Omnius

Omnius was the "evermind," or controlling intelligence, of the robots in the Legends of Dune series, a trilogy of novels set before Frank Herbert's Dune.

There were many copies of Omnius, one on each of the Synchronized Worlds (planets controlled by the thinking machines). Each Omnius received regular updates from every other Omnius, keeping all of the machine worlds synchronized with each other -- hence the empire's name. Omnius controlled most of the machines, although some robots, like the robots Erasmus and Seurat, were independent.

Omnius believed itself to be superior to humans in every way; this overconfidence eventually led to its downfall. Unlike its perfect machines, humans were unpredictable to Omnius, and it made no serious attempt at learning their haphazard ways. The humans used their unpredictability to secure victory after victory. During the middle of the struggle, Vorian Atreides managed to commandeer an updater ship and use it to infect many copies of Omnius with a virus. Omnius Prime (the main Omnius, located on Corrin), even after being cured by Erasmus, suffered lingering effects - it slowly went, as Erasmus puts it, "insane." It begins by making operational errors, unacceptable in the machine world, although Erasmus - in fear of his existence - refuses to admit this fact to Omnius. Later, Omnius attempts to imitate humans, creating art and having its machine army march in parades. When all but two of the other everminds were destroyed in the great purge, Omnius refused to synchronize with them because it feared another programming virus. The other everminds wanted to control the remnants of the Empire themselves, and in a bitter argument Omnius Prime declared itself to be God. In the subsequent infighting, the other two severely damaged Omnius Prime.

All copies of the Evermind were supposedly destroyed in the Battle of Corrin. However, not only did Omnius Prime send out a copy beam of himself into space, the Giedi Prime Omnius had already launched 5,000 probes capable of constructing machine colonies on each planet they land on, across the galaxy many years before. This Omnius was destroyed immediately after doing this, however; neither the humans nor Omnius Prime were ever aware of the probes' existence. Thus, it is highly probable that thousands of worlds at distant locations in the universe are still controlled by thinking machines.