With the release of the Butlerian Jihad books, I've had a lot of weird theories about machines surviving the jihad and remaining dormant to eventually destroy man. It was after all, Leto's Golden Path that prevent that holocaust. So what happened, where'd the machines come from?
After rereading Dune Messiah, I found these few sentences describing the Quizarate priests/government officials:
[quote]His gods were Routine and Records. He was served by mentats and prodigious filing systems. Expediency was the first word in his catechism, although he gave proper lip-service to the precepts of the Butlerians. Machines could not be fashioned in the image of a man's mind, he said, but he betrayed by every action that he preferred machine to men...[/quote]
So it appears that the Quizarate would have eventually re-created the machines! That's why Paul had to denounce his own religious order in CoD.
But it would have happened anyway. Had the Bene Gesserit's original breeding program come to fruitarian, they too would have created a similar religious order to control humanity. And we learned that they never stopped using computers in Chapterhouse.
So I guess the thinking machines will ALL be exterminated in the latest prequel after all. But the machine war did set up the events that would happen 11,000 years later that would have led to their re-birth and ultimate victory over the humans. Wow!
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