Noosphere

The Cog Mechanicum, icon of the Adeptus Mechanicus

The Noosphere is a cybernetic information and communication technology system developed by the Mechanicum during the closing years of the Great Crusade in the late 30th Millennium.

History

The designs for the Noosphere was originally discovered by Explorator Laszlo, a hunter of antiquities, sometime before the Great Crusade. Before the union of Mars and Terra, Laszlo made several forays to the third planet in the years before the union of Mars and Terra, seeking out the remnants of technology left behind by the ancients. Buried beneath the great crater of Kebira in the land of Gyptus on Terra, Laszlo discovered a great tomb complex, a vast sepulchre selfishly guarded by the tribes of the Gilf Kebir. Laszlo's Skitarii easily overcame the tribesmen, and the secrets he discovered beneath the sands were so many remnants of times long forgotten and technologies thought lost forever. Secrets of energy transference, atomic restructuring, chemical engineering and, most importantly, the evolution of human cognition and digital communication through the Noosphere.

After discovering the secrets of the Noosphere, Laszlo gave the technology to his apprentice Adept Cacye, who in turn gave it to his apprentice, the famed Mistress of Magma City in Mars, Koriel Zeth. After Zeth was given the technology she developed it further and gifted it to her allies such as Ipluviel Maximal and Fabricator Locum Kane. To those who were noospherically modified, information and communication are one and the same, a form of collective consciousness that emerges from the interaction of human minds and where knowledge becomes visible in shoals of light. Those connected to the aether are rendered sensitive to such things, and as an individual developed their abilities, they would eventually see more and more of the information that surrounded them. To the untutored mind the aether could be dangerous, for it was a realm of thought and emotion that existed outside of the physical realm.

During the Schism of Mars when the forbidden Vaults of Moravec were opened, and Chaos-corrupted scrapcode was released, the singular nature of the Noosphere protected Magma City and other Martian forges that utilised it so that the debased viral code could not enter their vital systems. This led to Fabricator-General Kelbor-Hal sending his emissary Melgator to Magma City to acquire this technology and to learn how Magma City survived the scrapcode assault. Melgator chastised Adept Zeth -- if she had freely shared the technology of the Noosphere with her fellow Adepts then Mars might have been spared the horror of the "Death of Innocence," to which Adept Zeth countered that if perhaps the Fabricator-General had put more faith in the Noosphere when she had presented it to him, that might have been the case.

Sources

• Mechanicum (Novel) by Graham McNeill, pp. 100-103, 119-122, 195, 220-221, 226, 229