"Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson - Dune 10 - The Butlerian " - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

Then came a man from the distant Thalim system, a visionary who took the name of
Tlaloc after an ancient god of rain. He spoke to languid crowds, attempting to revive
their human spirit, to no apparent effect. But a few misfits heard Tlaloc's message.
These new thinkers met in secret and discussed how they would change the Empire,
if only they could overthrow the foolish rulers. Discarding their birth names, they
assumed appellations associated with great gods and heroes. Foremost among them
were General Agamemnon and his lover Juno, a tactical genius. These two recruited the
programming expert Barbarossa, who devised a scheme to convert the Empire's
ubiquitous servile machines into fearless aggressors by giving their AI brains certain
human characteristics, including the ambition to conquer. Then several more humans
joined the ambitious rebels. In all, twenty masterminds formed the core of a
revolutionary movement that took over the Old Empire.
Victorious, they called themselves Titans, after the most ancient of Greek gods. Led
by the visionary Tlaloc, the twenty allocated the administration of planets and peoples
among themselves, enforcing their edicts through Barbarossa's aggressive thinking
machines. They conquered most of the known galaxy.
Some resistance groups rallied their defenses on the fringes of the Old Empire.
Forming their own confederation—the League of Nobles—they fought the Twenty Titans
and, after many bloody battles, retained their freedom. They stopped the tide of the
Titans and drove them back.

Tlaloc vowed to dominate these outsiders one day, but after less than a decade in
power, the visionary leader was killed in a tragic accident. General Agamemnon took
Tlaloc's place as leader, but the death of his friend and mentor was a grim reminder of
the Titans' own mortality.
Wishing to rule for centuries, Agamemnon and his lover Juno undertook a risky
course of action. They had their brains surgically removed and implanted in preservation
canisters that could be installed into a variety of mechanical bodies. One by one—as the
remaining Titans felt the specter of age and vulnerability—all of the others also
converted themselves into "cymeks," machines with human minds.

The Time of Titans lasted for a century. The cymek usurpers ruled their various
planets, using increasingly sophisticated computers and robots to maintain order. But
one fateful day the hedonistic Titan Xerxes, anxious to have more time for his pleasures,
surrendered too much access to his pervasive AI network.
The sentient computer network seized control of an entire planet, followed quickly
by others. The breakdown spread like a virulent infestation from world to world, and the
computer "evermind" grew in power and scope. Naming itself Omnius, the intelligent
and adaptible network conquered all the Titan-controlled planets before the cymeks had
time to warn each other of the danger.
Omnius then set out to establish and maintain order in its own highly structured
fashion, keeping the humiliated cymeks under its thumb. Once masters of an empire,
Agamemnon and his companions became reluctant servants to the widespread
evermind.
At the time of the Butlerian Jihad, Omnius and his thinking machines had held all of
the "Synchronized Worlds" in an iron grip for a thousand years.
Even so, clusters of free humans remained on the outskirts, bound together for
mutual protection, thorns in the sides of the thinking machines. Whenever attacks
came, the League of Nobles defended themselves effectively.
But new machine plans were always being developed.