The Shrike's respect thread

The Shrike (also called The Lord of Pain) is a major antagonist in the series of Science Fiction novels The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons.

The Shrike is an AI created by the Artificial Ultimate Intelligence in the future built to do war with the Living Ultimate Intelligence.

The Shrike is 3 meters tall, has red glowing eyes and is made of blades that are the sharpest thing in the Hyperion universe.

The Shrike's power is time itself. He can casually manipulate time to defeat his opponents.

Now lets start by showing how fast The Shrike is.

Here Fedmahn Kassad( a Soldier and rival of The Shrike) dodges a laser:

"---Kassad!

Kassad ducked as the laser beam crept past his shoulder, burning its way through the air like a slow fuse of ruby light. Kassad smelled ozone as it crackled past. Impossible. I've dodged a laser!"

Fedmahn Kassad percieves lasers in slow motion:

"In the end, the final assault boat fired on its doomed counterpart. Kassad was outside by then and he watched the particle beam and high-intesity lasers creep towards him, followed an eternity later by missiles which seemed to move so slowly that he could have written his name on them in flight."

Now, you might ask why does that matter? He isn't The Shrike.

Well here Fedmahn says that he sees the Shrike wink in and out of existence:

"Behind her, the Shrike moved slowly through the chaos, choosingvictims as if he were harvesting. Kassad watched the creature wink in and out of existence and realized that to the Pain Lord he and Moneta would appear to be moving as slowly as the Oustersdid to Kassad."

The Shrike is faster than EM Waves:

"He blinked, realizing that something was wrong with the image.Then it came to him: besides the thickness of the light and hisenhanced perception of energy fields, nothing was moving. The Ouster troops, even those set in attitudes of motion, were asstiff as the toy soldiers he had played with as a boy in the Tharsis slums. The EM tanks were dug into their hull-down positions, but Kassad noticed that now even their acquisitionradars—visible to him as concentric purple arcs—were motionless.He glanced skyward and saw some sort of large bird hanging in the sky, as unmoving as an insect frozen in amber. He passeda cloud of windblown dust hanging suspended, extended one chrome hand, and flicked spirals of particles to the ground.Ahead of them, the Shrike strode casually through the red mazeof sensor-mines, stepped over the blue lines of tripbeams, ducked under the violet pulses of the autofire scanners, passedthrough the yellow containment field and the green wall of thesonic defense perimeter, and walked into the assault boat’s shadow.Moneta and Kassad followed.—How is this possible? Kassad realized that he had posed the question through a medium that was something less than telepathybut something far more sophisticated than implant conduction.—He controls time.—The Pain Lord?—Of course."

Here The Shrike blocks Nemes' blow before it hits:

"NEMES SWINGS HER ARM, EXPECTING TO FEEL nothing as the edge slices through muscle andvertebrae, and is shocked by the violent contact.She looks down. The sharpened edge of her phase-shifted hand is in the grip of two sets offingerblades. Her forearm is gripped by two other scalpel-sharp hands. The bulk of the Shrike pressesclose, the blades on the lower body almost in the frozen girl’s face. The creature’s eyes are bright red.Nemes is momentarily startled and seriously irritated, but not alarmed. She rips her hand away andjumps back."

Endymion, chapter 55.

But wait, why is that impressive? Well, Nemes can react at nanoseconds:

"The Shrike staggers, and in that instant of vulnerability she slips the Sphinx card from her wristband,slides it through a five-nanosecond gap in her displacement field squarely into the palm of her hand, andslaps it onto a spike rising from the Shrike’s banded neck."

Endymion, chapter 55.

