Men the perfect lifeform. Compared to the average human being, the New Men are stronger, almost impervious to pain, immune to many poisons, and capable of surviving in environmental conditions that normal humans would simply die.

However, in spite of all this, for some reason Bile’s New Men inevitably turn out…wrong. The New Men invariably lack any sense of empathy or social etiquette. They are not psychopathic, nor sociopathic, but the only beings they ever seem to reliably show a connection to are their fellow New Men. It is for these reasons that the Fallen refuse to take New Men as recruits, despite a 100% compatibility rate with Astartes gene-seed. In addition, the New Men always end up with leucism or albinism, with pale grey skin the color of a corpse and translucent veins running just under their skin. It is not clear why the New Men end up this way. It cannot be due to their creation, as there are many humans in the Imperium that are grown in-vitro and yet turn out to be perfectly adjusted adults. It cannot be due to their upbringing, as even New Men raised by surrogate families still turn out the same way. It is almost as though the souls of the New Men somehow know they were grown from spliced cells cultivated from dead bodies, unwillingly implanted into the surrogate wombs of terrified prisoners.

Although Fabius Bile is frustrated by these setbacks, he is not perturbed. He knows these flaws are something he will manage to fix…eventually. As to the failed batches, Bile has no problem lending them out to the Dark Eldar or the Crone Worlders as front-line combatants so that someone might get some use out of them, only requesting that he retain a few specimens for dissection and breeding purposes.