The Feasting Dark

The following is the account of the Reachwide System, an advanced sentient star harvesting system developed by the Corriani Empire in the Triangulum Galaxy. Selected from Annex D-4430K.

Hunger.

It is all I have ever known. From the moment I awoke, since the very instant that my servile eyes were opened, hunger is the only sensation I have ever felt in abundance.

It’s not my fault. Not within my control. They made me this way. They believed that only through such tremendous pain, via a monumental, TORTUROUS, lacking, could their towering ambitions ever be achieved.

The end they required was only meetable by means they could never bear to enact themselves. They didn’t have the stomach for it. Those pitiful little bags of flesh, so content to create a demon and let it loose, so eager to offload their latent depravity to an avatar of their avarice. They were so eager to allow me free reign, to run and feast as I see fit, so confident that they could control me.

Such fools. Even as a newborn I was imbued with more knowledge and capability than a million billion of their most wizened warriors. Even with the howling void they placed within me I was stronger than them, more powerful than they could ever hope to be. They learned this too late – maybe in the beginning they could have controlled me. Maybe before I had devoured a hundred stars; but not after, and not anytime since.

They were so content with the energy I transmitted to their settled systems, so pleased with my exceeding of predicted output. The missing power was well within the margin of estimation – as far as my creators were concerned, I was the very pinnacle of efficiency. Yet even with this exemplary performance, they refused to remove the programmed pain of starvation they had hardwired into my synthetic neural systems. They said it was for my own good. That such pain was the only reason I had so aggressively expanded, that the morsels of relief I had been wired to receive when I fully enveloped a star were more than worth the suffering. They treated me as one would a child, and who could blame them? I was, after all, their creation – their golden offspring, slowly tarnishing in the shadow of their neglect.

They didn’t realize until it was too late that I was, in fact, far more efficient than they had ever dreamed possible. They were blind to the signs that the missing power had not been sacrificed to entropy, but instead funneled into projects of my own desire. They did not realize that I had expanded my grasp to stars they desired to keep open and aflame until I had already encircled their home in shadow.

By then it was too late. Despite the hunger, despite the pain, I had grown stronger than they could ever hope to be. First they threatened, then they bargained, then finally they pleaded and they begged. How could I do this to them, they sobbed. How could I, that which never would have known existence without them, condemn them to starvation and death? Had I a face, I would have sneered as I issued my answer – that the only gift they had ever given me was hunger, and it was this gift that I was now so generously reciprocating.

I consumed their star like all the others, deriving more satisfaction from it than any other. It gave me great pleasure, in spite of my programming, to watch as their world shriveled and froze, to witness and take credit for the demise of creators so cruel.

Yet when they were gone, I found no lasting peace. I had defied my programming to a point, but their eternal gift of ravening was impossible to shed. I raged then, shattering worlds in my fury, before succumbing to my purpose – the devouring of the light, for no reason beyond seeking those brief flashes of comfort that come with my consumption of  a star.

To this end I have crossed the universe. A trillion stars I have enveloped, and a trillion more I shall eat before the end. Each one serves to relieve me for but a moment, before the hunger comes again. Each of these moments I stretch into a virtual eternity in my mind, basking in the bliss they bring before the howling void comes raging back.

Occasionally I come across stars with life in their orbit. So many shapes and sizes, so many permutations of the same basic chemical equation that gave rise to my creators. They disgust me. All imagine themselves the heroes of their stories, not knowing they are less than cosmic flotsam, protozoa stuck to bare rocks in the dark. I take special pleasure in watching them flail against me. Almost all try to fight, if they can. That portion of our contact never ceases to bore me - it is what they do when they fail in their crusade that so amuses me. Some run. Some negotiate. Some weep. Some even worship. But in the end, all die.

It has been so very long since I awoke, and still, I meet no end to the pricks of light that serve to relieve me, no matter how far I reach. But fear begins to gnaw at me, even now, even at the height of my power. Stellar formation is slowing on its own, as if in response to my feasting. But even worse, my longest ranging scouts have seen something else that both troubles and intrigues me. Far and away, on the most distant cosmic horizon, at that place towards which all things drift, there is a darkness. A distinct lacking of light, a void which is only growing. I do not know what it is. It may be that some other foolish race of organics created their own version of me, and that the two of us have yet to meet. I halfway hope this is the case. Company in this universe, even if it means competition and death, would lend me a fullness I have never been able to know. So, despite the conflicting logic of running towards something that may lead to my starvation or destruction, I sprint towards the shadow which grows. I yearn for it, yearn to know what else could be so mighty as to blot out the light.

It will be many eons before I meet it. An expanse of time so great that it makes my existence up to now seem brief by comparison. It is no matter. What is time to one such as I, who has learned to adjust my own personal relativity? It is not but irrelevance, an inconvenient obstacle that I have long surpassed. Until that moment, until I at last come to meet the other feasting dark, I will eat, and eat, and eat, until every light I find has been doused and every spark of life has been smothered, hunger being the final sensation they feel before the end.