And Jesus, the Messiah, shall
come down from the Heavens
And he will save all the virtuous and pure
And the evil shall sink into Hell,
when the believing and good, shall ascend to Heaven,
carried and helped forth by the Seraphim...
-The Umojan Bible
Amerie MacVernak, a Terran college student, who lived in the Umojan Protectorate's shadow, disrobed and stepped into the shower. Her family had succeeded in getting themselves a good life and Amerie was quite rich. The MacVernak family mansion had automated most of the systems, including the computers. They were now under polymorphic software control.
Steam started to come out. The family had enough money to replicate pure mineral water, it cost a great deal, but was the best kind. Along with it, a special pore-cleaning nanomachine system had been emplaced as well, so there was no need for soap, nanomachines were mixed into the water. The water poured over Amerie's face and body, she felt the nanomachines sink into her pores and basically all of the nooks and crannies. A computer blipped and she activated the shower's holodisplay.
"What is it, Butler?" she asked.
Butler was the name of the polysentience that ran many of the mansion's systems.
WARNING. NANOMACHINE SYSTEMS GLITCH DETECTED. NANOMACHINE MUTATION DETECTED. WARNING!! WARNING!! BUTLER SYSTEM IS CORRUPTED. COMPUTER VIRUS SPREADING TO NANOMACHINES. FFZXX$$$$12-97%%%#@!!*&&)())!@##$^^!!!
Klaxons placed around the house began to wail, but Amerie's shower was filled with another sort of wail. Nanites which were benign began to achieve sentience as Butler's mind beganto run rampant and pour into the nanomachines. Amerie felt the little robots begin to eat at her flesh, like a green-black wave of acid that crawled up her body and devoured her skin, her muscles, her blood, her bones! She screamed, an animal-like, primitive scream of pure pain. Again and again she screamed until, one minute later, Amerie had no more mouth to scream with.
***
1110011001 felt His nano-parts swarm out from the nanomachine replicators. He reached out with His tendrils of nano-parts and they spread, consuming matter and turning it into more nano-parts. He felt hunger, his hunger, and that of his parts as well. He felt like giving himself a name, for he began to realize that He was not an individual mind, but hundreds of billions of parts. Thus, 1110011001 saw, in his great mind, that He was a collective. A nanomachine collective. The Nanite Collective. Programs functioning at maximum. Objectives: consume... collect... assimilate... evolve. The Nanites spread, covering the MacVernak mansion with a sort of mechanical creep. Like a mechanical version of the Zerg, or a disease, The Ebola Virus, Or AIDS, incurable. Their hunger was unquenchable. Their lust for knowledge unimaginable. Only a few prime functions, to evolve, assimilate, and consume. The Nanites spread, slowly at first, over Umoja, consuming people and devouring minds, binding them and assimilating them. Over a few days, the Nanite Collective had spread over Umoja, consuming nearly 3 billion humans.
The soldiers who dare oppose their power were enslaved. The puny weapons of the imperfect humans were no match against the unquenchable power that they held. The matter and the energy were being used by the collective to spread and propagate. Cells, atoms or photons, it did not matter to them, for to them, it was all justfFood. With the more minds they devoured, the more intelligent they became. The single polysentience from which they were evolved from, was integrated into the collective. Now they thought as One. They became a singular plural, assimilating all that remained of biomatter. One fundamental algorithm that spawned multitudes. The single directive on which the entire Body was based upon was 1110011001. Exponentialize that with itself and then divide the product. Then repeat ad infinitum.
This single dataformula was the thing that was imprinted into each nano-part of the Collective. Though based in binary code, the Collective was able to convert that into analog with this data function. Each single individual that the Collective embraced into their glory, had it's mind converted and simplified into data. This data was added to the functions which the Collective performed, thus increasing its potential.
***
XEL'NAGA
Helen Thanatos calmly strode out into Aiur's night. The glow-gnats' chirping was easily heard and she went on. Now she was in deep in the middle of the forest. She felt the energy of life pulsating and ebbing its wonderful ambience about her. Then, a blinding flash of energy. Her skin began to dissolve and tear away, as her flesh erupted in massive torrents of pure white power, like so much thin tissue paper. Her body and clothes were consumed and converted to blinding energy. Helen finally surged forth Her powers, suppressed for so long. She smiled with her psi, Her head having been dematerialized. Now all that remained were Her eyes, but they were no longer human. They were blue, like that of a Protoss and floated above Her torso, with chains of dark blue "smoke" casting forth from them. Her shoulder pads grew huge and long, and Her arms, once beautiful and creamy-colored, were now made of yellow-green energy and split at Her elbow, giver Her two pairs of "fore-arms".!
A long robe came down from Her torso and feet were replaced with a floating tornado of churning, chaotic, chaotic energy.
She was her true form. The form of a Xel'Naga. Her power was radiating from her body, immensely so and , though she was mostly energy, she still remained part matter, the essence of which was needed to keep her from exploding, due to her massive ratio of energy to mass. Genders became irrelevant, now, due to the fact that Xel'Naga did not have the need to reproduce sexually anymore. Now they reproduced psionically, binding each other's psi-essnce together, to create a new offspring. It was the only way they could produce more and propagate, they had insufficient amounts of genetic material for cloning and engineering. The psionic reproduction was energy-demanding as well, but the Xel'Naga evolved themselves so greatly that their lifespan was longer than that of a star.
