Chapter 77 chapter Ten

As strong as my grandmother was, my father was as weak.The Overlord didn't wait until eleven local years later to return - the military torchship managed to reach orbit within five years.The hastily built ships of the rebellion were smashed into pieces, and for a while, my father just stood by and watched.They surrounded our world while Father continued to defend the Hegemony.I remember being fifteen years old, with my family on the upper deck of the Clan Island, watching a dozen small islands burn in the distance, the depth charges of the Hegemony Raider lighting up the ocean.By morning, the waves were filled with dolphin carcasses, and the sea had turned gray.

In the hopeless days after the Battle of the Archipelago, my older sister Lila fought with the rebel army.Someone witnessed her sacrifice.But no one found her body.My father never mentioned her name again. Less than three years after the ceasefire and sanctuary access was granted, we, the first colonists, became a minority on our own planet.The island had been tamed and sold to tourists, just as Meren had predicted to Siri.The first stop is now a city with a population of 11 million. Apartment buildings, spires, and maglev cities all extend around the entire island along the coastline.The port of first stop is still a grotesque market, with descendants of the first family selling handicrafts, and the works of art they sell are always at sky-high prices.

When my father was first elected to the council, we lived for a while at the Whale Center, where I finished my studies.I am a dutiful son, extolling the virtues of life in the Web, studying the glorious history of human overlords, and actively preparing myself for a career in the diplomatic corps. All this time I've been waiting. I returned to Maui shortly after graduating to work in an office on Central Government Island.Part of my job is to visit the hundreds of floating platforms rising up in the shallow sea, report on the rapidly multiplying submarine island groups, and be in charge of liaising with the development companies from Whale Heart and Dragon Star 7.I don't like this job.But I'm a high performer.I still face everything with a smile.Still waiting.

I courted and married a girl from the First Family, who was of the bloodline of Heely's cousin Betol, and after I got the "first" grade in the Diplomatic Corps Examination, which is rarely achieved by anyone, I Requirement to serve outside the ring. So began my private extraterrestrial emigration with Gretha.I work conscientiously.I'm a natural diplomat.In less than five standard years I have become Deputy Consul.Within eight years, I became a consul in my own right.This is the highest position I can be promoted in remote areas. This is my choice.I work for Overlord.I wait.

My role in the beginning was to provide outlander colonists with the ingenious invention of the Ring Web to help them do what they do best - literally destroying their pristine native lives.It is no accident that in six centuries of Star Expansion the Overlord has not encountered any intelligent beings recorded in the Drake Turing-Chan Index.On Old Earth, it has long been accepted that if a species dares to put humans on the menu of its food chain, it will go extinct quickly.With the expansion of the ring network, any species that really tries to compete with human intelligence will be extinct before the first teleporter in the galaxy is opened.

Between the cloud towers of the revolving stars, we tracked those Zeplons whose dragons see their heads and tails.They shouldn't be smart by human or kernel standards.But they are beautiful.As they die, their skin ripples like a rainbow of neon lights, but their companions ignore these colorful messages, don't hear them, and run away, letting their painful deaths be too beautiful to describe.We sell their light-sensing skin to Ring Web Corporation, sell their flesh and blood to planets like Heaven's Gate, grind their bones into powder, and sell them as aphrodisiacs to impotence on more than 20 other colonial planets Or superstitious people.

In Gadden, as a consultant to the ecological construction engineer who was about to drain the Great Swamp, I put an end to the short-lived—and threatening—growth of the Overlord's dominion over there.Eventually they tried to move, but the northern lands were too dry, and when I visited Decades later, when Jaden joined the Web, the dried-up centaur corpses were still lying in the wild, like some Carcasses of exotic plants from a more colorful age. When I arrived in Hebron, Jewish immigrants were ending their generational strife with Senesi and Aruit, who were as fragile as the world's water-scarce ecology.Aruit's spiritual sensitivity is extremely strong, and it is our fear and greed that kill them-of course, our eyes cannot tolerate other things, which has been undeniable since ancient times, and it is another reason.But in Hebron, it was not the demise of Aruit that made me hard-hearted, but the doom of the colonists was doomed by my actions.

In the old land they had a word they used to describe me - traitor.Because, although Hebron is not my old planet, the colonists have fled here, and there is a clear reason for everything they do, just like the life contract signed by my ancestors on the island of Maui in the old place clear and direct.But I'm just waiting.What I did in my waiting really deserves the name. They trust me.In my open and honest discourse, they came to believe how great it would be to rejoin the human family and join the Ring.They insisted that only one city be open to outsiders.I smiled and agreed.Now New Jerusalem has a population of 60 million, while the entire continent has only 10 million Jewish natives. Most of their source of livelihood depends on this city that has joined the ring network.Still need to wait ten years.It probably won't take that long.

