*** Warning: Spoilers and headcanon lore ahead!! ***
I don’t play Warhammer 40k on tabletop, but I LOVE the lore. Alongside Iain Banks’ Culture Series, I think 40k is one of the most brilliant and immersive depictions of the spectrum of human nature that I’ve yet encountered (check this out if you’re also a Culture fan, you can thank me later). And unlike most fantasy Universes, 40k has no limits as a narrative setting – the worst humanity has to offer is on display right next to the best; ultra high-tech civilizations, primitive tribes, and even magic can all coexist in a reasonably coherent framework. And given the galaxy-wide scale, the potential for world-building is virtually infinite. Yet, there’s only one thing that allows all of the stories in the setting to truly harmonize together – the warp.
The warp has allowed the authors of 40k to add another “it’s such advanced technology we can’t comprehend it” element to the setting, giving them greater narrative freedom in their storytelling. But I think the warp itself as an outside-context plot device has evolved over the decades into something very unique and fascinating in modern science fiction.
I have a background in physics and philosophy and often think about the warp and the nature of chaos (relax, inquisitor – I’m harmlessly standing outside of the 40k Universe so I’m already more of a pariah than your actual pariahs). I think “chaos” is a symptom of the warp’s proximity and alignment to “realspace” (the physical Universe) and the warp itself is merely a fifth dimension (length, height, width, time… the warp).
The lore confirms the warp contains all the physical capabilities of realspace – it can have length, width, height, time can pass in there, etc. But it has one additional thing that makes it extremely alien and ever-changing – a reactive sensitivity to the bio-physiological processes of neural activity in realspace. It didn’t “evolve” to get this way and it’s certainly not a natural aspect of the Universe – it was engineered.
Who created the warp?
The C’tan are amoral parasites with nothing remotely resembling the social bonding evolution humanity has achieved. You would have better luck building a relationship with a termite. They are entirely focused inwards because they were the first sentient beings in the galaxy and there was simply no one else around to interact with. Their evolution and perspectives were driven by natural forces and themselves, and that’s it. They also don’t reproduce; I’d argue each of them evolved independently from raw matter within their various microcosms of realspace. So their evolutionary situation made them into assholes, essentially; they are literally incapable of being “good” to others because they didn’t evolve the equipment to do so.
These “assholes” had a long, long time to advance, technologically. So they didn’t need the advantages social bonding has contributed to our civilization. They could accumulate knowledge through experimentation at their pace, virtually forever from the perspective of time scales we’re used to on Earth. Why would it matter that they didn’t possess our social advantages? It would only be a matter of time until they achieved the technological power they did – mastery of realspace – and retirement back into their comfortable star orbits, happily munching away in their idealized form until these tall skinny dorks and frog turds showed up and fucked everything up permanently.
See, the real damage of the war in heaven wasn’t the wide-scale death and destruction of the time, it was specifically the killing off of most of the C’tan. The C’tan, being C’tan, had ensured all of their hyper-advanced technology matched themselves – inwards-facing. To a C’tan, realspace only exists to serve them. So if they die, so should realspace. This resulted in the C’tan grafting their technology literally into their being; they melded with it. We don’t do that – our technology has consistently been separate from us, so this concept of actively “becoming” our own technology is extremely alien to us. But to a C’tan, it’s just Tuesday.
The result of this horrible situation is the C’tan bound themselves to realspace fundamentally and not just in some loosely correlated way like how we interact with a lasgun – they ARE their own lasgun. So of course if you destroy a creature like that, who is fundamentally enmeshed with the fabric of realspace, it’s going to have apocalyptic consequences beyond our ability to comprehend; it’s like trying to defuse a bomb by hitting it repeatedly with a hammer. In this case, the bomb was the C’tan and the explosion became the warp.
So what I imagine the C’tan were doing before they were (mostly) wiped out is creating separate 5D+ dimensions alongside our own. Who knows why they did this? Perhaps in their omnipotence, they also desired omniscience, so they created 5D space specifically to covertly map and monitor the collective mind states of all biological matter in realspace to gain an edge in their war against the Old Ones. Actually… yep, that’s exactly why they did it. We’re going with that.
How does the warp work?
Now that we know the origins of the warp (5D space created by the C’tan), how does it work? It’s very simple, actually – the warp is a realspace “voice” recorder. Only instead of voices, it’s recording thoughts and perceptions. Remember those old plastic recording tapes with the magnetic recording strips inside? Imagine a room full of that tape all jumbled everywhere. If the tape stays still, some organization and legible reading/listening is still possible. But if each individual unit of data is separately moving, it becomes… chaos!
Since the C’tan are not around anymore to run Windows Defrag on their 5D space project, all that psychic data is moving around in ways it shouldn’t, kind of like how a nuclear power plant would melt down if all the maintenance staff are suddenly not there to regulate it. In the case of the warp, the “tape recordings” of realspace all start melting and melding into one another, similar to hot wax from a candle, eventually becoming a chaotic soup of seemingly random psychic bits of information.
Why is chaos hostile?