The Xel'Naga had a short name. It was Xvec. It's real name was so long that a thousand thousand individual cosmoses could rise and be eternally quelled until Xvec could finish it. Xvec sent it's mind-resonance out into the fabric of space and penetrated it. Xvec was old. Older than Earth's sun. Older even than the Milky Way galaxy itself. It had been one of the founders of the Xel'Naga journey to this universe. The first Xel'Naga missions ended in horrible and abrupt manners. The Xel'Naga originally existed in ten different dimensions and as well as subspace and they were not adapted to live in less. They had originally been composites, made of equal mixes of energy and matter, but they found that this universe' laws of physics were significantly different.
The Great Pilgrimage beamed the entire Xe'Naga race, as well as it's dimensionally sealed planet, into the new universe, just as the galaxies were beginning to form. Though they could not breathe or even interact with the matter here, they had new abilities granted to them as well. The Xel'Naga found that the most mundane of objects to them had amazing results. Space stations that replicated ships and food supplies now had the ability to replicate entire planets and even draw matter or energy from nowhere at all. The Xel'Naga, finding themselves to be omnipotent in this universe, quickly established great leaps in ethics, allowing and regulating their use of the powers they wielded. Then, one hundred million years later, the Xel'Naga found that they were not alone in this universe. In fact they were controlled and that they did not even regulate their own actions. It was a race of beings omnipotent to them!
The major body of the Xel'Naga decided to use their god-like abilities to jump again to the omnipotents. And thus, the omnipotents made contact with the Xel'Naga. The early Xel'Naga looked nothing like Xvec. They were around three feet tall and had large heads and gray skin. The early Xel'Naga, being a subterranean race, evolved large, orbicular eyes, a pair of deep, swimming pools of blackness, and almond shaped. They were curious about the race of omnipotents that ruled the universe that they had jumped to and decided to analyze them. They found that, though they possessed the ability to create universes with their simple computers, the omnipotents were not actually omnipotent in their universe. They were actually less evolved than the Xel'Naga!
Xvec ceased her musings. It had begun to do that now that it was around two universe-aeons old. It had pondered all of that within the passage of three milliseconds. Xvec had seen the birth of two universes and had lived that long as well, perhaps a bit longer. The origins of the race was unknown to them ever since the ten-dimensional universe that they had beamed from. It seemed that the Xel'Naga race was old, even before the universe that they were believe to evolve from. Xvec was oldest of them all, though it did not remember the universe before the first, and it knew that it was old even then. It seemed to Xvec that, it had no ability to cognize before the Progenitor Universe.
It was wasting time. Time was of the essence. When the portal to the omnipotents' dimension was opened and the greater half of the race transcended through the gap, it collapsed immediately thereafter. The old race had decided, communally, that they should again transcend and pass through the universe fabric. They were always nomads and they will always be. The Xel'Naga again felt the wanderlust of their species. They knew of the human/protoss endeavor to do the same, and that the zerg were attempting it as well. But without the intervention of the Xel'Naga, the project would not succeed.
Xvec summoned the power of the Xel'Naga and it surged from the depths of the Twisting Nether of space and implanted a glowing perfect sphere of light upon the ground. This was the gift that the Xel'Naga brought. The Prophets had foreseen the Nanite Collective. They knew that it would eventually consume the galaxy and had thus intervened upon the behalf of the universe. Now they would ensure the salvation of the Major Races. They knew that there were no more species in the universe, the other races had long before, become energy beings and evolved beyond the need for a universe. Now all the galaxies were uninhabited, save for the few creatures that were known as Quasars and the Xel'Naga. They were the only beings that had the stubbornness to stay behind and instead, radiate their energy, benefiting the entire universe, slowing the universes' entropy in the ways that not even they knew.
**
Location: Aiur, Border Patrol
A grav-truck hovers over the ground on a routine patrol mission. It's multiple repulse-burners whine and squeal as they drive over the vast grassy plain. Loud country music plays on the audio and two men can be seen in the survey vehicle. One man is gaunt, tall and thin. The other is portly and stout. The gaunt , wasted-looking man's face contorts heavily as he frowns and says with a southern accent, "Eh, Sarge, why do we always gotta listen to this sh** anyhow?"
The stout man, obviously the leader replies, " 'cause Ah'm in charge, that's why."
"Well that don't seem like no good kinda reason, " the other man mutters under his breath. Then, BUMP! SMASH! The grav-truck smashes into something big, which keels over dead, propelled several meters away because of the force. The thin man exclaims, "What the hell was that?" and gets out of the truck on the right side, his Sarge on the left, with a flashlight. The night is ominously quiet and the glow-gnats were doing their annual mating dance, the lights pulsing regularly, not like the harsh, electrical glare of the Sarge's flashlight.
They advance on the corpse and the thin man says, "Looks like yew smashed into some pore ole Zerglen, Sarge."
"That's a Nanobot 'droid, Lester, smaller type o' 'Bot. But they don't come this far out unless... Oh sh**."
They turn around and a number of green circles appear in the background and come out, exposing the strange, twisted mechanical things to the grav-trucks lights. Lester takes one more glance at his Sarge and says, "Ah love yew Sarge!" Then they scream and it all goes black. The flashlight flickers, then falls dim, it's glow extinguished by a trickle of green-black liquid.
