Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos Direct

That night, I left him and walked into the Valley of the Time Tombs alone. The anti-entropic fields made my skin crawl. My internal chronometer—never wrong in forty years—began to stutter. Past and future bled like wet paint.

Tell the Ouster Clergy: the Tombs are not a god. They are a theater . Tell the Hegemony: the war is not a strategy. It is a compulsion . And tell the poets: the one perfect verse already exists. It is this: Dan Simmons - The Hyperion Cantos

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. That night, I left him and walked into

“You’ll hear them singing,” he said, pouring a glass of genuine Château Chiavari. “The Shrike’s tree. The steel thorns. Don’t go into the Valley at night.” Past and future bled like wet paint

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

Do you know who I am? he subvocalized on a band I barely heard. I was the poet.

We built it. Not as a machine. As a character . The villain of a story we could not stop telling.