The Shrike

This article refers to a fictional creature, for other uses see Shrike (disambiguation).

The Shrike is a half-mechanical, half-organic creature from Dan Simmons' science fiction Hyperion Cantos. The Shrike stands roughly three meters in height and is described as being composed of razorwire, thorns, blades, and cutting edges, having fingers like scalpels and long, curved toe blades. Though metallic in appearance ("quicksilver over chrome"), the Shrike is also described as an 'organic' machine, humanoid in a general way, but with four 'oddly jointed' arms and intense, multi-faceted ruby eyes. It has the ability to control the flow of time, and may thus appear to travel infinitely fast.

The Shrike appears in all four Hyperion Cantos books and is an enigma; its purpose isn't revealed until the second book, but even then left malleable. The explanation is changed significantly in the latter two books (The Endymion duology). The Shrike appears to act both autonomously and as a servant of some unknown force or entity, and in the first two Hyperion books, exists solely in the area around the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion. In the latter two, it is effectively unfettered.

Abilities

The Shrike does not normally communicate. Once the Shrike communicated with the poet Martin Silenus by forcing one of Silenus's arms to write its responses.

Preferring to perform vivisections on its victims, the Shrike generally 'appears' near its victims and blinks about them before killing them in a flash of opening flesh and gore; sometimes it leaves its victims alive and transports them to an eternity of impalement upon an enormous artificial 'tree of thorns' in Hyperion's distant future. The tree of thorns is described as unimaginably large, alive with the agonized writhing of countless human victims of all ages and races.

Throughout the books the Shrike can travel through time, appearing to move much faster than light. The Shrike was assumed to be a prisoner of the Hyperion time tombs' anti-entropic fields (the 'time tides'), but as these degraded, the Shrike ranged farther and eventually was observed elsewhere in the galaxy.

Resistant to virtually all conventional weaponry, the Shrike's speed and ability to control time allows it to dodge with ease (even laser strikes). It can withstand direct hits from human weapons, such as plasma rifles, with no measurable effect. Upon suffering injury in combat, the Shrike is seen to lose a large amount of cabling likened to intestines, but in no way loses its abilities as a result.

The Shrike proves to be more than competent at hand-to-hand combat; it is itself a gigantic cutting utensil, and its control over the flow of time make it nigh invincible. In spite of its impressive abilities, however, the Shrike is not indestructible and is vulnerable to other entities employing similar technology. Rhadamanth Nemes, an agent of the TechnoCore was able to hold it at bay using time-manipulating technology similar to its own.

Origin

Surrounded in complete mystery, the object of fear, hatred, and even worship (by members of the Church of the Final Atonement, AKA the 'Shrike Cult'), the Shrike's origins are as uncertain as are its purpose and its abilities.

It is suggested in the books that the Shrike was actually a creation of a distant-future computer god, the Ultimate Intelligence, or UI, which was the end-result of countless years of TechnoCore research and effort. The UI, however, was not the only 'god' to be created—humanity and other conscious life eventually spawned its own god. The UI and the human god apparently battled one another before the empathy part of the human god fled back in time.

The UI then created the Shrike and sent it back to create suffering by impaling people on its tree of thorns, in the hopes that when enough human suffering was harvested and sustained on the tree of thorns, the human god would emerge from hiding and respond to all the pain broadcast by the Shrike's tree.

The results of this are not discussed in depth in the books.

In a somewhat different explanation offered in The Rise of Endymion, The Shrike has a connection to a TechnoCore sect called the Reapers, the original programs designed to provide evolutionary pressure on the hyperlife Core entities. The Reapers' motivations are, again, unclear - though in the latter two books, when the connection to the Reapers is made clear, the Shrike acts as a protector of Aenea against the Core assassins.

The actual controlling persona of the Shrike is, in fact, taken from that of its nemesis Fedmahn Kassad, the warrior who ultimately defeats it. It is unclear whether this applies to the legions of Shrikes existing by the time of Kassad's final battle, some time in the distant future, or solely to the original Shrike.