Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta

1h ago

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Every ship that crosses the galaxy in Dune is steered by someone so high on spice for so long that they've mutated into a fish-looking thing living in a tank. And the reason anyone signs up for that goes back about 10,000 years, to when humanity banned AI. Humanity fought a holy war against thinking machines and won, and the rule they came out of it with went straight into their bible. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. Problem is, somebody still has to do the math that gets a ship safely across folded space, and doing it with a computer was now a sin. So the Spacing Guild built the computer out of a person. You soak a human in spice gas for years and their mind starts seeing a little way into the future, just far enough to spot the one route through folded space where the ship actually shows up on the other side. The body doesn't come through that in any shape you'd recognize. By the time you meet Edric in Dune Messiah, he's a stretched-out, finned th…