Life Extension Technologies

In the Imperium of man death is always present, and for the vast majority of mankind life is brief and bitter. Those lucky few with sufficient funds and technology can on the other hand make their lives last for centuries. The truly desperate, gifted or insane search for true immortality, a pursuit were both failure and success can lead to utter damnation.

Chemical rejuvenation
The use of rejuvenating drugs is commonplace among the middle and upper classes of all technologically advanced imperial worlds. With regular use they can slow or even reverse human aging dramatically for centuries. But sooner or later even the most expensive treatments fail to hide the ravages of age. At that point the subject becomes more vulnerable to infections and organ failure and after 400 years few can survive without mechanical assistance.

Technological augmentation
Flesh is weak, but machines can last forever. By exchanging a subject’s organs with mechanical substitutes the individual’s life can be greatly extended, at the petty price of their humanity. With the aid of micro-cogitators even the mind can be partly replaced. The Adeptus Mechanicus both uses and produces a majority of the Imperiums augmentations and the most advanced modifications are reserved for the machine god’s own servants. Simpler implants are available for those with money and connections, but the price is such that augmentations often are passed down as heirlooms for generations.

For those whose fear of death knows no bounds there are a few extreme measures that even tech-priests revile:

The rite of Setesh
At about 500 years of age the strength of most human bodies are utterly spent and death is making its presence known. However, some imperial potentates refuses to accept their fate and instead they chooses to invoke the Mechanicum rite of Setesh. The subject’s body is mummified alive and permanently sealed within a coffin like exoskeleton, where it can spend a couple of centuries in agony and claustrophobic horror before deaths finally claim its life. Many members of the Mechanicum see the rite of Setesh as a practice bordering to tech-heresy. Only the most radical adepts would even consider performing the process, and even then only in exchange for a fortune in money or political favours. The Mechanicum itself have no need for such cumbersome machinery. In their search for mechanical purity they have found better and more lasting ways to preserve their existence, by replacing the flesh rather then conserving it.

The Proteus protocol
According to rumours among the galaxy’s hereteks there is a way to transfer a persons full intellect, and possibly even their soul, to a machine and thereby achieve true immortality. This technology is by most considered a myth, but in 240.M41 inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn discovered the essence of the arch-heretic Pontius Glaw preserved in just such a device. The machine itself consisted of a crystalline core, containing the intellect, connected to a mind impulse unit that enabled Pontius to connect with exterior machinery. Even in his bodiless stat Pontius could make use of his formidable psychic powers. The renegade Magos-Inquisitor Cyrrik Scayl has for many years experimented with mind transfers and his studies indicates that only the mind of a psyker is strong enough to endure the process.

Warp related phenomena
The static matter of real space always breaks sooner or later, but the dynamic energy of the warp is eternal. By infusing a creature with warp power its existence can be strengthened and maintain, usually at a terrible price to its sanity and soul.

Dark pacts
Chaos gods and daemons are more then willing to lengthen a humans life, in return for her soul and fealty. Valuable servants can live for millennia and even return from the dead if it pleases their patron, but such service invariably twists the soul (and often the body) into a cruel mockery of its original form.

Warp exposure
Long time exposure to warp or webway energy can have a rejuvenating effect on human tissue. These phenomena are particularly evident in the chaos Space Marines, who have fought the Imperium for ten millennia from their warp-infested territories. Of course, long time warp exposure can also lead to madness, death and utter damnation.

Daemonhood
The human soul is potentially immortal, but in most cases to weak to stand against fury of the warp after death. By absorbing large quantities of warp energy a human can strengthen his essence and thereby transform himself into an immortal daemon. Daemonhood is usually a reward from the chaos gods to their most loyal servants, but through dark rituals independent heretics can reaches this elevated stage on their own. Sometimes the dark gods give out daemonhood as a curse rather than a blessing. Plague bearers and Furies are said to be products of this ironic cruelty.

Psychic powers
A few psykers and sorcerers have mastered their art well enough to utilise the warps revitalising effect on their own bodies and thereby take control over the aging process. The greatest master of this ability is the Emperor, who kept himself alive for 40 millennia before he was interned in the golden throne. He could even extend this power to preserve valued servants, like for example Malcador the Sigillite, and this gift is still evident in many of the living saints.

Halo devices
On some dead worlds, in the volume of space known as the Halo stars, travellers sometimes find artefacts from long lost civilisations. The strangest and maybe the most powerful of these are the so-called Halo devices. Many rich fools search for Halo devices as an easy way to cheat death, but only the most unfortunate finds what they are looking for. Prolonged contact between a human and a Halo device does form a bond that rejuvenates the human host, but at the same time it starts a horrible transformation. The host stops aging and gains inhuman strength and resilience, but at the same time his body and soul begins to change. Visions of alien worlds fill his dreams and unholy thirsts plague his days.

After years of use the halo device becomes an integrated part of the host body, which it self twists into an alien monstrosity. In the end nothing remains of host’s human personality, but the cunning menace which have risen in its stead is practically immortal and can even return from the dead to complete its unknown purpose.

Life through death
Since everything living is destined to die some scholars search for a ways to make dead tissue regain its function and intelligence. Even in the ranks of the Mechanicum a radical sect known as the Hippocrasian Agglomeration are searching for ways to revitalise necrotic flesh. The emperor himself is in a way an undead corpse, powered by the arcane energy of his golden throne. Some of the Imperiums most extreme death cults, like the legendary Night Cult, try to emulate their saviour. Through the use of forbidden technology, like the sarcosan wave generator, they raise the dead to fight in His glory.

The lust for immortality can overcome even the emperor’s strongest servants. Inquisitor Erya Nephthys began her career as a dogmatic monodominant, but after a near death experience on Sinophia she became obsessed of preserving her own existence and for that reason she embraced heresy. Through a combination of sorcery and dark technology, much of which she stolen from the Hippocrasians, she returned from the dead several times before the inquisition succeeded in destroying her corporal form. Even as they burnt her body she swore she would rise yet again to avenge herself on the living and her ash is still kept in a sealed vault under a inquisitorial fortress, just in case…