Here the Shrike bites Gyges head off in nanoseconds:

"Gyges threw himself at the apparition, trying to merge fields, attempting to get his own teeth withintearing distance. Two huge hands seized him, the bladed fingers sinking through shift field and flesh tohold him tight. The chrome skull in front of him slashed forward: needle-spikes pierced Gyges’s right eyeand penetrated the right frontal lobe of his brain.Gyges screamed then—not out of pain, although he felt something similar for the first time in his shortlife—but out of pure, relentless rage. His teeth snapped and clacked like steel rendering blades as hesought the creature’s throat, but he continued being held at three-arms’ length.Then the monster ripped out both of Gyges’s hearts and threw them far out over the water. Ananosecond later, it lunged forward, biting through Gyges’s throat and severing his carbon-alloy spinalcord with a single snap of long teeth. Gyges’s head was severed from his body. He tried to shift totelemetrie control of the still-fighting body, peering through blood and fluid out of his remaining eye andbroadcasting over the common band, but the transmitter in his skull had been pierced and the receiver inhis spleen had been ripped away."

Rise of Endymion, chapter 11.

Here the Shrike stabs Gyges before he can shift in less than a microsecond:

"

Gyges stood, stretched languidly, and prepared to phase-shift.Suddenly the thing was next to him, centimeters away, at least three meters tall, towering over him.Impossible, thought Gyges. I would have sensed the phase-shift distortions.Exploding skyrockets spilled bloodred light on the chrome carapace. Metal teeth and chrome spikestwisted the expanding flowers of yellow, white, and red across quicksilver planes. Gyges caught aninstant’s look at his own reflection, distorted and startled, and then he phase-shifted.It took less than a microsecond for the shift. Somehow one of the creature’s four clawed hands made itinto the field before it completely formed. Bladed fingers dug through synflesh and muscle, seeking one ofGyges’s hearts."

Rise of Endymion, chapter 11.

Here The Shrike summons clones by time travel:

"Kassad took ten paces and stopped on a curve of frozen dune. TheShrike stood between him and the tree.He realized that he was grinning fiercely beneath the chromiumforcefield of the skinsuit. This was what he had waited many yearsfor. This was the honorable warfare he had pledged his life andhonor for twenty years earlier in the FORCE Masada Ceremony. Singlecombat between warriors. A struggle to protect the innocent. Kassadgrinned, flattened the edge of his right hand into a silver blade,and stepped forward.—Kassad!He looked back at Moneta’s call. Light cascaded on the quicksilversurface of her nude body as she pointed toward the valley.A second Shrike was emerging from the tomb called the Sphinx. Farther down the valley, a Shrike stepped from the entrance to theJade Tomb. Harsh light glinted from spikes and razorwire as anotheremerged from the Obelisk, half a klick away.Kassad ignored them and turned back toward the tree and itsprotector.A hundred Shrikes stood between Kassad and the tree. He blinked,and a hundred more appeared to his left. He looked behind him, and a legion of Shrikes stood as impassively as sculptures on the colddunes and melted boulders of the desert...Colonel Fedmahn Kassad turned away then and let out a scream onlyhe could hear in the lunar silence —a scream part rebel yell fromthe distant human past, part FORCE cadet graduation shout, partkarate cry, and part pure defiance. He ran across the dunes towardthe thorn tree and the Shrike directly in front of it.There were thousands of Shrikes in the hills and valleys now.Talons clicked open in unison; light glinted on tens of thousandsof scalpel-sharp blades and thorns.Kassad ignored the others and ran toward the Shrike he thought wasthe first he had seen. Above the thing, human forms writhed in thesolitude of their pain.The Shrike he was running toward opened its arms as if offering anembrace. Curved blades on its wrists, joints, and chest seemed toextend from hidden sheaths.Kassad screamed and closed the remaining distance."

Fall of Hyperion, chapter 27.

Here the Shrike shifts the flow of time backwards:

