Father Hoyt discovers that Het Masteen’s room is covered in blood. They search the ship, but he is nowhere to be found.
When the windwagon arrives at Pilgrims’ Rest, they unload their belongings into a cable car, including Het Masteen’s belongings which include an Erg (a small creature that can generate a force field) that is inside a Mobius Cube.
Het Masteen was supposed to be next to tell his story, but in his absence, the detective, Brawne Lamia, is the next to tell her story.
Brawne Lamia, private detective, is approached by Johnny, a “cybrid,” which is a human body with an AI mind. Johnny believes that someone wiped the past five days of his memories, which he equates to murder. He wants to hire her to figure out who it was.
Johnny is perplexed why someone would want to murder him and explains that it would make more sense for someone to attack him on the datumplane versus attacking his body to truly get rid of him. He then tells Lamia his backstory and that he was created as a personality retrieval project. His mind is meant to be the recreation of 18th century poet, John Keats.
Lamia decides to follow Johnny as his bodyguard and catches the man with the ponytail, whom she refers to as Queue, trailing Johnny. When she approaches him, he attacks Lamia and runs. She chases him through a few farcaster portals and eventually catches up to him on Maui-Covenant, where they fight and Lamia bests him. As she starts to question him, he self-destructs by bursting into blue flame, revealing that he was also a cybrid.
Before she is caught by the authorities, Lamia escapes via a hawking mat, basically a magic carpet. Johnny aids her by directing her mat to a multi-portal eight meters below the water.
Lamia finds Johnny waiting for her on a planet that is a reconstruction of Old Earth. They end up in a recreation of John Keats home, where the poet died. Johnny theorizes that Technocore, which is a conglomerate of AI’s, is trying to create God and shares with her his memories of the poet Keats’s final days. Later, Lamia and Johnny end up sleeping with each other.
The next morning, they’re assaulted by 5 Lusians who burst into their room, but Lamia is able to fight them off. She questions one of the attackers, who tells her they were sent by The Bishop to bring Johnny back to the Shrike temple on Lusus.
Johnny and Lamia go to the Shrike Temple to confront The Bishop. The Bishop tells him that Johnny had offered to go on a Shrike pilgrimage 8 days ago, but then seems to have changed his mind.
Johnny realizes that traveling to Hyperion involves transferring his consciousness to his cybrid body, effectively becoming fully human. He also realized this is the reason he was killed, presumably by TechnoCore. He decides he wants to follow through with this, and asks Lamia to come with him. She agrees.
Brawne then travels to Tau Ceti Center to meet with Meina Gladstone, to uncover more information on TechnoCore’s interest in Hyperion.
Lamia goes to see BB Surbringer, an AI expert, to have him help move Johnny’s consciousness entirely into his cybrid.
As they’re in the dataplume and try to get Johnny out, there is a giant explosion, and Johnny is able to rescue Lamia, but as they exit they see BB’s head has exploded, but not before BB could pass the data along to Johnny to allow him to become human.
Johnny learns that interstellar war is an inevitability, its predicted outcome is disputed among the different factions of AI. He also learned that his creation and decision to go to Hyperion was dangerous to the Volatiles, so they tried to murder him.
Lamia finds that Johnny has implanted a device inside of her that allows him to interface directly with him and is able to store an almost infinite amount of data.
Lamia and Johnny try to make it to the Shrike temple so they can get transport to Hyperion, but a mere 30 meters before getting to the temple, they’re shot by a multitude of beams and projectiles. They barely make it to the Shrike temple, but once inside, Johnny dies from his wounds as his last words are “Fanny..”, the name of John Keats’ lover, but not before he was able to transfer his consciousness into Lamia via the shunt that he installed.
Lamia recovers in the Shrike temple and realizes that she’s pregnant before making her journey to Hyperion, in a sense, together with Johnny.