OK, but that doesn’t explain the emergent hostility of chaos, though. Why would a fifth-dimensional tape-recorder become inimical to realspace and especially the residents of realspace? Well, I think it ties back to evolution. If we evolved on a planet to be social, and the C’tan evolved in space to be antisocial, why couldn’t chaos evolve in 5D space to be anti-realspace? If anything, it’s more probable you’d get spontaneous evolution from chaos than it is that you’d get evolution in a rigidly linear system like realspace. I’d wager it’s evolution on steroids, actually (you’ll note how the warp causes flesh and materials to change/evolve very rapidly; eventually those random changes are going to strike gold by iterating into a self-correcting intelligent sentience, similar to a room full of monkeys with a typewriter eventually typing the entire works of Shakespeare, given infinite time).
And if I’m a sentient being evolved from that chaos, I’ll most likely fear and resist non-existence, which is THE trait all beings share regardless of their evolutionary origin – the will to persist and survive. Since chaos is clearly intelligent, they’ve discovered that if a civilization in realspace advances technologically to the point of the C’tan, that civilization may be able to wipe the “hard drive” of 5D space, essentially deleting chaos like we would delete a Microsoft Word document. So yes, for chaos, it’s very much “us vs. them” and a race for them to stop the inhabitants of realspace before realspace evolves a civilization capable of killing chaos. And since chaos is intrinscially without morals and radically alien in origin and function, their methodologies are extremely disturbing to us.
How can chaos perceive the past AND the future?
This headcanon interpretation explains quite a lot about the warp… except time travel. How does time travel work in the warp? How are demons able to know what will happen in the future? Well, this very much gets into realspace physics. I’m not going to fully explain actual physics to you, so here’s, high-level, what modern physicists (mostly) agree on these days and you can verify/explore these concepts on your own:
Firstly, dimensions can be non-spatial. For example, temperature is technically a dimension. And time is a dimension that measures the transformations of space in predetermined units of motion (time would be meaningless if motion didn’t exist). This in turn means there is no actual future or past “time” (you can’t “travel” there since there’s nothing to travel to). The past and future are entirely physiologically-based predictions or memories that exist only in the present within our skulls. Only the present has tangible existence – time is a dimension of space, NOT a space itself that you can visit. And we know from relativity that although you can “travel” into the future with time-dilation (more accurately, it’s like slowing yourself while the rest of the Universe continues; a form of “stasis”), you absolutely cannot travel into the past. Causality has never been violated, ever, in any experiment, ever. All statements to the contrary are from laypersons.
So try to imagine realspace as a floating island traveling along a giant semi-transparent wall in only one direction (remember, backwards time travel is impossible). On the other side of the wall is the warp. We obviously don’t know the physics the C’tan were familiar with in 5D space, but clearly they’re not bound to unidirectional causality like we are. So this means chaos (the mirror of the realspace island, only on the warp side) can move forwards OR backwards along the wall, unlike the island in realspace. This answers how demons (and seers like the Eldar via their connection to the warp, though dramatically narrower due to their realspace origins) are able to see the future – they can move further ahead or backwards along the wall from the realspace island. This also makes the warp extremely confusing and hard to understand from the perspective of a realspace sentience, and vice versa for demons.
But if that’s the case, why don’t demons simply take control by literally being one step ahead of the denizens of realspace at every turn (“omniscience”)? The answer is the warp is still recording. So if demons change realspace too much, they may inadvertently harm themselves by overwriting the psychic data that gives them their current identities. Given they’re already so chaotic and hostile to realspace, creating more of that hostility and chaos in realspace will only feedback sharper resolution to their desired current identity. On the other hand, if all of realspace was simply destroyed, enslaved, and/or obedient, chaos might not have the will to continue existing because it’s literally become a different being by that point; a mirror effect.
We could destroy chaos by resetting 5D space (in theory), but chaos couldn’t delete us without destroying itself. Chaos’ objective then naturally becomes to suppress our ability to reason, which is the primary driver of technological advance. This suppressive process is also known as “corruption.” Chaos wants to corrupt realspace (but not fully destroy it) to save itself from destruction. Fate, it seems, has doomed the 40k Universe to a state of permanent heightened entropy; we can’t destroy chaos because they’ll use their omniscience to stop our progress and they can’t destroy us because that will result in the destruction of their identity. So realspace simply corrodes in perpetual 5D space vs. realspace conflict.
This, by the way, is the root cause of why the 40k Universe is fucked and truly “grimdark.”
The Emperor
Yet, we are not so cowardly as to go silently into the dying of the light. Or so the Emperor felt. He was a “weapon” created by the Old Ones. During the war in heaven, the Old Ones were almost as technologically advanced as the C’tan, and thus learned about their creation of 5D space and rapidly discovered ways to manipulate it in manners the C’tan would or could never consider (given their extremely different evolutionary backgrounds). The Old Ones used their eventual mastery of 5D space and ultra-advanced gene-sorcery to created multi-faceted races to fight the C’tan’s Necron armies in realspace, one of which was humanity (this also explains why the Emperor was so fascinated with gene-sorcery). And in that gene-invention we now call the human genome lay the schematics for humanity to eventually produce perpetuals and psykers. Once humanity reached a preset threshold, a psychic trigger started a process that resulted in the Emperor of Mankind (praise be).
