Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

by Dan Simmons

‘May I sit down?’ he asked, evidently satisfied that a bona fide investigatory agency would operate out of such a slum.

Johnny?’ I held out the bottle of Scotch I had been ready to put away as he entered. Johnny-boy shook his head. Maybe he thought I wanted him to drink from the bottle. Hell, I have more class than that. There are paper cups over by the water cooler.

It took ten minutes to get the story out of him. When he was finished, I no longer thought he was crazy. I was. Or I would be if I took the job.

Johnny was an AI. His consciousness or ego or whatever you want to call it floated somewhere in the megadatasphere datumplane of TechnoCore.

Basically the cloud

Our persona was opinionated to the point of absurdity, prejudiced beyond rationality, and functionally insane. It took a year of tinkering before we discovered that the persona was accurate; it was the man who had been nuts.

‘Are you kidding? Six hundred years ago, maybe. Two centuries ago the Secession made us leery. But if the things wanted to hurt humanity, they could’ve done it long before this. Worrying about AIs turning on us is about as productive as worrying that farm animals are going to revolt.’

‘Jesus, you don’t know shit about anything, do you, Brawne? The personality retrieval projects were all washouts. Even with the best sim control . . . they got the FORCE OCS:HTN network involved . . . you can’t factor all variables successfully. The persona template becomes self-aware . . . I don’t mean just self-aware, like you and me, but self-aware that it’s an artificially self-aware persona – and that leads to terminal Strange Loops and nonharmonic labyrinths that go straight to Escher-space.’

Basically it becomes self aware that not only is it real but that it was created to be real and goes mad

If our society ever opted for Orwell’s Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person’s activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.

‘I live on a small . . . inheritance.’ ‘Not too small, I hope. I want to be paid.’

‘Fanny.’ The word was almost whispered.

Lol

‘You said I reminded you of Fanny.’

Lol

The old man rubbed finger and thumb in a gesture as old as greed.

‘The Ultimate Intelligence,’ I said, exhaling smoke. ‘Uh-huh. So the TechnoCore is trying to . . . what? . . . to build God.’ ‘Yes,’

‘With the Ousters?’ Since the war on Bressia a few years earlier, the Ousters had been the Web’s prime bogeymen. The idea of the Core . . . the same congregation of AIs which advises the Senate and the All Thing and which allows our entire economy, farcaster system, and technological civilization to run . . . the idea of the Core being in touch with the Ousters was frightening. And what the hell did Johnny mean by ‘other sources’? I didn’t really want to know right then.

‘The result has been two futures – two realities if you will – one in which the Shrike scourge soon to be released on the Web and interstellar humanity is a weapon from the Core-dominated future, a retroactive first strike from the Volatiles who rule the galaxy millennia hence. The other reality sees the Shrike invasion, the coming interstellar war, and the other products of the Time Tombs’ opening as a human fist struck back through time, a final, twilight effort by the Ousters, ex-colonials, and other small bands of humans who escaped the Volatiles’ extinction programs.’

And there it is

‘Are we going on tonight?’ asked Brawne Lamia. ‘To the Tombs?’ asked Silenus, showing real surprise for the first time on the voyage. ‘You’d go to the Shrike in the dark?’

‘They have a section of balcony outside but no other access than this stairway. Easy to defend. The rooms are . . . clean.’ Silenus laughed. ‘Does that mean nothing can get at us or that, when something does get at us, we’ll have no way to get out?’

The SDF forces have been running wild. Much of the carnage could be their doing.’ ‘With no bodies?’ laughed Martin Silenus. ‘Wishful thinking. Our absent hosts downstairs dangle now on the Shrike’s steel tree. Where, ere long, we too will be.’

Martin Silenus had been writing notes on a pad but now he stood and paced the length of the room. ‘Jesus Christ, people. Look at us. We’re not six fucking pilgrims, we’re a mob. Hoyt there with his cruciform carrying the ghost of Paul Duré. Our “semisentient” erg in the box there. Colonel Kassad with his memory of Moneta. M. Brawne there, if we are to believe her tale, carrying not only an unborn child but a dead Romantic poet. Our scholar with the child his daughter used to be. Me with my muse. The Consul with whatever fucking baggage he’s brought to this insane trek. My God, people, we should have received a fucking group rate for this trip.’

The whole book in one paragraph

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

‘It will serve,’ said Mike. His voice was held taut by a cord of pain. ‘Damn. A fucking sword. Do you believe it, Merin? Cut down in the prime of my prime by a piece of fucking cutlery out of a fucking one-penny opera. Oh, damn, that smarts.’

I smiled at Siri’s use of the local term for the dolphins. The Maui-Covenant colonists were such children when it came to their damned dolphins.

At first my role was to provide Web ingenuity to help the colonists do what they do best – destroy truly indigenous life. It is no accident that in six centuries of interstellar expansion the Hegemony has encountered no species considered intelligent on the Drake-Turing-Chen Index. On Old Earth, it had long been accepted that if a species put mankind on its food-chain menu the species would be extinct before long. As the Web expanded, if a species attempted serious competition with humanity’s intellect, that species would be extinct before the first farcaster opened in-system.

Well of course. If a species was classed as "intelligent" then we couldn’t steamroll over the world and build a McDonald’s drive through on it

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome’s faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

I told her that the Ousters wanted me to become Consul on Hyperion so that I might be a double agent when war came. I did not tell her that they had promised to give me a device which would open the Time Tombs and allow the Shrike free rein.

The Ousters believed that the Time Tombs were artifacts from their future, the Shrike a weapon of redemption awaiting the proper hand to seize it. The Shrike Cult saw the monster as an avenging angel; the Ousters saw it as a tool of human devising, sent back through time to deliver humanity from the TechnoCore.

‘I was wrong,’ said the Consul. ‘I will make a request of the Shrike. I will ask for her.’ He gently touched Rachel’s head where the small skull curved in to neck.