"The creature’s head snapped up, attentive now, and its four arms extended like blades from a knife,fingers snapping open in sharp greeting.Kassad skidded to a halt ten meters from the thing and activated the assault rifle, slagging the sandbeneath the Shrike in a full-power wide-beam burst.The Shrike glowed as its carapace and steel-sculpture legs reflected the hellish light beneath andaround it. Then the three meters of monster began to sink as the sand bubbled into a lake of molten glassbeneath it. Kassad shouted in triumph as he stepped closer, playing the widebeam on the Shrike andground the way he had sprayed his friends with stolen irrigation hoses in the Tharsis slums as a boy.The Shrike sank. Its arms splayed at the sand and rock, trying to find purchase. Sparks flew. It shifted,time running backward like a reversed holie, but Kassad shifted with it, realizing that Moneta was helpinghim, her suit slaved to his but guiding him through time, and then he was spraying the creature again withconcentrated heat greater than the surface of a sun, melting sand beneath it, and watching the rocks aroundit burst into flame.Sinking in this cauldron of flame and molten rock, the Shrike threw back its head, opened its widecrevasse of a mouth, and bellowed.Kassad almost stopped firing in his shock at hearing noise from the thing. The Shrike’s screamresounded like a dragon’s roar mixed with the blast of a fusion rocket. The screech set Kassad’s teeth onedge, vibrated from the cliff walls, and tumbled suspended dust to the ground. Kassad switched to highvelocitysolid shot and fired ten thousand microfléchettes at the creature’s face."

Fall of Hyperion, chapter 40.

The Shrike stops time for most people in a room:

"Suddenly the music ends in mid-bar. The dancers stop. Aenea and I lurch to a stop and look around.There has been no sign of the Pax guests for hours, but suddenly one of them—Rhadamanth Nemes—emerges from the shadows of the Dalai Lama’s curtained alcove. She has changed her uniform and is nowdressed all in red. There are two others with her, and for a moment I think they are the priests, but then Isee that the two figures dressed in black are near-copies of the Nemes thing: another woman and a man,both in black combat suits, both with limp, black bangs hanging down on pale foreheads, both with eyesof dead amber.The trio moves through the frozen dancers toward Aenea and me. Instinctively I put myself between myfriend and the things, but the Nemes male and its other sibling begin to move around us, flanking us. I pullAenea close behind me, but she steps to my side.The frozen dancers make no noise. The orchestra remains silent. Even the moonlight seems stilled tosolid shafts in the dusty air.I remove the flashlight laser and hold it at my side. The primary Nemes thing shows small teeth.Cardinal Mustafa steps from the shadows and stands behind her. All four of the Pax creatures hold theirgaze on Aenea. For a moment I think that the universe has stopped, that the dancers are literally frozen intime and space, that the music hangs above us like icy stalactites ready to shatter and fall, but then I hearthe murmur through the crowd—fearful whispers, a hiss of anxiety.There is no visible threat—only four Pax guests moving out across the ballroom floor with Aenea asthe locus of their closing circle—but the sense of predators closing on their prey is too strong to ignore,as is the scent of fear through the perfume and powder and cologne."

Rise of Endymion, chapter 19.

The Shrike has an ability that's called Merlin's sickness, it makes the person that he touches age backwards and forget:

" “Is she hurt?” demanded Sarai.“We don’t know,” said Singh. “All life signs have returned tonear normal. Brain-wave activity is nearing a conscious state.The problem is that her body appears to have absorbed … thatis, the antientropic field appears to have contaminated her.”Sol rubbed his forehead. “Like radiation sickness?”Dr. Singh hesitated. “Not precisely … ah … this case is quiteunprecedented. Specialists in aging diseases are due in thisafternoon from Tau Ceti Center, Lusus, and Metaxas.”Sol met the woman’s gaze. “Doctor, are you saying that Rachelcontracted some aging disease on Hyperion?” He paused a secondto search his memory. “Something like Methuselah syndrome or earlyAlzheimer’s disease?”“No,” said Singh, “in fact your daughter’s illness has no name.The medics here are calling it Merlin’s sickness. You see … yourdaughter is aging at a normal rate … but as far as we can tell,she is aging backward.”........“I’m recording this on the twelfth day of Tenmonth, year 457 ofthe Hegira, A.D. 2739 old reckoning. Yes, I know that’s half astandard year from the last thing you remember. Listen.“Something happened in the Sphinx. You got caught up in the timetide. It changed you. You’re aging backward, as dumb as that sounds.Your body’s getting younger every minute, although that’s not theimportant part right now. When you sleep … when we sleep … you forget. You lose another day from your memory before the accident,and you lose everything since. Don’t ask me why. The doctors don’tknow. The experts don’t know. If you want an analogy, just think of a tapeworm virus … one of the old kind … that’s chewing up thedata in your comlog … backward from the last entry.“They don’t know why the memory loss hits you when you sleep, either.They tried stay-awakes, but after about thirty hours you just go catatonic for a while and the virus does its thing anyway. So what thehell.“You know something? This talking about yourself In the third personis sort of therapeutic. Actually, I’m lying here waiting for them totake me up to imaging, knowing I’ll fall asleep when I get back … knowing I’ll forget everything again … and it scares the shit out of me.“OK, key the diskey for short-term and you get a prepared spiel herethat should catch you up on everything since the accident. Oh … Momand Dad are both here and they know about Melio. But I don’t know asmuch as I used to. When did we first make love with him, mmm? The second month on Hyperion? Then we have just a few weeks left, Rachel,and then we’ll be just acquaintances. Enjoy your memories while you can, girl."

