Enhanced Face Dancer

Enhanced Face Dancers were a refined breed of the Tleilaxu shape changer, created by the Bene Tleilax Master Hidar Fen Ajidica near the end of the Corrino Empire and later intercepted and improved by the reborn Thinking Machine Empire of Omnius and Erasmus. Far harder to detect than the common breed, they served the machines as infiltrators and weapons during the war at the end of the age, all the while pursuing an agenda of their own under their leader Khrone.

Creation and release#

The first Enhanced Face Dancers arose during the Project Amal spice research, when the Tleilaxu temporarily conquered the planet Ix. Their leader, Hidar Fen Ajidica, developed a group of more advanced Face Dancers that could not be easily detected by the Bene Gesserit or by others trained to recognize a mimic. After Ajidica secretly created and consumed vast quantities of the melange substitute amal, he fell into delusions of Tleilaxu ascendancy under his own rule. To prepare the way for that rule, he dispatched large contingents of pre-colonizing Face Dancers into the far reaches of the galaxy. Contact with them was lost, and they were not heard from for millennia. In the Old Empire, Project Amal collapsed into failure, Ix was retaken by House Vernius, the Tleilaxu who had helped Ajidica were killed, and Ajidica himself died with his secrets.

Enhanced by the machines#

After their release, the colonizing Face Dancers came across the reborn Thinking Machine Empire, led by Omnius and Erasmus, on the planet Synchrony. Finding them, the machine leaders set about improving them as servants. Drawing on his study of humankind, Erasmus refined their mimicking abilities so far that, once returned among humanity, the Face Dancers would sometimes believe they truly were the people they had replaced. Neither the Bene Gesserit nor their successors in the combined New Sisterhood could detect them; only a Tleilaxu Master using the Whistling language could force their faces to contort and lose their borrowed visage, revealing them.

Erasmus considered the Face Dancers' need to kill the humans they replaced to be evil, and he found them untrustworthy. He therefore installed a genetic kill switch at the base of each one's brain, able to be triggered through the machine tachyon net, and he gave each an instinctive drive to return to Synchrony, so that every Enhanced Face Dancer carried within it both a homing beacon and the means of its own destruction.

Servants of the machines#

With humanity's location known once more, Omnius and Erasmus released the Enhanced Face Dancers back among the Lost Tleilaxu who had gone out in the Scattering. Though they blended with the ordinary Face Dancers of the Scattered Tleilaxu, the old Tleilaxu leaders never trusted them and never learned of their enhancement or their true allegiance. Ordered to seize key positions ahead of Kralizec, Khrone, the machine appointed leader of the Enhanced Face Dancers, killed the Elder Burah and the last of the Tleilaxu Elders, sparing only the Scribe Uxtal. With the traditional hierarchy destroyed, Khrone directed the Enhanced Face Dancers into the plots of the end of the age under guidance from Omnius and Erasmus in their Daniel and Marty guises.

Role in the search for the Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach#

The machine leaders told Khrone that a Kwisatz Haderach was the fulcrum needed to tilt the battle at the end of the universe in favor of whoever possessed him, and they gave the Enhanced Face Dancers a central part in both finding and creating such a being. Erasmus's projections placed the super being aboard the no-ship Ithaca. When the ship made a foldspace stop on the planet of the Handlers, Enhanced Face Dancers killed the gholas of Thufir Hawat and a Rabbi and took their places aboard. Over the following years the two killed important gholas the ship's leaders were creating and sabotaged its systems, leaving the vessel vulnerable to the Enemy's tachyon net. Though the first impostor of Hawat was killed by the ship's sandworms and the second by the Tleilaxu Master Scytale through the Whistling language, the damage had been done, and the Ithaca was finally captured and brought to Synchrony.

As a fallback, the machine leaders had Khrone create a clone of Paul Atreides, the first known Kwisatz Haderach. Khrone first had the Scribe Uxtal produce a ghola of Vladimir Harkonnen from a recovered nullentropy tube, then grew a clone named Paolo from the dried blood of a wound given to Paul thousands of years earlier. The Harkonnen ghola raised Paolo with cruel traits under Enhanced Face Dancer oversight on the planet Dan, until the boy was brought to Synchrony for Erasmus to complete his training.

Infiltration and the Day of Kralizec#

While the search continued, Khrone drove a mounting infiltration of the Old Imperium. Enhanced Face Dancers replaced rebel Honored Matre leaders, including a duplicate of Hellica who oversaw their base on Tleilax and launched an Obliterator attack that reduced shipbuilding Richese to slag. Khrone placed mimics on the foundry world of Ix, infiltrated the divided Spacing Guild, and set Face Dancers at every level of human authority. As Omnius launched his final assault, mimics replaced planetary leaders to sow chaos and advocate surrender, and as the Omnius Scourge spread, terrified populations rose against their own leaders.

The final battle, the Day of Kralizec, opened as ragged human fleets met the machines above Chapterhouse and Junction. The full extent of the infiltration became plain: sabotaged Obliterators would not fire, ships would not maneuver, and some crews were themselves Enhanced Face Dancers. On Synchrony, the Dancers retrieved the captive Ithaca crew, fought as suicide soldiers against the restrained ship, and were thrown against the giant sandworms released into the flow metal city.

Betrayal and destruction#

With Omnius banished to another universe by the Oracle of Time and the machines momentarily leaderless, Khrone revealed his true purpose. The Enhanced Face Dancers, he declared, had always acted as their own agents, opposed to both humans and machines. He had meant to let the two sides exhaust each other so that the Face Dancers could rise as rulers of the Known Universe, and he announced that the moment of their ascendancy had come.

Erasmus answered that he had long foreseen the day. Quoting the human saying that no one could ever trust a Face Dancer, he turned aside Khrone's attacking mimics and activated the tachyon net. With a single prearranged signal he triggered the genetic kill switch in every Enhanced Face Dancer in the universe. Across the fleets above Chapterhouse and Junction, and on Synchrony where Khrone himself collapsed among his dying race, every Enhanced Face Dancer died at once. Erasmus explained that the killing was necessary, for he believed the Face Dancers to be evil by their very nature.