Essence of theShrike (Hyperion Cantos)

Consuming this Spiky Metallic Essence will give you several boons.

• You gain the knowledge, power, skills & abilities of the Lord of Pain, the Avatar of the Machine Ultimate Intelligence, the Shrike.

• You can choose to adopt the body & physique of the Shrike if you desire or design a form of your own choosing. The one thing you cannot change is that the form you create must have the signature claws.

• You no longer exist in accordance with the linear flow of time, you exist throughout time. Meaning even if you're destroyed at one point in time, you can simply appear from other points in time. Whether that be through temporal clones, alternate timelines, or simply summoning a version of yourself from earlier points in time where you weren't destroyed in the first place. This renders you incredibly difficult to kill. You move through time more easily than humans move through space.

• You now gain complete control & understanding of the Shrike spacetime manipulation powers. Which includes the following abilities.

  • A Phase Shift Field that places you in a state of "No Time." Which means causes you to become displaced in spacetime. Allowing you to fight at quadrillions of times faster than light & appear enveloped in a reflective layer resembling chrome steel. This greatly boosts your speed, reaction time, strength & durability, (such as surviving being hit by an 80 gigawatt laser for several seconds, & getting immersed in molten lava rock for 4 years unharmed.. In this state, you'll have limited metamorphic abilities, being able to create bladed edges on your extremities.

    • While phase shifted you're able to enter "fast time" allowing you to travel at near-instantaneous speeds and pull off complex maneuvers within nanoseconds or less. This ability also allow you to travel through time. Even EM waves appear to be frozen in midair.

    • It takes less than a microsecond to enter phase shift.

    • While phase shifted they can walk on water.

    • You can still move fast without the field but without the effects of phase shift you could easily turn shatter everything within kilometer of your position or a planet's atmosphere into plasma.

  • The ability to Freecast, which is for all intents & purposes simply a very long range instantaneous teleportation that can be used to create portals to anywhere within time and space, & can move itself and others through these portals. They are of sufficient size to contain large spaceships.

    • Gets into a room with no entrances.

    • Moves the Tree Ship Yggdrasill (which is kilometer long) over 274 years into the past.

  • Temporal cloning.

    • You can summon copies of yourself from other points in time. Each of these copies are also able to summon copies, potentially ad infinitum. Even if the your body is destroyed, it can still return through use of this technique.

• Your senses are also augmented to include the following.

  • Infrared vision, light amplification, sonar space finding, deep radar which can map kilometers of tunnels in a single pulse & Telescopic vision.

• You receive a set of infinitely sharp claws that can be retracted at will. They're frictionless & are precise enough to manipulate a human's brain without them feeling any pain while the host is alive & consciousness.

  • Destroys a Cruciform Parasite without killing the host. Cruciform Parasites spread tendrils throughout the host's body & can grow back from even the tiniest sample.

• A pocket dimension contain the Tree of Pain. While at the same time being the organic/metal tree where people are physically pined to its branches, it is also a datasphere where people pined to the tree are actually only there in their minds.

  • Like you it's not properly in the flow of time as the current version can be viewed from the past & future it does not really have a present state.

  • You gain access to all the knowledge, powers, skills & abilities of anyone you place on the Tree of Pain.

  • Only you & those you designate can access this dimension & you can revoke access at any point in time.

• You can inflict someone with Merlin's Sickness with a touch. Once affected, the target will age backwards, one day at a time, until they cease to exist. It would take 20 years for someone who was 20 years old to disappear, and so on for any other age. While this happens, they lose their memories one day at a time. You can choose whom you want to infect & stop this at any point.

• You can also infect someone with the Cruciform Parasite. After the death of the host, the parasite is able to recreate the host's body and mind, not only repairing bodily damage but being able to completely reconstruct all bodily tissues and parts, thus resurrecting the individual. Only the tiniest fragments of host tissue and cruciform matter remains are required to regenerate both host and cruciform.

  • This is the perfected Cruciform that the Technocore later develops & as such it doesn't suffer from the same flaws that the Hyperion Cruciform has. Memory & mental capabilities won't be lost or diminished with each consecutive resurrection, neither will the host suffer the physical deformities. This can be of course changed by you.

  • It still has the function of allowing the host brain to be used as biological computer processors.

    • You gain access to all the knowledge, powers, skills & abilities of anyone you infect with a Cruciform.

  • People whom you empower are completely loyal, unable to rebel or work against you.

• You have full knowledge how these powers work & the best ways to use them and you won't be overwhelmed by the sheer number of powers you have.

• Your powers cannot be suppressed, copied, altered, nullified or affected negatively against your will & will not malfunction or have control loss of.

• You also have a limited Connection to the Machine Ultimate Intelligence. It grants you several additional benefits.

  • You gains a complete database of all the tech used in the Hyperion Cantos.

  • Perfect/infinite memory storage & processing power with instant recall, indexing, learning capability.

  • Gain practically infinite trains of thought & ability to multitask. When creating temporal duplicates you're capable of networking your computing abilities together with you at its head.