Your Life Is Just Beginning

 Can you think of a substance, one single substance that the entire world depends on? A substance that can grant the user mild prescience, extended heath and age with moderate use and destroy a person physically while simultaneously granting immense prescience, and extreme long life with addiction level use?

And can you imagine there is only one place this substance exists in its natural form? That this substance can’t be duplicated because, despite all the technological advances in the world, it isn’t understood well enough TO duplicate it? That space travel would be impossible without it? That a suitcase filled with this substance could buy a planet?

Can you imagine a world without computers? Where specially trained men and women ARE the computers? Where computers are actually OUTLAWED?

Go out into your garden after a good, soaking rain.  See those earthworms? What if just one of those earthworms was a city block long and four stories high, with a tough outer skin? A skin that could be manipulated with special hooks, you could climb UP the ropes that hang from those hooks and RIDE that worm? Oh, and this particular earthworm has a mouth full of razor sharp teeth.

Think about the hottest, most desolate place on earth, covered in sand and very sparse vegetation. Now imagine that’s your whole world. There is never any rain; never any snow. No precipitation of any sort. Ever. No polar ice caps, no shining seas, just….sand. So many different types of sand…fine sand, powder sand, drum sand, hard packed sand, dry quick sand… Just sand.

This is your future.

You come from a privileged, noble class and you live on a planet filled with water, fishing, wonders of the deep. You want for nothing.  You have been educated beyond belief by private tutors, and not just in books but in politics, defense, weaponry, chivalric arts. Your parents are not married because, while they love each other, it isn’t politically expedient. Your father is well loved by others in his class, and is known as a straight shooter—handsome, honest, loyal, truthful. Yet, he inspires jealousy by his very goodness, jealousy from the ruler.

Your mother has been educated in a women’s only school, a very mysterious school, where she has learned the fine art of intrigue, exceptional physical control over each and every one of her bodily systems—nerves, muscles, sweat glands-EVERYTHING. Along with the lessons your father ordered for you, she taught you as she was taught, something she was forbidden to do-yet she did anyway. She is as beautiful as your father is handsome.

You are 15 years old. You have been groomed to be a Hero. And your life along that path is just beginning.

You are Paul Atreides, son of Duke Leto Atreides and the Lady Jessica, bound concubine to the Duke. Your family has just been ordered to leave the family planet of water rich Caladan to take control of the fiefdom of Arrakis, the desert planet known as “Dune” and the sole source of mélange.

Your own Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV, has issued this order out of jealousy, and, in collusion with the hated Harkonnens and the Spacing Guild, has set your family up for assassination and extinction.

Your life is just beginning.