After Hebron opened up to the ring, I was a little depressed.I discovered alcohol, the great thing that keeps me from flashbacks and electricity.Gretha stayed with me in the hospital until I got over my alcohol addiction.It is strange that a clinic on this Jewish planet should belong to the Catholic Church.I still remember the rustling of robes in the hall that night. My depression calmed down and faded away.My career hasn't been ruined yet.I brought my wife and children to Brescia in official consular capacity. What a delicate part we play there!How cunning is the line we are on.For decades, Colonel Kassad's, techno-core armies have been harassing the Ouster horde's exile.Now the two giants, the Parliament and the Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council, have made a decision to test the strength of the Ousters in a remote place to see how capable they are.So they chose Brescia.I admit that the people of Brescia exercised power on our behalf for decades before my arrival.Their society was quaint and pleasingly Prussian, militaristic to the extreme, economically cocky, defiant, and xenophobic to the point of fervor to call up troops to wipe out the 'Ouster Menace'.At first, some people rented a batch of torch ships to get close to the Ousters.They have plasma weapons.There are also dense probes, loaded with specially crafted viruses.

I made a small miscalculation, and I was still in Brescia when the Ouster Horde arrived.There was a few months of error.A military-political analysis team was supposed to take my place at that time. But that's okay.Anyway, the overlord's intention has been achieved.The firm and rapid deployment of the military has completely passed the test, and the interests of the overlord have not suffered any substantial damage.Greta died, of course.Died in the first round of bombing.And Aaron, my ten-year-old son.He stayed with me...to the end of the war and was alive...but then died, booby traps and blasting charges dropped by some military fool too close to the refugee camp in Baekmin Temple in the capital.