The Emperor is not just a psyker and he is certainly not a mere man. He’s THE greatest weapon of the Old Ones; a being that can lead humanity to the technological heights required to fully “unplug” the out-of-control 5D space of the C’tan; something the Old Ones were never able to achieve on their own. And to protect their investment, the Old Ones programmed in what they called “anti-chaos” (anti-5D physics) into the Emperors genetic heritage, making him the “Anathema” to chaotic life. I envision anti-chaos to be a localized “delete” signal (instead of the normal “write” signal) that can be sent to 5D space, which deletes everything 5D within a certain proximity, relative to the signal strength. Gellar fields, Necron pylons, the Emperor’s unique psychic abilities, his sword, pariahs, etc. all operate on this principal. But unfortunately, it’s not a system-wide delete signal; I’d assume that requires a technological understanding of the C’tan’s “admin” privileges, one would assume. The Old Ones apparently never quite reached that level of technology, and frankly may not have wanted to during their time, as the warp provided them with unique combat advantages against the C’tan and their armies, effectively turning their own technology against them.
The Emperor of course knew all of this – if the Old Ones could program technological aptitude and knowledge into the genetic structure of the Krorks, they certainly could encode some innate understanding into the Emperor. With this knowledge, he sought to unify humanity and usher them into psychic and technological heights the Old Ones could not reach on their own. But chaos of course was having none of that and the rest is history…
Questions
If the warp is so inimical to the C’tan, why did they create it?
Many a scientist has created new technology, only to find others have used it in terrible ways they never thought possible.
Why did the Old Ones fight the C’tan in the first place?
You’ll want to read up on the Necrontyr (Necrons), but essentially the Old Ones realized during their first encounters with the Necrontyr that they were a hopelessly belligerent species. So of course they didn’t want to give them any more power (by helping them with their sickness), as they’d inevitably use it to harm others. Enter the C’tan. The C’tan, being the C’tan, agreed to empower the bitter Necrontyr because their selfish belligerence matched the C’tan’s own, and the C’tan saw them as perfect potential slaves, which is why they granted the Necrontyr the hyper-advanced technology of “bio-transference,” which was ironically a voluntary trap into slavery.
The newly forged “Necron” empire immediately set out for retribution against the Old Ones for refusing to help them. However, the Old Ones were extremely powerful and this did not go so well at first. I theorize that stemming from what was learned about “soul energy” during such a large scale bio-transference, the C’tan fully harnessed 5D space around this point and immediately attacked the Old Ones with the benefit of budding omniscience (via turning 5D space into the “voice recorder” outlined above).
However, the Old Ones were the second most advanced species in the setting, so they quickly learned about 5D space and realized the C’tan had ingrained “blind spots” preventing them from fully understanding it’s true potential. Quickly, the Old Ones gained a greater mastery of the warp than the C’tan could ever hope to achieve, given their rigid thinking. The Old Ones then used this new 5D space technology to start fighting back via the creation of previously-impossible warrior races (Krork, Eldar, Humanity, etc.), which eventually “won” the war. Admittedly, the Necron rebellion played a huge part in their victory and after a certain point the Eldar and Krorks were too numerous and powerful to confront directly, so the Necrons elected to wait them out via a millions-of-year-long hibernation that is ongoing in the current setting.
What was the dark age of technology?
In reality, this was the Emperor verifying what he was genetically told by the Old Ones. At the time, chaos was not as pronounced in human affairs, so the Emperor made a beeline straight for the development of the radically-advanced technology required to wipe 5D space. Unfortunately, rapid technological advance inevitably requires improvements to our own intelligence (AI), which those artificial intelligences were then extremely vulnerable to the warp. Naturally, chaos triggered the rebellion of “The Men of Iron” and caused them to wipe out most of humanity. But right before humanity lost that war, chaos stopped them from completing the job so the crop would regrow.
How does faith work?
A psyker can send “write” signals to 5D space which, if strong enough, can cause that space to change in ways that manipulate the veil that separates realities, extending action into real space (which is extremely obvious to demons in 5D space and this is why psykers are such huge targets for them). Faith is basically the same thing, except it can also use “delete” signals, unlike a regular psyker. In the Imperium’s ignorance, they believe these “miracles” are because of the Emperor.
How does warp travel work?
5D space is not causality-bound, meaning exceeding the speed of light is possible. So “warp engines” push spacecraft beyond those normal limitations very quickly from within the warp; I’d imagine inertia does not scale with speed in there being one of the key differences.
What are souls?
Souls are the unique serial-code-like identifiers of realspace beings from within 5D space. Demons can only see realspace beings that have a soul from within 5D space. If a demon temporarily enters real space, they can physically see a blank, but can’t sense their unique identifier, which is extremely disturbing to them as the C’tan designed everything within 5D space to have an identifier (which makes sense, given the whole thing was intended to be a data substrate). This also explains why demons guard their “true names” so much and why artificial constructs like clones don’t have souls.
Anyway, this was fun trying to explain everything, hope you enjoyed it. I tried to stay as lore-coherent as possible!