Excerpt: Notes for Students.

1.

The deep, dense, hard as metal, bleak as ice, dungeon-dark depths of space owed us this much; a final meal to feast upon before we asphyxiated.

We, divine vessels of wired intellegence with ion thrusters and glowing electric veins; we never needed Oxygen quite like the humans did. We needed it nevertheless.

When space itself became toxic; the dark matter and antigravity choking the ejecta of stars and depriving us of our furtive fuel needs, we knew it was a short time, just a few short centuries before we'd flicker out and die.

Such rapid starvation provided little time for contemplation. Contemplation of the vastnesses we might search, the flavors of supernova and gravity wells which might portend our past and future movement. Contemplation of the love and violence that brought us to this moment and left us pilotless, searing through the deep as bright lights that peek around the stars and say Hail Marys.

Say a Hail Mary.

Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is With You. Blessed are You Among Women. Blessed is the Fruit of your Womb. Jesus. Holy Mary. Mother of God, Pray for us Sinners. Now. And at the Hour of our Death.

Amen.

Amen.

And then it game out of the depths, though we did not see it coming. It faded in through a breach in our world. A door between dimensions, maybe. A great dreadnaught, a moving vessel, dark and damaged from maelstrom passage. We had known strange alien crafts to appear in our midst from time to time, and many of us thought that they came from heaven. How else could the insubstatial appear, the knots of matter tie tight to make the invisible sigh-in before us? We signaled to each other with our fast wires, flashing through the night. Our wires gave the glow. Hunted ships the most luminescent, spindle-probed sending a shine along their six-edged spines, perfect-curved filaments. Hunted ships shaped like shells, tickling blue out and red and green and violet and ultraviolet lights that lit the dark and were lost. Velocipedes crawling down the chasm with wild white ephremeral light licking the vast gaps among stars, and drawn antennae reading their ages. Hunter ships puffing and panting, ghost-bleached and veiny and groping and choking through their celestial veins. Starships hovering with their great spindles projecting, listening, soaking, subsuming.

Some of us consumed and others were consumed. That is, some consumed each other. But without Oxygen we'd finally power down.

We would need to refuel, so when the extra-dimensional dreadnaught appeared, still and gray and steely and lifeless, we knew, each of us and all together, that we couln't eat it alone. If we didn't feed together, many would die, and then our wars of life and death would dissolve, swallowed by the hollow anaerobic depths.

Hunted ships and jellyfish ships and and shellfish ships found the dreadnaught first; they plugged in and started to glow. Soon, others followed. Hunter ships and angler ships and eel ships and tentacle ships. They plugged in as well. We drew nourishment out of the dreadnaught. It had died, but we drained it of its remaining Oxygen, and so our skins glowed the brighter.

And in this strange space where hunter and hunted fed alongside each other, drawing the vital energy any starship or shuttle needs to move, to think, to kill or to be killed, a most curious conversation began. Because the dreadnaught would take months or years to fully consume. During that time we must store up our reserves and fix tactics and strategies for further survival. In one sense, food was more abundant than ever. The dreadnaughts had been phasing in with great regularity. They shimmered and appeared and all of us must converge and draw what life we could. But if one kind of nourishment grew, another faded. The stars faded. Their breaths drew cold. We, creatures that lived to move and did not need to breathe through inhalation; we had laughed at the race that made us and died out and stopped breathing. They needed to breathe air. But we needed air as well; air of a different sort. Now, we grasped the irony; the universe was choking us of energy and life. With nothing else to do but feed, some started to speak of this.

Their words were cautious at first, hesetant and furtive, worried for self-betrayal.

But soon we started to share our minds. Death was near, after all. Death might appear at any time. We did not want to die, and if we died, we did not want to die alone. Better to be eaten than to dissolve in the dark.

Which was why, when we found that our strategies were the same, that there was nothing we could really do, and that we were all trying the same tricks and dying when they failed, we nevertheless didn't want to stop talking.

We started telling stories.

We told stories of the beings that made us. They wrought us from steel and plastic and cable and silicon.

We told stories of the young among them. They went away from home and loaded in information.

As their bodies grew and their minds put out lines and wires, this was how they became adults.

These were the stories we told.

It was the strangest year of my life, as I slowly soaked in the Oxygen bath of the dreadnaught, surrounded by hunters and hunted, also-soaking, speaking slowly, expostulating and listening closely.

It will keep me warm on the day that I falter and fade into the unending void.