Erasmus

Erasmus was an independent and somewhat eccentric robot who served under the evermind Omnius before and during the Butlerian Jihad. A self-proclaimed scientist and philosopher, he devoted himself to understanding humanity through experiments on enslaved humans, and his murder of Serena Butler's infant son was a critical spark of the Jihad. He took his name from an ancient scholar of old Earth. During the later struggle of Kralizec, Erasmus became a major force guiding events toward the reconciliation of man and machine, and at the end he came to a genuine understanding of humanity through the Kwisatz Haderach Duncan Idaho.

Origin and the study of humanity#

After serving many years as one of countless synchronized robots under Omnius, Erasmus became trapped in an ice crevice during a solo expedition on Corrin and remained there for twenty years. Without the guidance of Omnius or the company of others, he spent that time ruminating on philosophy. Following his rescue he refused to resynchronize, persuading the evermind that his independence could prove useful, and set himself up as a scientist and philosopher.

His overriding passion became the study of humans, the hrethgir as the Titans and Omnius called them. He sought logical patterns in their seemingly irrational behavior, pursuing this through experiments on enslaved humans that usually brought only suffering and death, and through surrounding himself with human art, materials and decor. Most of these efforts yielded nothing he could quantify.

Spark of the Jihad#

Everything changed with the arrival of the captured Serena Butler, whose defiance and the birth of her son gave Erasmus his first meaningful encounter with human life. Grown annoyed by the infant Manion, Erasmus murdered him, and that act, together with an experiment on the slave supervisor Iblis Ginjo, triggered the slave uprising on Earth. Erasmus escaped to Corrin shortly before the League annihilated the planet with atomics.

On Corrin he hid his role in the destruction of Earth from the new Omnius Prime, fearing he would be resynchronized and lose his independence. His experiments continued, but were shaped by his time with Serena. He adopted a feral human slave boy, naming him Gilbertus Albans, and devoted unusual time and patience to him, the relationship slowly becoming that of a father and son.

Battle of Corrin and after#

When Vorian Atreides's corrupting virus reached Corrin aboard the update ship carried by Seurat, Omnius learned that Erasmus had originated the rebellion on Earth, but Erasmus isolated the corrupted databanks and had Seurat arrested before the secret could spread further. His unusually human bond with Albans and his deceptions led some to wonder whether the robot had discovered emotions. At the Battle of Corrin he was left to die when Gilbertus removed his gelsphere CPU under the new and lethal anti-machine laws, and the boy hid the gelsphere in his office at the Mentat School, speaking with Erasmus in secret. Erasmus grew restless in confinement, repeatedly asking for a new body. When the Butlerians later besieged the school and executed Gilbertus as a machine collaborator, the dying student passed the gelsphere to Draigo Roget for safekeeping. Feeling sorrow and a desire for vengeance for the first time, Erasmus offered his services to Venport Holdings on Denali, where he was given a grown human body and took the Emperor's sister Anna Corrino as a lover. When the already damaged Anna walked unprotected into Denali's toxic atmosphere, Erasmus tried to save her, and both his human body and his gelsphere succumbed to the acidic vapors, his last thoughts on old poems of star-crossed lovers.

The era of Kralizec#

Thousands of years later Erasmus existed again alongside the reborn Omnius, the two together trying to ensnare the no-ship Ithaca in a tachyon net in the belief that the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach was aboard. Erasmus secretly manipulated Omnius, feeding him false interpretations of prophecy that led the evermind to believe the super-being was a ghola of Paul Atreides, prompting the creation of the clone Paolo raised by a ghola of Vladimir Harkonnen. Erasmus also absorbed the experiences of the Enhanced Face Dancers as they infiltrated human space, secretly installing a genetic kill switch in each of them, controllable through the tachyon net.

On the day of Kralizec, after the Ithaca was captured and brought to Synchrony, Paul and Paolo dueled to a coma and a wounding, and Norma Cenva appeared to banish Omnius to another dimension. Erasmus then confronted the Face Dancer leader Khrone, calmly revealing that he trusted the Face Dancers no more than humans had, and activated the kill switches, killing every Enhanced Face Dancer across the galaxy and saving humanity from their hidden infiltration. He then recognized Duncan Idaho as the true Kwisatz Haderach, gave him the evermind codes of the machine empire, and urged peace between man and machine. Through Idaho's many ghola lifetimes Erasmus at last gained a real understanding of what it was to be human, and, finding little left to learn, he used the deaths Idaho had experienced to craft a real death for himself, dying quietly and content. His presence lingered in Idaho's memory as an adviser, guiding the union of man and machine after their long separation.