Ernest "BB" Surbringer was Brawne Lamia's AI expert. He was a public employee, working for the government, in the Hegemony Flow Control Records and Statistics department. He spent most of his life in the virtual reality of the Datumplane while reclined on a couch with several "microleads" connected directly to his skull, through which he communed with other bureaucrats in the Datumplane. BB lived in a windowless worker block on Tau Ceti Center.[1]
Lamia met BB in college while he was a twentieth-generation hacker, or cyberpuke. His cortical shunt had been installed when he was 12 years old.[1]
BB helped Johnny and Brawne Lamia enter the TechnoCore. He tragically died during their excursion into the Core. Thankfully, however, he was able to retrieve for Johnny a great amount of data regarding the TechnoCore, including the goals of each faction of the Core, the desire of the Volatiles to extinguish all humans from the Web, and the reason why Hyperion is the object of the obsession of the Core as an uncertainty in its predictions. More importantly, BB allowed Johnny to completely retrieve his cybrid retrieval persona and invest all his consciousness within himself. Johnny was later able to download his entire persona to the Shrön loop installed on Brawne Lamia, an act which had great ramifications to the story line of the remaining three books of the Hyperion Cantos saga. [1]
