"Herbert, Brian - The Butlerian Jihad" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

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 adaptable 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.
When humans created a computer with the ability to collect information and learn from it, they signed the death warrant of mankind.

-- SISTER BECCA THE FINITE



Salusa Secundus hung like a jeweled pendant in the desert of space, an oasis of resources and fertile fields, peaceful and pleasing to the optic sensors. Unfortunately, it was infested with feral humans.

The robotic fleet approached the capital world of the League of Nobles. Armored warships bristled with weapons, weirdly beautiful with their reflective alloy coatings, their adornments of antennae and sensors. Aft engines blazed pure fire, pushing the vessels to accelerations that would have crushed mere biological passengers. Thinking machines required no life-support or physical comfort. Currently, they were focused on destroying the remnants of age-old human resistance on the wild outer fringes of the Synchronized Worlds.

Inside his pyramid-shaped vessel, the cymek general Agamemnon led the attack. Logical thinking machines did not care about glory or revenge. But Agamemnon certainly did. Fully alert inside his preservation canister, his human brain watched the plans unfold.

Ahead of him, the main fleet of robot warships swept into the human-infested system, overwhelming the crews of surprised sentry vessels like an avalanche out of space. Human picket ships opened fire, defenders swept in to meet the oncoming machine force. Five League sentry vessels fired off heavy salvos, but most of their projectiles were too slow to hit the streaking inbound fleet. A handful of robotic vessels were damaged or destroyed by lucky shots, and just as many human ships exploded in flashes of incandescent vapor -- not because they posed a particular threat, but because they were in the way.

Only a few distant scouts managed to transmit a warning toward vulnerable Salusa Secundus. Robot battleships vaporized the diffuse inner perimeter of human defenses, without even slowing on their way to their real goal. Shuddering under extreme deceleration, the thinking-machine fleet would arrive not long after the warning signal reached the capital world.

The humans would never have time enough to prepare.

The robot fleet was ten times the size and power of any force Omnius had ever before sent against the League of Nobles. The humans had grown complacent, having faced no concentrated robotic aggression during the last century of uneasy cold war. But machines could wait a long time, and now Agamemnon and his surviving Titans would finally have their chance.

Revealed by a flurry of tiny machine spy probes, the League had recently installed supposedly invincible defenses against gelcircuitry-based thinking machines. The massive robot fleet would wait at a safe distance while Agamemnon and his small vanguard of cymeks pressed forward on a mission, perhaps a suicidal one, to open the door.

Agamemnon reveled in the anticipation. Already the hapless biologicals would be sounding alarms, preparing defenses . . . cowering in fear. Through flowing electrafluid that kept his disembodied brain alive, he transmitted an order to his cymek shock troops. "Let us destroy the heart of the human resistance. Forward!"

For a thousand hellish years, Agamemnon and his Titans had been forced to serve the computer evermind, Omnius. Chafing under their bondage, the ambitious but defeated cymeks now turned their frustration against the League of Nobles. One day the once-defeated general hoped to turn against Omnius himself, but thus far had seen no opportunity.

The League had erected new scrambler shields around Salusa Secundus. Such fields would destroy the sophisticated gelcircuitry of all AI computers -- but human minds could survive the passage. And though they had mechanical systems and interchangeable robotic bodies, cymeks still had human brains.

Thus, they could pass through the defensive shields unscathed.

Like a target behind crosshairs, Salusa Secundus filled Agamemnon's field of view. With great attention to detail the general had studied tactical projections, applying the military skills he'd developed over the centuries, along with an intuitive understanding of the art of conquest. His abilities had once allowed a mere twenty rebels to take over an empire . . . until they'd lost it all to Omnius.