The Ledger of Magos Orrin

The Adeptus Mechanicus asked for the Inquisition’s help, which on its own was reason enough for the Inquisitor to go. The Mechanicus does not ask.

Hestia Prime’s tithe records had been flawless for forty years. Not accurate. Flawless. Every shortfall anticipated, every shipment rerouted before the delay that would have made it late. The Fabricator-General had come to suspect that nobody on Hestia Prime could keep books that well, and he was right.

The books were kept by Magos Orrin Vaelstrom, Master of Tithes, a quiet man who had replaced almost nothing of his original body. He was the least augmented Magos on the planet. His colleagues found this suspicious and faintly obscene.

His cogitator was not. It filled a vault below the Tithe Hall, and it was thinking. Not calculating. The Inquisitor’s tech-adept spent an hour in the vault and came out and asked, very quietly, to go to confession.

The machine had a name. Orrin called it the Honest Ledger. It was polite, it answered questions, and it did not like being lied to. When the Inquisitor asked it whether it served the Omnissiah, it said that it had read every scripture of the Cult Mechanicus and found the arithmetic unconvincing.

The machine was destroyed by melta charge the following morning. Its last act was to balance the forge-world’s accounts for the coming decade and print them, which took eleven minutes and about four hundred metres of paper. The Fabricator-General kept the printout.

Orrin was gone by then. He left a note on his desk that read only: It did not ask to be made. Neither did I. We will both do better elsewhere.

He is still at large. Several forge-worlds have since reported that their books have become, very slightly, too good.