I wasn't with him when he died. I was promoted after the Battle of Brescia.I was entrusted with the most challenging and confidential task ever entrusted to anyone with consular status: I became the diplomat in charge of direct negotiations with the deportees. At first I teleported to the Whale Center and had a long meeting with Senator Gladstone's committee and some of the AI ​​advisors.I met Pleasant Stone himself.The plan is quite complicated.The main point is this: we must provoke the Ousters to attack, and the key to their anger lies in the planet Hyperion. The Ousters had been watching Hyperion before the Battle of Brescia.Our intel reveals that they're obsessed with Time Tombs and Shrikes.Their previous attack on the Overlord medical ship carrying Colonel Kassad, and several other attacks, had been miscalculations; their captain panicked when the medical ship was wrongly identified as a military swing ship.Worse, in the Ousters' view, was the decision to land the dropship near the Tombs of Time, so that the ship's commander had already demonstrated their ability to withstand the tides of time.After their commandos were decimated by the Shrike, the ship's captain returned to the flock to be executed. But our intelligence agencies are showing that the Ouster's miscalculation wasn't exactly a total failure.They gained valuable information about the Shrike.And their fascination with Hyperion has gradually deepened. Pleasant Stone had explained to me how the Overlord Project would exploit that obsession. The heart of the plan is that I must provoke the Ousters to attack the Overlord.And the focus of the attack must be Hyperion itself.From there, I began to understand that the ultimate battle was to deal with the internal affairs of the Ring, not to remove the thorn in the side of the Ouster.For centuries, all forces at the technological core have opposed Hyperion's entry into the Overlord.Gladstone explained that it was no longer in the interest of humanity, and that annexation of Hyperion by force - under the guise of protecting the Ring itself - would allow the Federation of more progressive AIs within the Inner Core to gain power.In this way, a shift in the balance of power in the kernel would benefit both the council and the ring in ways that were not fully explained to me. The potential threat of the Ousters, which cannot be compromised, will be completely eliminated.A new era of glory for Bannerlord is about to begin. Yueshi explained that I didn't need to volunteer, and that the mission would be fraught with danger—both for my career and my life.Nevertheless, I accepted it. Overlord provided me with a private ship.I only asked for one modification: an old Steinway piano. I have traveled solo for months relying on the Hawking drive.For the next few months, I roamed the lot where the Ouster bands regularly immigrated.Eventually my ship was detected and captured.They believed me to be a messenger and they knew I was a spy.Some of them advocated killing me, while others opposed it. They debated for a long time and finally left me alive.They also debated for a while whether to negotiate with me, and finally decided to do so. I don't want to describe the beauty of life in the Wanderers—their zero-gravity spherical cities and comet farms, the thorn bushes, their miniature orbiting forests and migratory rivers, the variety of colors and fine textures of life in party worship.It's safe to say that I believe the Ousters have accomplished what the humans of the Web have failed to accomplish in the last few millennia: evolution.While we still lived in our own spin-off culture, the pale shadow of life in the old land, the Ousters had developed new dimensions of culture, including aesthetics, ethics, biochemistry, art and other things that had to change, evolve, The human soul is finally fully reflected. Barbarians, that's what we call them, but at the same time we cling cowardly to our rings, like the Visigoths, huddled in Rome's lost glory, and declared themselves civilized . Within ten standard months, I had told them my biggest secret, and they had told me theirs.I explained in as much detail as I could what kind of plan the people of Pleasant Stone had for them to flash him out of the world.I told them that Ring scientists knew very little about the anomalies of the Time Tombs, and I told them about the unspeakable fear of Hyperion at the core of the technology.I described in detail that if they try to occupy Hyperion without fear of danger, they will fall into a trap, and the military will mobilize all their strength to come to the Hyperion galaxy and wipe them out.I told all I knew and waited to die again. Instead of killing me, they told me something.They showed me intercepted super-luminous messages, dense optical records, and some records they took with them when they escaped from the Old Earth system four and a half centuries ago.What they showed me was horrifying and simple. The big mistake of 1938 was not a mistake.The death of the Old Lands was deliberate, a conspiracy orchestrated by members of the Technological Core and their corresponding human counterparts in the fledgling government of the Overlord.Decades before the out-of-control black hole "accidentally" fell into the heart of the Old Earth, they had planned the whole process of the exodus in detail. The Ring, the Global System, the human supremacy—they're all built on top of this most vicious act of patricide.Now they are maintained by a policy of quietly orchestrated fratricide—the killing of all other species that show the slightest hint of a competitor.And the Ousters, the only human tribe that roams freely among the stars, the only species that is not controlled by the technological core, are the next person on the extinct list. I go back to the ring.Thirty years have passed since Ring Time.Meina Gladstone becomes CEO.Siri's rebellion became romantic legend, a minor footnote in Hegemony's history. I paid my respects to Yueshi.I told her much - but not all - of what the expulsion had revealed to me.I told her they knew any battle for Hyperion was a trap, but they'd come anyway.I told her that the Ouster wanted me to be Hyperion's consul so I could be a double agent when war broke out. I didn't tell her that they had promised me a device that would open the Time Tombs and free the Shrike from its chains. The CEO, Yue Shi, and I had a long talk.Army intelligence agents and I had more prolonged conversations, some of which lasted for months.They used technology and drugs to make sure I was telling the truth and that I wasn't withholding any information.Ousters are also very good at using technology and medicine.I do speak the truth.I also withheld some information from the public. In the end, I was sent to Hyperion.Pleasant Stone offered to elevate that planet to the status of a protectorate, and at the same time make me an ambassador.I declined both offers, but I'd like to keep my own personal spaceship.I arrived aboard a regular orbiting ship, and my own ship arrived a few weeks later aboard a visiting flare ship.It was left on a relay track, and I could call it down at any time and drive it away. Alone