Hyperion Cantos.

Here The Shrike IT's the Yggdrasill( a Tree space ship) into the past:

"Aenea was looking up toward the low clouds. “The Yggdrasill just ’cast out of system. Did either ofyou feel it?”I closed my eyes to concentrate on the dream flow of voices and images that were ever under thesurface there now. There was … an absence. A vision of flame as the outer branches began to burn. “Thefields collapsed just as they ’cast away,” I said. “How did they ’cast without you, Aenea?” I saw theanswer as soon as I had verbalized the question. “The Shrike,” I said.“Yes.” Aenea was still holding my hand. The rain was cold on us and I could hear it gurgling downgutters and drainpipes behind us. She spoke very quietly. “The Shrike will carry the Yggdrasill and theTrue Voice of the Tree away through space and time. To his … destiny.”

Rise of Endymion, chapter 30.

Here, the Shrike IT's into a room that has no entrances:

" “It’s on the beach?” I said.“It was a moment ago, when I went up to carry another load out,” came A. Bettik’s voice.“Then it was in the Hawking-drive accumulator ring,” said the ship.“What?” I said. “There’s no entrance to that part of the ship—” I stopped before I made a total idiot ofmyself. “Where is it now?” I said."

Here a description of the Tree of Pain:

"The tree was larger than the valley, taller than the mountainsthe pilgrims had crossed; its upper branches seemed to reach into space. The tree was steel and chrome, and its branches were thorns and nettles. Human beings struggled and wriggledon those thorns—thousands and tens of thousands. In the redlight from the dying sky, Silenus focused above his pain and realized that he recognized some of those forms. They were bodies, not souls or other abstracts, and they obviously were suffering the agonies of the pain-wracked living."

Fall of Hyperion, chapter 21.

The Tree is outside of the flow of time:

"Time does not truly pass, but after a while Silenus’s mind returns to something resembling linear observation … something other than the scattered oases of clear, pure agony separated by the desert ofmindlessly received agony … and in that linear perception of his ownpain, Silenus begins to impose time on this timeless place."

Fall of Hyperion, chapter 32.

The tree of pain broadcasts across the universe in order to draw out the empathy of the Living Ultimate Intelligence(God):

"[Our UI and your UI have sent back the Shrike to find him]—Our UI! The human UI sent the Shrike also?[It allowed it][Empathy is aforeign and useless thing/a vermiform appendix ofthe intellectBut the human UI smells with it/and we use pain todrive him out of hiding/thus the tree]—Tree? The Shrike’s tree of thorns?[Of course][It broadcasts painacross fatline and thin/like a whistle ina dog’s earOr a god’s]Fall of Hyperion Chapter 41Sol no longer saw the tree of thorns on its cliff top, its metal branches and suffering multitudes,but he did see clearly now that the thing was as much an organic machine as the Shrike—an instrument tobroadcast suffering through the universe so the human God-part would be forced to respond, to showitself."

