–Who killed my father? Senator Byron Lamia?

[Elements of the Core authorized it\\ Myself included]

–Why? What did he do to you?

[He insisted on bringing Hyperion into the equation before it could be factored/predicted/absorbed]

–Why? Did he know what you just told us?

[He knew only that the Volatiles were pressing for quick

extinction

of humankind\\

He passed this knowledge

to his colleague

Gladstone]

–Then why haven’t you murdered her?

[Some of us have precluded

that possibility/inevitability\\

The time is right now

for the Hyperion Variable

to be played]

–Who murdered Johnny’s first cybrid? Attacked his Core persona?

[I did\\ It was

Ummon’s will which prevailed]

–Why?

[We created him\\

We found it necessary to discontinue him

for a while\\

Your lover is a persona retrieved

from a humankind poet

now long dead\\

Except for the Ultimate Intelligence Project

no effort has been

so complicated

nor little understood

as this resurrection\\

Like your kind/

we usually destroy

what we cannot understand]

Johnny raises his fists toward the megalith:

–But there is another of me. You failed!

[Not failure\\ You had to be destroyed

so that the other

might live]

–But I am not destroyed, cries Johnny.

[Yes\\

You are]

The megalith seizes Johnny with a second massive pseudopod before Brawne can either react or touch her poet lover a final time. Johnny twists a second in the Al’s massive grip, and then his analog—Keats’s small but beautiful body—is torn, compacted, smashed into an unrecognizable mass which Ummon sets against his megalith flesh, absorbing the analog’s remains back into the orange-and-red depths of itself.

Brawne falls to her knees and weeps. She wills rage… prays for a shield of anger… but feels only loss.

Ummon turns his gaze on her. The egg-chamber ovoid collapses, allowing the din and electric insanity of the megasphere to surround them.

[Go away now\\

Play out the last

of this act

so that we may live

or sleep

as fate decrees]

–Fuck you! Brawne pounds the palm-platform on which she kneels, kicks and pummels the pseudoflesh beneath her. You’re a goddamned loser! You and all your fucking AI pals. And our UI can beat your UI any day of the week!

[That is doubtful]

–We built you. Buster. And we’ll find your Core. And when we do we’ll tear your silicon guts out!

[I have no silicon guts/organs/internal components]

–And another thing, screams Brawne, still slashing at the megalith with her hands and nails. You’re a piss-poor storyteller. Not a tenth the poet that Johnny is! You couldn’t tell a straightforward tale if your stupid AI ass depended—

[Go away]

Ummon the AI megalith drops her, sending her analog tumbling and falling into the upless and downless crackling immensity of the megasphere.

Brawne is buffeted by data traffic, almost trod upon by AIs the size of Old Earth’s moon, but even as she tumbles and blows with the winds of dataflow, she senses a light in the distance, cold but beckoning, and knows that neither life nor the Shrike is finished with her.

And she is not finished with them.

Following the cold glow, Brawne Lamia heads home.

“Are you all right, sir?”

I realized that I had doubled over in the chair, my elbows on my knees, my fingers curled through my hair, gripping fiercely, palms pressed hard against the sides of my head. I sat up, stared at the archivist.

“You cried out, sir. I thought that perhaps something was wrong.”

“No,” I said. I cleared my throat and tried again. “No, it’s all right. A headache.” I looked down in confusion. Every joint in my body ached. My comlog must have malfunctioned, because it said that eight hours had elapsed since I first entered the library.

“What time is it?” I asked the archivist. “Web standard?”

He told me. Eight hours had elapsed. I rubbed my face again, and my fingers came away slick with sweat. “I must be keeping you past closing time,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It is no problem,” said the little man. “I am pleased to keep the archives open late for scholars.” He folded his hands in front of him.

“Especially today. With all of the confusion, there is little incentive to go home.”

“Confusion,” I said, forgetting everything for a moment… everything except the nightmarish dream of Brawne Lamia, the AI named Ummon, and the death of my Keats-persona counterpart. “Oh, the war. What is the news?”

The archivist shook his head:

I smiled at the archivist. “And do you believe that some rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

The archivist did not smile. “Yes, sir, I do.”

I stood and moved past the vacuum-press display cases, not looking down at my handwriting on parchment nine hundred years old. “You may be right,” I said. “You may well be right.”

It was late; the parking lot was empty except for the wreck of my stolen Vikken Scenic and a single, ornate EMV sedan obviously handcrafted here on Renaissance Vector.

“Can I drop you somewhere, sir?”

I breathed in the cool night air, smelling the fish-and-spilled-oil scent of the canals. “No thanks, I’ll ’cast home.”

The archivist shook his head. “That may be difficult, sir. All of the public terminexes have been placed under martial law. There have been… riots.” The word was obviously distasteful to the little archivist, a man who seemed to value order and continuity above most things.

“Come,” he said, “I’ll give you a lift to a private farcaster.”

I squinted at him. In another era on Old Earth, he would have been the head monk in a monastery devoted to saving the few remnants of a classical past. I glanced at the old archives building behind him and realized that indeed he was just that.

“What is your name?” I asked, no longer caring if I should have known it because the other Keats cybrid had known it.

“Ewdrad B. Tynar,” he said, blinking at my extended hand and then taking it. His handshake was firm.

“I’m… Joseph Severn.” I couldn’t very well tell him that I was the technological reincarnation of the man whose literary crypt we had just left.

M. Tynar hesitated only a fraction of a second before nodding, but I realized that to a scholar such as he, the name of the artist who was with Keats at his death would be no disguise.

“What about Hyperion?” I asked.

“Hyperion? Oh, the Protectorate world where the space fleet went a few days ago. Well, I understand that there’s been some trouble recalling the necessary warships. The fighting has been very fierce there. Hyperion, I mean. Odd, I was just thinking of Keats and his unfinished masterwork. Strange how these small coincidences seem to crop up.”

“Has it been invaded? Hyperion?”