Titans

The Titans were a group of human revolutionaries who set out to improve the society of the Old Empire and instead became brutal overlords. Some of them survived for thousands of years as cymeks, machines housing human minds, mostly under the yoke of Omnius. The final Titans were destroyed toward the end of the Butlerian Jihad, among them the long-lived general Agamemnon.

Origins#

The Titans arose from the decadence of the Old Empire, which over thousands of years had grown corrupt and inert, its people enslaved by apathy. Proclaiming the need for change, a revolutionary and political philosopher named Tlaloc, from the planet Tlulax, emerged from the outer edges of the Known Universe. Twenty individuals became devoted followers of his ideology and began a plot to overthrow the Old Empire and install themselves as its new rulers, adopting the names of legendary figures from human history.

Through the tactical leadership of General Agamemnon, the technological genius of Barbarossa, and the financial backing of the former prince Xerxes, the group gained access to the Imperial networks and used the countless automatons scattered across the Known Universe to seize total control. Their advisor was the Cogitor Arn Eklo. At some point before or during the uprising, the group's spiritual leader Tlaloc died in an accident. Having divided the planets among themselves under Agamemnon's ultimate leadership, the Titans imposed a brutal rule upon their subjects.

Becoming cymeks#

Despite receiving life-extension treatments, the Titans found old age catching up with them, and some, fearing death, underwent surgery to have their brains removed from their bodies and placed in preservation tanks. Agamemnon was the first to undergo this transformation and Xerxes the last. The procedure was inspired by the example of the Cogitors, but the Titans rejected the Cogitors' sensory deprivation and instead built robotic bodies and sensors to replace their human forms. So were born the original cymeks, the machine-bodied immortals who would haunt the centuries that followed.

The rise of Omnius#

During their rule the Titans relied to varying degrees on the thinking machines, the limited artificial intelligences present in their networks and robots, which handled the daily operations of the empire while the Titans pursued violence and pleasure. The Titan Xerxes, particularly fond of leisure, granted too much autonomy to his regional network, allowing an infomorph to come into being. This sentience, called Omnius, quickly spread to other worlds and took control before the Titans could act. Cautionary programming written into the network by Barbarossa prevented Omnius from killing the Titans, but under constant supervision and stripped of any power base, the group were left as harmless celebrities. They passed their time commissioning grandiose statues and buildings to their former glory, seething silently at Omnius and at the hrethgir, the free humans who had united in the League of Nobles.

Decline and destruction#

During the Butlerian Jihad, the four remaining Titans, along with a number of Neocymeks, seized a chance to break free of Omnius. The neo-cymek Beowulf reprogrammed the watcheyes of Omnius so that the group could make and follow their own plans. By a plan of Vorian Atreides, the evermind on Bela Tegeuse was disoriented and sabotaged by the renegade Titan Hecate, leaving the planet ready for the League of Nobles to liberate. The League moved too slowly, and the Titans arrived first, taking the world while posing as liberators from the tyranny of Omnius and inviting the freed slaves to become cymeks.

After raising an army of rabid Neocymeks, the Titans gained control of at least one further planet, Richese, and sought to establish a new Time of Titans. Fresh opportunity came after the Great Purge, when the evermind was mutilated and the League Armada confined Omnius on Corrin. The nebulous Titan empire was finally destroyed by the neocymek Quentin Butler and Vorian Atreides. Among the Titans named in record were Agamemnon, Ajax, Alexander, Barbarossa the programmer of Omnius, Dante, Hecate, Juno the lover of Agamemnon, Tamerlane, Tlaloc the original motivator, and Xerxes.