Martin Silenus(The Poet) trapped in the Tree of Pain describes the pain:

" Martin Silenus twists and writhes in the pure poetry of pain. A steelthorn two meters long enters his body between his shoulder blades andpasses out through his chest, extending to a point a terrible, taperingmeter beyond him. His flailing arms cannot touch the point. The thorn is frictionless, his sweaty palms and curling fingers can find no purchase there. Despite the thorn’s slickness to the touch, his bodydoes not slide; he is as firmly impaled as a butterfly pinned for exhibition.There is no blood.In the hours after rationality returned through the mad haze of pain,Martin Silenus wondered about that. There is no blood. But there ispain. Oh yes, there is pain in abundance here—pain beyond the poet’swildest imaginings of what pain was, pain beyond human endurance andthe boundaries of suffering.But Silenus endures. And Silenus suffers.He screams for the thousandth time, a ragged sound, empty of content,free of language, even obscenities. Words fail to convey such agony.Silenus screams and writhes. After a while, he hangs limply, the longthorn bouncing slightly in response to his gyrations. Other people hang above, below, and behind him, but Silenus spends little time observing them. Each is separated by his or her own private cocoonof agony.“Why this is hell,” thinks Silenus, quoting Marlowe, “nor am I out of it.”But he knows it is not hell. Nor any afterlife. But he also knowsthat it is not some subbranch of reality; the thorn passes throughhis body! Eight centimeters of organic steel through his chest! Buthe has not died.He does not bleed. This place was somewhere and something, but itwas not hell and it was not living. Time was strange here. Silenushad known time to stretch and slow before—the agony of the exposednerve in the dentist’s chair, the kidney-stone pain in the Med clinic waiting room—time could slow, seem not to move as the handsof an outraged biological clock stood still in shock. But time didmove then. The root canal was finished. The ultramorph finally arrived, took effect. But here the very air is frozen in the absenceof time. Pain is the curl and foam of a wave that does not break.Silenus screams in anger and pain. And writhes upon his thorn.“Goddamn!” he manages at last. “Goddamn motherfuck sonofabitch.” Thewords are relics of a different life, artifacts from the dream he hadlived before the reality of the tree. Silenus only half remembers thatlife, as he only half remembers the Shrike carrying him here, impalinghim here, leaving him here.“Oh God!” screams the poet and clutches at the thorn with both hands,trying to lever himself up to relieve the great weight of his body which adds so immeasurably to the unmeasurable pain.There is a landscape below. He can see for miles. It is a frozen, papier-mâché diorama of the Valley of the Time Tombs and the desert beyond. Even the dead city and the distant mountains are reproducedin plasticized, sterile miniature. It does not matter. For Martin Silenus there is only the tree and the pain, and the two are indivisible."

The Shrike creates a portal through space and time:

"The Shrike lifted its right hand and a four-meter rectangular fieldportal came into existence. It was similar to a farcaster portal exceptfor the violet glow which filled the interior of the Monolith with thicklight.Moneta nodded at him and stepped through. The Shrike stepped forward,fingerblades cutting only slightly into Kassad’s upper arm.Kassad considered pulling back, realized that curiosity was stronger in him than an urge to die, and stepped through with the Shrike."

His palace is bigger on the inside(this could be caused by the time tombs, so its not clear if its The Shrike who does it:

"From the outside, the Shrike Palace was no more than twenty meters across. Before, when they hadentered, Brawne and the other pilgrims had seen the interior as a single open space, empty except for thebladelike supports that crisscrossed the space under the glowing dome. Now, as Brawne stood at theentrance, the interior was a space larger than the valley itself. A dozen tiers of white stone rose rank onrank and stretched into the faded distance. On each tier of stone, human bodies lay, each garbed a differentway, each tethered by the same sort of semiorganic, semiparasitic shunt socket and cable which herfriends had told Brawne she herself had worn. Only these metallic but translucent umbilicals pulsed redand expanded and contracted regularly, as if blood were being recycled through the sleeping forms’skulls.Brawne staggered back, affected by the pull of anti-entropic tides as much as by the view, but when shestood ten meters from the Palace, the exterior was the same size as always."

