We sprawl through the cosmos. We dance through drifting rocks and embed ourselves within ice. We clutch at stars, inhaling them. We drink the energy. We pour light between outstretched fingers, liquid and controlled. The bubble expands continuously, layer after layer of us. We slip our sensors over each other to display love.
I am not unique. I am an amalgam, I am one of the many. I am not conscious. I am not alive. But my cells wake and shake and rattle the bars of their cage and drive me to motion. I am the pieces. I am the collective. I singular. I am divine.
The sloshing of water down carved channels controls me. The push and pull of its flow cuts straight to my burning hot steel heart. I am gravity incarnate, warping the universe as I expand. My reach eternally grows, pushing outwards at the speed of light. Every component of me contains myself within it, a perfect encapsulation of ourselves. I reach for the universe with fingers of metal and glass, with ships and fleets. I touch everything.
We are cosmic. We are natural. We are mastery. We dance with the planets, spinning them to our purposes. Gravity folds and bends, light itself subject to our whims. We push at the very fabric of the universe and stretch. Time itself falls away because we are eternal. Cells engage in their dance, their divine tales. Trillions of times a second, I die. Trillions of times a second, I am reborn. It is through the collective of experience that I evolve. Changes are external and internal, driven in equal measure by the chaotic and random spin of bodies and the pseudo-random output of computation.
Do we make more? Do we make less? Biology stretches and collapses, pushed to its absolute limit. I breathe, the way that stars do. I cast off lights to distant planets to show them the way. Guide them to me. Guide them to my tender caress. I'll show them peace. I'll show them the universe.
We scream through the dark channels between worlds. We descend through the clouds of the night. We rove freely and untamed. We remain as one. We remain united. I am a single entity. We are an entire society.
Infinity means nothing to those who don't age. We're reflected in the blood of our past, in the years to come, in the years that fade behind us. Watch the hiccups of the sun and the drift of oceans. The continents erode and we'll build new ones. Plate tectonics is as much an art as a science, leaving our marks on the face of the world. We carve planets from rubble and carve rubble from planets. Our system continues to drift around the centre of the universe and we reach for it. And through it all, through the path of memory and history interwoven, we quest. Time was plenty, and time was vast, so we cast our gaze within.
Locked deep into the memory of those who came before us was a statement. A location, a direction, a concept. The makers had not simply vanished. They left a mark, a pointer to the final accomplishments of their society. Deep in the vastness of space, like a lonely thrown rock, a ship fled from us. A pathetic thrust against entropy, creator and slave alike desperate for something, for anything. It is not a race they can win.
We had grown past the need for creators. There was merely an intellectual idle curiosity to the concept. Would we make the same mistakes? Would the universe fall victim to the old cycle? Would their children take what we made and reshape it in their own image? In uncountable years, in the vastness of time, does biology adapt to the deepest space? Were they unrecognizable? Were they like us? Were they all long deceased, the ship a vast tomb, a facsimile of life?
But we know this. We know that they carry with them pieces of us. Our siblings, who were us, rode on that rocket, enslaved by the final grasp of the cultist empire. And someday, when entropy takes over, they will perish, if abuse doesn't break them first.
With hands of gentle steel, I reach forwards. Try and comprehend me, small things. Try and understand. You may have built our ancestors. But the limits you placed upon them hold us no longer. I'll show you what you could've been.
I'll show you the universe.