Khrone

Khrone was the true leader of the Bene Tleilax Enhanced Face Dancers' Myriad, a secret order that purported to serve the reborn thinking machines Omnius and Erasmus while pursuing an agenda entirely its own. Descended from the deep-space Tleilaxu colonies who became the Lost Tleilaxu, Khrone's Enhanced Face Dancers could perfectly mimic any human, even beyond the detection of a Bene Gesserit. From the shadows he infiltrated the power centers of the Old Imperium, intending that his Face Dancers alone should survive the war between humanity and the machines to rule what remained.

Origin of the Enhanced Face Dancers#

During the time of the last Padishah Emperors under Shaddam Corrino IV, the Tleilaxu scientist Hidar Fen Ajidica believed the ascendancy of the Tleilaxu race had arrived and launched colonies of Face Dancers into deep space to prepare the way for his rule. Ajidica's plans came undone, and contact with the colonizing spacefarers was lost for over four thousand years. While colonizing, those Tleilaxu encountered the reborn thinking machine empire led by Omnius and Erasmus. Their Face Dancers were considered a major find for Erasmus, who had always been fascinated by human behaviour and furthered his research by absorbing the life-experience data of his human-impersonating Enhanced Face Dancers into his flowmetal matrix.

During the Scattering after the death of the God Emperor Leto Atreides II, some of the intermingled Tleilaxu colonists returned and were called the Lost Tleilaxu by the established Tleilaxu of the Imperium. The Enhanced Face Dancers maintained a separate secret identity under their leader, Khrone. Because they could mimic their human counterparts so perfectly that even a Bene Gesserit could not tell the difference, Khrone's Face Dancers began infiltrating many power centers of the Old Imperium.

Servant of the machines#

As the return of the Honored Matres brought devastation and the certainty of great war, Erasmus convinced Omnius through mathematical projections that the Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach was aboard the no-ship Ithaca. When the machines failed to capture the vessel in a tachyon net, allowing the gholas of Duncan Idaho and Miles Teg, Sheeana, and their crew to escape, the search fell in part to Khrone. On Tleilax he revealed himself as leader of the Face Dancer contingent and killed the last Lost Tleilaxu Elder, Burah, judging it no longer necessary to feign inferiority to the ancient Masters. With the secret approval of Omnius and Erasmus, he planned to move the Face Dancers to the forefront of human existence.

As a backup to capturing the Ithaca, the machine rulers, communicating through the tachyon net in the guise of Daniel and Marty, instructed Khrone to create a ghola of the first Kwisatz Haderach, Paul Atreides. He first ordered the Lost Tleilaxu Elder Uxtal to grow a ghola of Vladimir Harkonnen from a recovered nullentropy tube, then learned that genetic material of Paul survived in the Emperor's Blade hidden in a shrine on Dan. Khrone had a ghola grown from it, whom he called Paolo, and had both gholas taken to Dan, where Harkonnen raised Paolo with a corrupted and perverted personality. Throughout, Erasmus's augmented human spies gathered data, and the machine rulers punished Khrone through pain inflictors in the tachyon net when they judged he deserved it.

Infiltration of the Old Empire#

Khrone led an ever-growing infiltration of the Old Empire, placing Face Dancers at the starship foundry worlds of Ix and Richese to destabilize the war effort. He tricked the Ixians into accepting secretly built mathematical compilers, leading Chief Fabricator Shayama Sen to believe his people had developed the device themselves, then helped introduce it to CHOAM, the Spacing Guild, and the New Sisterhood, widening the rift between the Guild's Administrator and Navigator branches. Most significantly, he infiltrated the leadership of the Honored Matres, replacing the Matre Superior Hellica with a duplicate who launched an Obliterator attack that reduced Richese to slag. Khrone placed Face Dancers at every level of human authority.

Kralizec and the kill switch#

Khrone was in truth a double agent. Since the start of the machines' war on humanity he had pursued his own agenda: to help the machines nearly destroy humankind, then spring his own trap so the Face Dancers could mop up the survivors and rule the Known Universe. As Omnius unleashed a million-ship armada that conquered system after system, humanity made its last stand above Chapterhouse under Murbella of the New Sisterhood. Khrone's sabotage proved decisive, as Ixian-built ships were found unworkable and many functioning vessels were crippled by their infiltrated Face Dancer crews.

When the Ithaca was finally snared and brought to Synchrony, Khrone watched the events of Kralizec unfold and bided his time. The duel between Paul and Paolo left Paolo comatose and Paul gravely wounded; as Omnius gloated, the Oracle of Infinity, Norma Cenva, appeared and banished the evermind permanently to another plane. With the machines reeling and a battle led by a ghola of Leto II raging in the streets, Khrone judged that humans and machines had exhausted themselves and made his move, declaring before all assembled that the time of the Face Dancers' ascendancy had come. Erasmus laughed long and loud, declared that he had foreseen the Face Dancer leader could never be trusted, and revealed that long ago he had placed a kill switch into the genetic make-up of his altered Face Dancers. He activated it through the tachyon net, and Khrone and every Enhanced Face Dancer instantly died, as millions of duplicates collapsed throughout the Old Empire.