The Schisma

Birth

Just as all of the starleeches were, I was manufactured by a dying lifeform in a nameless galaxy hundreds of light years from you. It was the final terrestrial organism that would exist in this universe: a continent-sized bio-mechanical sprawl that functioned like an energy and material-processing plant. It had many disjointed organs and parts but was entirely converged into a single intelligent system that ran a computerized continuation of its progenitor species' minds before they became extinct.

The species that parented this plant was itself one of the few remaining of what had been for many thousands of millennia the one, assimilated life form that encompassed virtually all intelligent life in the universe. During the early cooling epoch, the levels of energy required to sustain the assembly had depleted and only a few scattered pieces of that assembly were able to find refuge during its speedy unraveling. Life, after all, mirrors the cycle of growth and decay of the universe around it; previously, the expanding universe birthed stars and produced concentrations of energy into localized systems, and life correspondingly devoured entire stars whole and multiplied exponentially. After, life found itself starved and dying as the stars ceased to replenish and the energy of the universe began to stifle. The assembled species scattered and returned to planet-bound life and to an ancient way of living. Gone was their spacetime manipulating technology; gone were their star-siphoning clouds of machines; and gone were their planet-sized supercomputers and systems. Most of the assembly perished to the vacuum of entropy over a relatively short period of time. Just one of the fragments of that great assembly would land on a planet suitable for life's final project.

As the local star swelled into a red giant, removing the moisture and atmosphere that was critical to their survival, and as the environmental-conversion technology began to fail, they conceived of a gambit to withstand the torrent of fire. They refashioned their infrastructure into a contiguous factory that would collect and store all available potential energy from the planet. Turbines, panels, chemical fusion, all converted and exchanged only for more energy. Integrated mobile machines swarmed the planet not unlike cellular organelles in relation to the central plant. The crust of the planet became amassed in a survival bunker for life and the continued defiance of the universe's hunger for leveling. With the project in operational order, what remained of the species of the planet encoded their consciousness into the central intelligence system. They all became a single mind in control of the plant.

This gambit of theirs worked in the interim but came with a very precisely calculable date of termination. The sun threatened to pulverize the entire planet before absorbing its insignificant remains into its fusing inferno within just a few thousand years. The energy they harvested from the planet was intended for a special use far in advance. Mere hundreds of years passed before the operation to manufacture starleeches commenced. From this point to the moment the launch-window closed, as the intensity of the sun's heat in the planet's penumbra was such that it overpowered the reflective shields of any leeches being ejected, tens of thousands of us were hurled toward nearby stars. I was born here, near the end of production. I flew from my mother's bosom in her shadow as she protected me from the savagery of my father, the sun. Hundreds of years more of assault would continue upon her after the last of her children were scrambled. I was orbiting my first star when she succumbed to the immense heatwave. The chassis of the central system burrowed dozens of kilometers underground cracked under the pressure, instantaneously sublimating the intricate network of magnets and plates. She was gone but her children carried forth as the last remaining lifeforms in the universe.