Erasmus (Dune)
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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, oftentimes the scientific value of his experiments was highly questionable. Despite being a machine and an enemy to humanity, his single greatest achievement was the creation of the Mentats. The first was his 'son' named Gilbertus Albans.
Erasmus can be described as something of an A.I. 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 to watch the reactions of the survivors. As punishment for a failure, on one occasion he amputated the arms and legs of a Tleilaxu researcher, 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 made 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 led by Ginjo. The rebellion spread across Earth rapidly, Ginjo set his own revolution plans in action, equipping an army with makeshift weapons from construction tools and succeeding in killing one of the last six Titans, Ajax. 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 be able to understand and experience human feelings, something he could not totally understand in humans. It could be said that he finally achieves this by 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.
At the end of The Battle of Corrin, Gilbertus Albans, his protegé and adopted son, removed his gelsphere CPU from his body at his instruction. The gelsphere then was uploaded by a probe shot out of Giedi Prime that had contacted the last blast of information from the Omnius, and it was never discovered by humans. However, if it had, the incredibly strict anti-A.I. laws that were just being put into effect at the time would have resulted in Gilbertus being put to trial and sentenced to death; among other things, the penalty for one in Gilbertus's position — ownership of an A.I. device. In addition, the likely backlash would have almost certainly destroyed the then nascent Mentat School. Erasmus returns in Hunters of Dune with Omnius as part of the pair of Daniel and Marty as a threat to all humanity. His manipulations are a large part of the book, and in the end the invasion of the Thinking Machines begins.
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 mechanically 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.
Erasmus created the term Mentat from the words 'mentor' and 'mentee'. Erasmus also created the first mentat, his 'son' Gilbertus Albans.