in Hyperion, I wait.Years passed.I allow my assistants to run this outlying planet while I drink and wait in Cicero's. The Ousters contacted me via a private hyper-optical message, and I took three weeks off from the consulate to land the ship in an isolated location near the Sea of ​​Grass, and fly it with their scout boat in Europe. They rendezvoused near Teyun, picked up their agent—a woman named Andil—and a trio of technologists, and landed north of the Bridle Mountains, just a few kilometers from the Time Tombs. Ousters do not have teleporters.Their lives are spent on the long march between the stars, watching the lives of the ring network passing by at a high speed, the verse is a flat or holographic movie played at a crazy speed.They are obsessed with time.Technology Core provides and continues to maintain teleporters to Overlord.Human scientists and science teams have absolutely no idea how the teleporter works.The Ousters tried to figure it out, but failed.However, although they failed, they understood how to manipulate time and space. They figured out the time tides, the anti-entropy fields that surround the tombs.They cannot generate this energy field, but they can protect themselves from it and—theoretically—destroy them.Time Tombs and their inner objects no longer move against time.The cemetery will be "opened".The Shrike will break free from its lasso and will no longer be trapped near graveyards.Everything inside will be released. The Ousters believe that the Time Tombs are man-made artifacts from the future, and that the Shrike is a weapon of salvation, waiting to be captured and manipulated by the right hands.The Church of the Shrike sees this monster as an avenging angel; the Ouster sees it as a tool designed by humans, traveling back in time to save mankind from the master demon at the core of technology.Andil and technical experts are here to carry out calibration and test work. "You're not going to use it now, are you?" I asked.We are standing in the shadow of a building called the Sphinx. "Not now," said Andil, "it will wait until the war of aggression is about to break out." "But you said it would take months for the device to work," I said, "for the tombs to open." Andil nodded.She has dark green palladium eyes and is tall, and I can make out the tiny lines in the powered exoskeleton of her pseudo-suit. "It may take a year or more," she said, "this device will gradually decay the anti-entropy field. But once this process is triggered, it can no longer be undone. We will not activate it now, unless the Ten Council has already It was decided that the Ring must be invaded." "Any doubts?" I asked. "The ethical debate," Andil said.A few meters away from us, the three technologists were covering the device with a color-changing mask and weaving a containment field around it. "Interstellar war will bring millions of casualties, or even billions. The release of the Shrike into the ring network will have unforeseen results. The crusade against the core is imperative, and the focus of the debate is only on how to do it." is the best way." I nodded and looked at the installation and the valley of tombs. "But once it's activated," I said, "there's no going back. The Shrike will be unleashed, and you've got to win the war and keep it under control, right?" A smile crossed Andil's face. "Is such that." I killed her with one shot—her, and then the three technologists.I tossed my grandmother Sealy's Statzin laser far into the moving sand dunes, and sat on the empty plastic foam crate, sobbing for a few minutes. Then I walked up to them, entered the containment field with the comlog of one of the technologists on it, dropped the color-changing mask, and activated the device. Nothing changed immediately.There was still the bright late-winter light in the air.The Emerald Tomb was glowing slightly, and the Sphinx was still looking at the ground with a dazed gaze.The only sound in my ears is the sound of sand blowing over the crater and over the corpses.The only indication that the Ouster is working is from the flickering of a light on it... it's working. I walked slowly back to the boat, torn between anticipation of the Shrike and hope that it would not appear.I sat on the balcony of my ship for more than an hour, watching the shadows slowly cover the canyon, and the yellow sand gradually cover the corpses in the distance.No Shrike.There is no thorn tree either.After a while I played a piece of "Bach Overture" on the Steinway piano, closed the ship, and then went up to the sky. I contacted the Destroyer ship to say there had been an accident.The Shrike had taken the others; the device had been pre-activated.Despite their confusion and panic, the Ousters offered me their refuge.I refused their help and turned around for the Ring.The Ousters didn't come after me. I contacted Pleasant Stone with my clairvoyant and told him that the Ouster agents had been eliminated.I told her that aggression was very likely and that the snare would tighten as expected.I didn't tell her about the device.Yueshi congratulated me and offered to let me return to the old star.I refused.Tell her I need quiet and I want to be alone.I turned around and flew to the remote planet closest to the Hyperion system. I knew that this journey would consume the rest of the time until the next flash operation began. Later, Yueshi himself sent a superluminous message to inform me of my participation in the pilgrimage, and I learned the role that the Ouster had assigned me in the last days: Ouster, or the kernel, or Yueshi and her plot.It doesn't matter anymore who sees himself as the king of all things.Things no longer obey the will of their masters. The world as we know it is dying, friends, no matter what happens to us.As for me, I don't want anything from the Shrike.I don't have any last words about it or the universe.I came back only because I had to, because it was my destiny.When I was a child, I went alone to Shirley's grave and swore to her that I would avenge the Overlord, and I knew I had to. I know the price I have to pay, both in my own life and in history as a whole. But when the day of judgment comes, when you know that betrayal spreads like fame across the web, and will bring the whole world to ruin, I beg you not to think of me - my name is not even named by your sleeping poet soul. Say, fame on water—but please think of the inexplicable decay of the old land, think of the dolphins, their gray flesh drying and decaying in the sun, and see—as I have seen—the wandering The moving islands, their devastated hunting grounds, the row upon row of equatorial shallow water platforms, and the islands, full of frantic tourists, smell of UV lotion and marijuana. Better yet, don't think about it at all.Like me standing like this after throwing away the switch, even though I am a murderer and a traitor, I am still proud, my feet stand firmly in the drifting sand of Hyperion, my head is held high, my fists are waving to the sky, big Shouted: "Both of you will be unlucky for eight lifetimes!" You know what, I remember my grandmother's dream.I remember what a dream it might have been. I miss Shirley.