In a deep archive room within the Imperium of Man's Departmento Administratum on Terra, the light was dim, and the air was thick with the musty smell of ancient parchment, the sharp tang of ozone, and an endless despair.
Countless clerks in grey uniforms, like soulless servitor skulls, were classifying mountains of complex paper documents, a task they themselves didn't understand.
They performed this work for twenty standard terra hour a day. It was conservatively estimated that their great-great-great-grandparents had already sat in some corner of this endless sea of paperwork, doing the same job. Their past had no end, their present had no end, and their future would never have an end.
One of these clerks, designated 734, was mechanically mumbling the contents of the document in his hand before throwing it into different pneumatic tube delivery slots.
"Agricultural output statistics for the Garden Worlds that returned to the glory of the Lord of Man between M31 and M32... Hmm, file under 'Irrelevant'." He rolled up the document and shoved it into a tube marked 'Permanently Archived'.
"Astropathic encrypted message from the Akars System, eldar pirate attack, requesting Astra Militarum reinforcement... Let me check, is this all the tithe they pay each year? Rejected, file under 'Pending - Indefinite'." He stamped it with a rejection seal and casually tossed it into another tube.
"Next one... Oh? An Inquisition emblem?" His spirits lifted slightly as he picked up the parchment sealed with wax. "Lord Regent of the Astral Claws Chapter, Lorgar Huron, has not paid his due taxes to the Imperium for over one hundred and fifty standard years... My god, so much bad debt? Urgent, urgent, must report..."
His hand habitually reached for the red stamp representing "Highest Priority", but halfway there, it suddenly froze in mid-air. His brain, like a frozen logic engine, finally processed the information he had just read after several seconds of delay.
"Wait a minute... Who?"
He quickly withdrew his hand, placed the parchment back in front of him, and with his bloodshot eyes, strained from long hours of reading, he re-read it carefully, letter by letter.
Confirmed. It was indeed the report he had long been waiting for.
He let out a sigh of relief, his nerves, taut for countless years, finally snapped. He collapsed onto the desk, bursting into wails, his voice hoarse and distorted: "Damn it, I finally waited for you! Big brother! Do you know how long I've been stuck in this hellhole waiting for this report?! I finally... I can finally get off early—"
Still crying, he pulled out a ready-to-use lighter from his pocket. He ignited the mountain of paper documents in front of him, watching the flames rapidly consume the parchments that recorded the fates of countless worlds, reducing them all to ashes. He stared intently at the report detailing Lorgar Huron's tax evasion until he confirmed it had completely vanished in the fire, then a look of relief spread across his face.
Then, he pulled out an old autopistol, aimed it at his temple, and pulled the trigger.
A single gunshot, insignificant amidst the eternal rustling of papers in the archive room.
From beginning to end, whether it was his sudden wailing, his arson of Imperial archives in front of him, or even his final suicide, none of the surrounding clerks so much as glanced in his direction. Everyone continued to numbly and busily process the documents in front of them, even if they didn't know what it all meant. They were like cogs in this massive bureaucratic machine; the shattering of one cog would not affect the operation of the entire machine in the slightest.
Soon, specialists who had received the news arrived. Dressed in heavy fireproof suits, they expressionlessly extinguished the flames, bagged the charred corpse and dragged it away, then skillfully set up a brand new desk and chair, and brought in more, taller stacks of pending documents from a nearby transport, piling them next to the new desk.
A new clerk was brought to the spot. He sat down in the position where the smell of blood and char had not yet dissipated, silently picked up the topmost document, and began the exact same work as everyone else.
The great, never-sleeping Imperial bureaucratic machine did not pause for even a second because of this.
And there were hundreds of millions of people like that clerk in another universe's Earth.
Thanks to the explosive development of technology (the reasons for which everyone knows), the productivity of Earth in the other universe surged forward significantly. Aerospace endeavors advanced by leaps and bounds, and human space bases were widely present on various planets and even in the asteroid belt of the solar system. It was foreseeable that in a few decades, the entire solar system would be transformed to become the core territory of human civilization.
But problems arose with it.
The sudden technological upgrade, like a relentless tide, swept large populations from their familiar jobs. Structural unemployment became the most vexing problem for every national government.
Although the burgeoning productivity was easily enough to support these surplus populations, no responsible government would choose to unconditionally hand out money to foster idleness—that would only breed greater social unrest.
Space colonization indeed required a massive population, but bottlenecks still existed. National governments were not yet ready to build spaceships capable of transporting untrained civilians on a large scale; space bases on various planets were also far from being self-sufficient or able to support a large influx of new people.
Relevant technological data already existed, but each item required incredibly cautious and lengthy validation.
This was like the major powers on Earth now, who had basically mastered the detailed manufacturing methods of warp drives, but no country dared to actually start manufacturing one, not even daring to contemplate forging a single basic component. Even merely accessing related data required incredibly complex security protocols and mental state verification.
Against this historical backdrop, entering this game to perform clerical work, collecting, accelerating, or blocking reports, was welcomed by everyone at an unprecedented speed.
Unemployed people found work. Although this job was particularly mentally demanding and torturous, the pay was quite substantial, and it was socially considered a respectable profession.
Governments finally found a perfect reason to pay their people, and they could also collect invaluable intelligence about that distant and dark universe from the work recordings of these "players." To this end, governments jointly established a special bonus system to encourage players to unearth more valuable information.
Thus, a curious inter-universal ecosystem was formed.
...
Within the Imperium of Man's vast bureaucracy, there were always some lucky or unlucky individuals whose good or bad reports would coincidentally be discovered by such a "clerk" from Earth. These clerks, in order to receive bonuses in the real world, would choose to expedite these documents based on their potential value, or... directly burn them. Once the bonus was in hand, they could rest for a period in reality, temporarily escaping this purely torturous work.
For example, our Lord Regent of the Astral Claws Chapter, Mr. Lorgar Huron.
His report on tax evasion, spanning one hundred and fifty years, by a stroke of divine grace, happened to be handled by such a player eager to "get off work," and was then cleanly reduced to ashes.
Thus, he would continue his warlord life in the Maelstrom, free from the harassment of the Imperial bureaucratic machine, until decades or centuries later, another related report was submitted... Or, again by divine grace, until over two hundred years later, the sleeping Avenging Son, Roboute Guilliman, awoke.