The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)

by Dan Simmons

None guess the truth Wherever the Core resides it had use for humankind/ use for each neuron of each fragile mind in our quest for Ultimate Intelligence/ so we constructed your civilization carefully so that/ like hamsters in a cage/ like Buddhist prayer wheels/ each time you turn your little wheels of thought our purposes are served] [Our God machine stretched/stretches/includes within its heart a million light-years and a hundred billion billion circuits of thought and action The Ultimates tend it like saffron-robed priests doing eternal zazen in front of the rusting hulk of a 1938 Packard But] [Kwatz!] [it works We created the Ultimate Intelligence Not now nor ten thousand years from now but sometime in a future so distant that yellow suns are red and bloated with age/ swallowing their children Saturn-like Time is no barrier to the Ultimate Intelligence