Erasmus (Dune)

Erasmus is a 'Thinking Machine' in Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's Legends of Dune trilogy. He served as a synchronized robot under Omnius before he fell into an ice crevice where he was trapped for twenty years and had only the ability to think. He gained an independence from all the time spent thinking, and having not linked up with the evermind, Omnius. Eventually he was rescued from the crevice. He became obsessed with learning Human Nature to better combat the hrethgir. He conducted thousands of experiments on slave humans captured from defeated League Worlds, as with Joseph Mengele, often times the scientific value of his experiments was highly questionable. His greatest achievement was the creation of Mentats. The first was his 'son' named Gilbertus Albans.

Erasmus can be described as something of an AI cross between Hannibal Lecter and Josef Mengele. Despite being very "cultured" by human standards and incredibly intelligent, he is also casually sadistic and violent on a whim. Erasmus is obsessed with understanding humans, and to this end for many years he has conducted horrific experimentation on live human prisoners (vivisection is a routine procedure in his labs). At times, he shot humans in his slave pens with remote-controlled automatic weapons simply out of boredom. As punishment for a failure, on one occasion he amputated the arms and legs of a human researcher off, then grafted the limbs onto other lab slaves in order to taunt him. Later, he would develop the Scourge virus to try to wipe out the free human planets.

Erasmus' actions accidentally led to the great revolt of humans against their machine masters on Earth itself at the beginning of the Butlerian Jihad. Erasmus had been making a bet with Omnius, arguing that the human slaves of the evermind were not, in fact, "tamed" completely but would rebel if given the chance. To prove his point, Erasmus dropped off cryptic messages to various human work crew leaders to hint to them that there was a (in truth non-existent) resistance movement and that they should start their own cells. The experiment backfired spectacularly when one of these humans, Iblis Ginjo, actually managed to build a large resistance cell as a direct result of Erasmus' suggestions. Next, Erasmus became obsessed with understanding the "non-tamed" human Serena Butler, culminating in Erasmus callously flinging her infant son Manion off of a multi-story balcony because he felt the child was a distraction. Serena's knee-jerk reaction was to shove a sentry robot off the same ledge while trying to kill Erasmus, and a large crowd of human slave laborers that witnessed the whole event then rose up in rebellion. The rebellion spread across Earth rapidly, and as soon as he heard of it Ginjo set his own revolution plans in action, equiping an army with makeshift weapons from construction tools and succeeding in killing one of the last six Titans. Erasmus fled in disgrace, but the Earth-Omnius was unable to transmit the information of Erasmus' responsibility for the situation to the rest of the Synchronized Worlds, so he was never punished.

One of Erasmus' goals was to being able to understand and feel human feelings, something he could not totally understand in humans. You can say that he in some sort of way finally does achieves this when saving his "son", Gilbertus Albans, by deactivating the Bridge Of The Hrethgir, even if he knew it meant the end of the A.I. Empire, just because of love.

His fate is unknown, but at the end of The Battle Of Corrin, Gilbertus Albans, his protegè and adopted son, removed his gelsphere CPU from his body at his instruction. The fate of the gelsphere is unknown. However, the incredibly strict anti-A.I. laws were just being put into effect at the time; among other things, the punishement of one in Gilbertus's position- ownership of an A.I. device- was death. This factor, coupled with the future existence of mentats- human computers, the first of which was Gilbertus himself- seems to indicate that the gelsphere was never discovered. If it had, the likely backlash would have almost certainly destroyed the then nascent Mentat School. There is however a theory that Erasmus might return in Hunters of Dune or Sandworms of Dune.

Erasmus enjoys quite refined pursuits, such as gardening and human arts and he's actually quite an expert from the standpoint of information, but he has no idea how to actually make his own good art. He's skilled enough to make exact copies of classical artwork, freehand, but he really has no idea how to create new art on his own, other than just mechanistically copying other works. He studied the mathematical relationships of the compositions of famous composers such as Johannes Brahms and Emi Chusuk then made his own composition based on these relations. The result was something that sounded very familiar and yet, one was sure that he has never heard it before. He also once painted an exact replica of one of Van Gogh's famous cottage paintings. 15,000 years later, in Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune, this Van Gogh painting is supposed to be in the hands of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, and it's strongly implied that the one they have is actually Erasmus' fake.

Erasmus created the term mentat from the words 'mentor' and 'mentee'. Erasmus also created the first mentat, his 'son' Gilbertus Albans.