Ethan Avila

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 thing swimming in orange gas, and Villeneuve finally puts him on screen December 18 in Part Three. As for why anyone takes the deal, the Guild runs every ship between every star plus the banking system on top of it, so every noble house in the empire pays whatever the Guild charges. If your family loses a war, the Guild is who flies you to a hidden planet only they know how to find. The Emperor can't move his own army without them. And all of that power hangs on one drug from one planet. When Paul took Arrakis and threatened to destroy the spice, the Guild ditched the Emperor on the spot and threatened to leave his whole army stranded in the desert. Paul figures out what's wrong with them pretty fast. They can see the future, and every time they use it to pick the safest option, which he says is exactly why they've been slowly stagnating for centuries. Herbert came back to them almost 20 years later. In the last two books, the Ixians build machines that can steer through folded space, and the navigators fade out while the Guild goes off to partner with the people building their replacements. So the whole job only ever existed because AI was illegal, and once the machines came back, the people who'd turned themselves into computers were stuck in their tanks with nothing left to sell.

Oh. Man. That's it for Mars, then, isn't it.