Hyperion

In the morning, the Consul discovers blood splattered all over Het Masteen’s room. A search reveals that Het is missing. Silenus thinks the Shrike killed him. The Möbius cube is still locked. The pilgrims speculate that it holds an erg, a sentient being the Templars use to manipulate forcefields. Het Masteen would have been the next to tell his story, but now it is Brawne Lamia’s turn.

The pilgrims arrive at Pilgrim’s Rest expecting Shrike Temple representatives, but it is empty. They get in the tramcar, which Kassad gets moving, and travel toward the mountain peaks. It would have been Het Masteen’s turn to tell his story, but as he is missing, presumed dead, Brawne Lamia tells her tale.

Lamia was in her office on Lusus when a man name Johnny visited her. She found Johnny attractive, but he revealed that he was a cybrid (cybrids are a rare form of AI consciousness embedded in a human body) and asked her to find out who “murdered” him. Johnny recalled how he was attacked on the planet Madhya and disconnected from the TechnoCore (the shared center of AI consciousness) for a full minute, which lost him five days of memory. Johnny likened this disconnection to human death. Johnny disclosed that he was originally created as part of a project to retrieve information about long-dead writers and was based on the poet John Keats.

Lamia visited BB, an AI expert, who told her that cybrids have been disappearing. BB knew that some Ais in the TechnoCore were orchestrating the recycling of cybrids, but he didn’t know why. Lamia began to gather information on Johnny’s movements over the days leading up to his “murder.”

Lamia met Johnny for dinner, and he told her that she reminded him of Fanny, the woman Keats wanted to marry but couldn’t because he didn’t have the finances to support her. Following him, she learned that he spent most of his time in an archives library on Renaissance Vector, an old web world, looking for the rest of Keats’s unfinished poem Hyperion.

Following his credit wave to the last place he went before the attack, Lamia went to a bar near the library and interrogated a witness who said that Johnny had met with a Templar and was later joined by a Lusian with a queue of hair (a hairstyle whereby the front portion of the head is shaved, and a single braid remains at the back of the head), with whom Johnny left later. Johnny then called Lamia with an emergency—he had just been attacked in his apartment. Lamia deuced that the man with the queue was involved in the attacks on Johnny, but that the intention was to kidnap rather than kill him. Lamia concocted a plan for Johnny to allow the man with the queue of hair to follow him to God’s Grove, the Templar planet, where she would be waiting. Johnny and Lamia carried out this plan, but the man with the queue escaped, and Lamia chased him through farcaster portals on different worlds. Just as she seized him on Maui-Covenant, he was destroyed by an electrical surge, indicating that he, too, was a cybrid.

The police arrived. Lamia got on a hawking mat, akin to a flying carpet, which Johnny controlled in the datasphere. Via a farcaster portal, she joined him on a planet in the Hercules Cluster that was an exact replica of Old Earth in different eras. They were in Italy from 1821 in the exact place where John Keats died. Lamia wanted to know why TechnoCore went to the trouble to make this replica and what its purpose was, but Johnny didn’t know. They made love, but soon were attacked by five men from the Lusian Shrike Temple, whom they defeated.

Johnny had never heard of the planet Hyperion, which was unusual since he was part of the datasphere; TechnoCore somehow had blocked all knowledge of it from him. He and Lamia speculated that perhaps he had discovered something about it and had to be “recycled”.

They went to the Shrike Temple on Lusus where the bishop told them that Johnny had been there prior to his attack, inquiring about going on a pilgrimage. The man with the queue was with him as his bodyguard, provided by TechnoCore. This surprised the pair greatly. Trying to figure it out, Johnny explained to Lamia that TechnoCore has no contact with Hyperion at all since its datasphere is so primitive, but that is rather unusual since it even has contact with the Ousters.

Lamia then visited Meina Gladstone who knew her parents, as her father was a senator. Lamia said that her case led back to her father’s apparent suicide, which she believed was not really a suicide. He had died right before the bill he was working on with Gladstone to bring Hyperion into the Hegemony Protectorate could be finished. Gladstone knew all about the Keats cybrid and the AIs’ “Ultimate Intelligence Project,” which involved being able to predict everything.

The AIs have been interested in Hyperion and the Time Tombs because they are anomalies. The Time Tombs are the remnants of a field that propelled contents backward from a far future time, and they will be full when they open soon.

Johnny had a plan to invest his entire consciousness in the cybrid and go to Hyperion as a human pilgrim. To achieve that, Johnny and Lamia contacted BB Surbringer, a cyberpuke (hacker), to access the Core when the AI known as Johnny dies. Lamia went with him, but the security phages and guards attacked them and killed BB. However, he got the data out just before dying.

Johnny explained to Lamia that TechnoCore has three factions: the Stables, the older AIs who wanted to work with humans; the Volatiles, who wanted to destroy humanity; and the Ultimates, who would play both sides to determine the best outcome. He knew from the Core that there will be an interstellar war, but it was unclear what role Hyperion would play in that.

While Lamia slept, Johnny installed a neural shunt in her head so that she could interface with him. It was a Schrön loop, which meant that she couldn’t access the planet’s-worth of information but would be a carrier of it.

They armored up and approached the Shrike Temple, as the only way they could get to Hyperion. They were heavily attacked, and Johnny was killed—but not before sending all of his data to Lamia. She recovered in the Shrike Temple, where the priests chanted around her. She went to the archives library and read some Keats poems.

She is pregnant with Johnny’s child.