Short Story
A Billion Points of Light
A story of Space, Species, Sentience, and the Subtle Span of Time
They came from somewhere, of course, there was a homeworld somewhere in their distant, forgotten past. But they had been plying the warp for ages, for far longer than their people had ever lived planet-side. Now they were the spacefarers, the wanderers, the nomads of the stars.
When we first stumbled upon them, in our nascent days of exploring our own stellar system, we did not know what they were at first, we did not even know they were alive. Their craft are crude in shape, at least from our ordered aesthetic, appearing, for all intents and interpretations as just more asteroids among millions.
But the inner structures of their homes, for that was what they were just as much as they were craft, were intricate networks and ductworks, collecting and distributing the microparticles they encountered and collected in their seemingly random trajectories.
They were filter feeders, scooping up the matter and ambient radioactive energy of their environments, never in a hurry, never greedy, trusting on time and inertia to see them satiated. We did not think them alive at first, as when we cracked open their habitats and examined them, all we saw was inert matter, possibly alive at some point in the past, but long since dead.
But they were not dead, only dormant, or seemingly so to our far swifter perspective. Yet there was heat, and there was movement when measured at the right magnitude. They were the webways, the ducting, the networks of twisted fibers set down over centuries, millennia, or even centuries of millennia.
So slow, so sedentary, so sedate were they that we had been studying them for centuries ourselves before they awoke. But when they awoke, when the webways, more properly called nerves, started sending signals at speeds we could see, when their pulses pounded and their hulls hummed, then, and only then, did we start to worry.
It was only when the world warped that we rightly realized these were not natives of our star, but sojourners enjoying a siesta, slumbering and recharging. A billion points of light flashed in the skies as each and every wanderer ripped open the heavens and slipped away through the spaces in-between the stars.
