As Dune: The Machine Crusade began, Ginjo (now Grand Patriarch of the Holy Jihad) and Serena (Priestess of the Jihad) had become the religious leaders of the human rebellion, and Xavier and Vorian its two generals. Xavier, thinking Serena was dead instead of a captive, had married her sister Octa and started a family. In 191 B.G., Ginjo created the "Seraphim", an elite force tasked with protecting Serena. She became interim Viceroy in 190 B.G. on her father's retirement, but was later relegated to a figurehead by Ginjo as he consolidated his power.
In 164 B.G., the humans were tired of war, but Serena and Ginjo knew that true peace was not possible — the machines had to be destroyed. Serena visited machine leader Omnius on Corrin as an emissary of the Jihad under the pretense of negotiating peace; secretly she planned to provoke Omnius into killing her, thereby making her a martyr and reenergizing the Jihad. Although Erasmus stopped Omnius from murdering Serena, one of her Seraphim bodyguards, on orders from Ginjo, killed her instead. Ginjo manufactured images of Serena being tortured at length and murdered by the thinking machines, using a Serena clone manufactured by the Tlulaxa. The plan worked; dissenters fell silent and the Jihad was galvanized back into action.
Read more about this topic: Serena Butler
Famous quotes containing the word machine:
“The momentary charge at Balaklava, in obedience to a blundering command, proving what a perfect machine the soldier is, has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet laureate; but the steady, and for the most part successful, charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of Slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. Do you think that that will go unsung?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)