Was it an illusion?
The Emperor lay there like an old man worrying over humanity's future.
His face was etched with the marks of age and worry.
The Emperor gave the Adeptus Custodes few instructions. He merely reined in his turbulent thoughts, for the battlefields of the galaxy left him little time to consider anything else.
The outcome of every battlefield and every war could determine whether his plans succeeded.
Every victory on the battlefield was a variable paving the way for the next.
Inside the Gamma Psionic Laboratory.
Within a laboratory capable of absorbing all forms of energy, even imprisoning light itself.
The surrounding light seemed to have solidified into a supersolid, drifting around the resurrected ancient man.
Those were discarded particles produced by Gamma World's vast quantities of particles used to reconstruct the past.
The operating speed of Gamma World's data-processing center, the Megastructure Synapse Condenser, began to decrease. Its overclocked flashing lights shifted from dark red to steady green. Meanwhile, certain sections of some Megastructure Synapse Condensers began to vent white vapor from overclocking, their lights turning a dangerous yellow—the sign of overclocking that had burned out part of their brains.
Nearby transport ships carried new "computing units" to replacement platforms. Mechanical structures loaded the fresh "computing units" back into the Megastructure Synapse Condensers one by one.
As the intact green lights of the replaced "computing units" came back on, normal streams of electronic data once more flowed through the Megastructure Synapse Condensers.
Dead bodies were hauled to landfills or sent to the Afterlife Employment Service Center to determine whether they still had any value left to exploit.
On Gamma World, even a sheet of paper had its use, let alone corpses with nothing more than burned-out brains.
Outside the laboratory.
Everyone watched this "ancient man."
His