Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos Apr 2026

The enemy is not out there. The enemy is the need for an enemy.

The Shrike is coming back through the door. I have perhaps three of your seconds.

Both were wrong.

“And you?” I asked. “What is your story?”

The Shrike opened its chest. Within, where a heart should be, there was no mechanism, no organ, no crystal. There was a door . A farcaster portal, but wrong—not linking two points in space, but two points in narrative . Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos

I wrote the word that killed the first AI, he sent. And the Shrike made me rewrite it. Every day. For three centuries.

“What, then?” I whispered.

I was an Ouster. Not the swarm-creatures of Hegemony propaganda, all claws and chitin, but a child of the void decades: webbed fingers, lungs adapted to argon-methane mix, eyes that saw ultraviolet. I had come to Hyperion not to die, but to understand. The Hegemony believed the Time Tombs were a weapon. The Ouster Clergy believed they were a god.

Do you know who I am? he subvocalized on a band I barely heard. I was the poet. The enemy is not out there

It did not move. It replaced space. One moment it stood before the Tombs; the next, it was behind me, a blade resting against my spine.

I found the Shrike’s tree first. It was not a tree at all, but a labyrinth of razorwire and chrome thorns, each branch ending in a hook. Impaled upon the lowest branch was a figure—human, male, still breathing. His eyes had been replaced with crystal lenses. His mouth was stitched shut with fiber-optic thread. I have perhaps three of your seconds