Vladimir Oane's Key Ideas from The Fall of Hyperion
by Dan Simmons

The Technocore is the sentient AI civilisation in Hyperion. Less is known about its purpose but we know there are 3 factions: 

• The Stables - wishing to keep the human-machine symbiosis
• The Volatiles - wishing to end humankind
• The Ultimates - wishing to transcend towards an Ultimate Intelligence

The Ultimates are the most forward looking. Their goal is to evolve into Ultimate God-like being, existing outside space-time. 

As the Technocore AI civilisation was evolving into an ultimate form it met the Human Ultimate. It met God. What they realized is that God’s trinity is made of:

1. the Void Which Binds
2. Intellect
3. Empathy

The machines did not poses Empathy so:

• they tried to bait the Human God using empathy as its weakness. This is the role of the Shrike.
• they worked on developing empathy by trying to understand poetry. It's why they focused on reviving John Keats. To understand the human spirit through poetry.

As the AI was working on becoming God, the humans are struggling with accepting one:

• Sol, a Jew scholar who's daughter is aging backwards, rejected him for cruelty and demand for obedience: “Abraham’s path of obedience can no longer be followed, even if there is a God demanding such obedience.”
• Father Dure, a Jesuit priest who was revived by a mysterious crucifix, was struggling with God as a clever algorithm. Not accepting that some things are beyond intellect.

Father Dure was a disciple of Teilhard de Chardin, a controversial Jesuit priest from the XX century. Teilhard’s God is not a mystical concept, but a cosmic one. He proposed that the cosmic body of Christ "extends throughout the universe and comprises all things that attain their fulfillment in Christ .. the Body of Christ is the one single thing that is being made in creation."

This process of God expansion and evolution will continue, it is proposed, until its full realization at Omega, a point which coincides with the fully realized Christ. It is at this point that God will be "all in all”.

Sol understood at the end, why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so. It was not obedience. It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son. 

Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.