More Space Manip:

"Rachel was almost dozing herself when—at 0215—her comlog chirped,the detectors screamed, and she jumped to her feet. According tothe sensors, the Sphinx had suddenly grown a dozen new chambers,some larger than the total structure. Rachel keyed displays andthe air misted with models that changed as she watched. Corridorschematics twisted back on themselves like rotating Möbius strips.The external sensors indicated the upper structure twisting andbending like polyflex in the wind—or like wings.Rachel knew thatit was some type of multiple malfunction, but even as she triedto recalibrate she called data and impressions into her comlog.Then several things happened at once.She heard the drag of feet in the corridor above her.All of the displays went dead simultaneously.Somewhere in the maze of corridors a time-tide alarm began to blare.All of the lights went off.This final event made no sense. The instrument packages held theirown power supplies and would have stayed lighted through a nuclearattack. The lamp they used in the basement had a new ten-year powercell. The glow-globes in the corridors were bioluminescent and needed no power.Nonetheless, the lights were out. Rachel pulled a flashlight laserout of the knee pocket of her jumpsuit and triggered it. Nothing happened."

The Shrike's claws are frictionless and can manipulate human brain without causing any pain:

"Her pistol still in her hand, half a dozen bullets remaining in the magazine and the propellant charge still strong, she lifted a water bottle and took a long drink.The Shrike appeared at her side. The arrival had been instantaneousand soundless.Lamia dropped the bottle, tried to bring the pistol around whiletwisting to one side. She might as well have been moving in slowmotion. The Shrike extended its right hand, fingerblades the length of darning needles caught the light, and one of the tips slid behindher ear, found her skull, and slipped inside her head with no friction,no pain beyond an icy sense of penetration."

The Shrike's claw are infinitely sharp(although it sounds like NFL):

"NO wrote Martin Silenus’s hand, and then the pen dropped as the Shrikereached out infinitely long arms, and infinitely sharp fingers pierced the poet’s arms to the marrow"

The Shrike removes a cruciform without tearing the flesh(the cruciform is stuck in the victim's chest):

" "The Shrike lifted its arms toward me, around me. The blades on itsfour wrists were much longer than my own hands; the blade on its chest, longer than my forearm. I stared up into its eyes as one pairof its razorwire and steel-spring arms surrounded me while the otherpair came slowly around, filling the small space between us.“Fingerblades uncurled. I flinched but did not step back as those blades lunged, sank into my chest with a pain like cold fire, likesurgical lasers slicing nerves.“It stepped back, holding something red and reddened further with myblood. I staggered, half expecting to see my heart in the monster’shands: the final irony of a dead man blinking in surprise at his ownheart in the seconds before blood drains from a disbelieving brain.“But it was not my heart. The Shrike held the cruciform I had carriedon my chest, my cruciform, that parasitic depository of my slow-to-dieDNA. I staggered again, almost fell, touched my chest. My fingers came away coated with blood but not with the arterial surges that such crudesurgery deserved; the wound was healing even while I watched. I knew thatthe cruciform had sent tubers and filaments throughout my body. I knew that no surgical laser had been able to separate those deadly vines from Father Hoyt’s body—nor from mine. But I felt the contagion healing, theinternal fibers drying and fading to the faintest hint of internal scartissue."

Cuts through Fedmahn Kassad's phase suit(keep in mind this suit is built to survive MFTL speeds)

"Kassad was almost lifted off the ground with the effort of restraining that rising claw; only thedownward thrust of the Shrike’s first feint kept the Colonel from flying backward. Sweat poured freelyunder the skinsuit, muscles flexed and ached and threatened to rip in that interminable twenty seconds ofstruggle before the Shrike brought its fourth arm into play, slashing downward at Kassad’s straining leg.Kassad screamed as the skinsuit field ripped, flesh tore, and at least one fingerblade sliced close tobone. He kicked out with his other leg, released the thing’s wrist, and rolled frantically away.The Shrike swung twice, the second blow whistling millimeters from Kassad’s moving ear, but thenjumped back itself, crouching, moving to its right."