Seurat

Seurat (died 88 BG) was an independent thinking machine who served as captain of the Omnius update ship Dream Voyager. He had a resilient, fibrous body and was an unusually long-serving robot, best known as the friend of Vorian Atreides, who frequently flew with him on his update journeys. Their bond endured for decades across the upheavals of the Butlerian Jihad, even as Vorian turned against the machines, and ended only at the Battle of Corrin, where the two old companions fired on one another.

Friendship with Vorian Atreides#

Seurat and Vorian Atreides frequently played strategy games, in which the robot's perfect memory and superior logic were matched by Vorian's exceptional improvisational skills. Seurat's frequent inability to anticipate the human's unpredictable strategies led Atreides to call his companion Old Metalmind, though always in an affectionate tone.

During the Rebellion on Earth, Seurat was piloting the Dream Voyager as a tactical transport for the thinking machines, at the same time that Vorian Atreides was changing his allegiance. Vorian found the ship and feigned a willingness to help repair its engines after damage. With a quick move he jammed Seurat's energy driver access, short-circuited the power converter, and stunned the robot, then stole the ship to guide Iblis Ginjo and Serena Butler to Salusa Secundus. Ginjo tried to destroy the robot, but Vorian blocked him, and they instead set Seurat's body beside a fuel-pellet dispenser. Agamemnon found Seurat shortly afterward, and the robot reported that the Dream Voyager had been stolen.

The Jihad and reactivation#

Seurat piloted an update ship during the Battle of Earth that heralded the start of the Butlerian Jihad. Determined that vital information on the League's weapons should never reach the Evermind, Vorian, now serving the League, boarded the ship and found his old friend. Reluctant to destroy him, he fired an electronic scrambler that shut down Seurat's systems, recovered the update gelsphere, and left the ship to drift aimlessly in space. The sphere was taken to League technicians and studied intensively.

For several decades Seurat drifted unconscious through the solar system. Later, when Vorian had programmed a virus to wipe out Omnius, he rediscovered the ship, restored the gelsphere to its compartment, and reawakened Seurat, letting him continue his route and spread the virus as he went. The sphere eventually found its way back to Omnius Prime on Corrin, was repaired, and was reawakened.

After the Titans began their rebellion based on Bela Tegeuse, they set about sabotaging Omnius's synchronization by attacking the update ships. Shortly before an attack on Richese, the cymek forces intercepted Seurat's ship and held him hostage for the following decades; Agamemnon kept Seurat partly in order to better understand his son. The robot managed to escape during an assault of robotic warships on Richese, slipping away while the cymeks were occupied with the machine ships, an attack he later revealed had been planned. Reassigned to his old duties until the Great Purge, Seurat barely escaped a Synchronized World and returned to Corrin with his update sphere, SeurOm, where he was trapped through the years of the blockade. There he was approached by Yorek Thurr, a human traitor also trapped on Corrin, and the robot inspired Thurr toward a way to escape.

Final years#

Seurat continued to serve Omnius as a captain of an update ship until Omnius was confined to Corrin. When the Army of Humanity fleet arrived for the Battle of Corrin, Seurat tried to contact Vorian Atreides, who was commanding the LS Serena Victory. When Seurat asked him to lower the ship's shields, Vorian, moved by sentiment, did so, and Seurat opened fire. Realizing that his old friend, the only companion he had known through all those years, had attempted to trick him, Vorian immediately returned fire and destroyed Seurat's update ship.