Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [212]
A small and innocuous-looking probe.
“Even seemingly insignificant things have great import. As this device proves.”
Centuries before the Battle of Corrin, the last great defeat of the thinking machines, one of the evermind copies had dispatched probes out to the unexplored reaches of the galaxy with the intent of setting up receiving stations, planting seeds for the later expansion of the machine empire. Most of the probes had been lost or destroyed, never reaching a solid world.
Erasmus looked down at the small device, marvelously engineered, pitted and discolored from its many centuries of unguided flight. This probe had found a distant planet, landed, and begun its work, waiting . . . and listening.
“During the Battle of Corrin, fanatical humans almost—almost—annihilated the last Omnius,” the robot said. “That evermind contained a complete and isolated copy of me inside itself, a data packet from the time when you once tried to destroy me. You showed great foresight.”
“I always had secondary plans for survival,” the voice boomed. Watcheyes came closer, flitting over the probe like curious tourists.
“Come now, Omnius, you never imagined such a dramatic defeat,” Erasmus said, not scolding but merely stating a fact. “You transmitted a complete copy of yourself off into nothingness. A last-gasp attempt at survival. A desperate hope—something a human might feel.”
“Do not insult me.”
That transmission had traveled for thousands of years, degrading along the way, deteriorating into something else. Erasmus had no memory of that endless, silent journey at the speed of light. After their incalculable trek through static and interstellar waste, the Omnius signal had encountered one of the long-dispatched probes and seized upon it as a beachhead. Far, far from any taint of human civilization, the restored Omnius began to re-create itself. Over millennia it had regenerated, building a new Synchronized Empire—and Omnius had begun making plans to return, this time with a far superior machine force.
“Nothing can match the patience of machines,” the evermind said.
Fully restored from his backup copy while the new civilization built itself, Erasmus had pondered the fate of humans, a species he had studied in painstaking detail. The creatures had always been infuriating, yet intriguing. He was curious as to how they would fare without the guidance of efficient machines.
He looked down at the small probe on its altarlike stand. If that receiver hadn’t been in the right place, the Omnius signal might still be drifting, attenuating. Quite an ignominious end . . .
Meanwhile, believing themselves victorious, the human race had gone through their own struggles. They continued to push their boundaries; they clashed with each other. Ten thousand years after the Battle of Corrin, a Tleilaxu Master named Hidar Fen Ajidica improved and dispatched a new breed of Face Dancers as colonists bound for far-flung wastelands.
As his empire regrew, Omnius had intercepted those first Face Dancer ambassadors—beings based on humans but with some attributes of the best machines. Erasmus, fascinated with the possibilities, had quickly converted them to appropriate goals, then bred more of the shape-shifters.
In fact, the independent robot still had some of those first Face Dancer specimens preserved in long-term storage. Occasionally he took them out for inspection, just to remind himself of how far he had come. Long ago on Corrin, Erasmus had dabbled with similar biomechanics, trying to create biological machines that could mimic the flowmetal capabilities of his own face and body. His new breed of Face Dancers did that, and more.
Erasmus could replay all of the memories in his head. He wished he had a few more of those Face Dancers here, to experiment on because they were so fascinating, but he had already sent them back into the human-settled star systems, to pave the way for the great machine conquest. He had already absorbed the lives