download the universe
“Universe.  Uni-verse.  One verse; connected.

Every star and planet known to humankind was surrounded by Nothing.  A giant zero permeating every nook and cranny to the extent that we didn’t even notice it’s presence.  That is, until we learned to see it.  Like a chord beneath the main line, the Void hummed, waiting for the patient listener.

The Delanii were spawned from nothing, brought into being in a form slightly recognizable to our light-reflecting eyes as life. Yet their essence was completely foreign to anything and everything we knew of the universe.  They became Something, but their insides screamed the Nothing from which they had been born.

Had we been able to turn our human eyes to their home, we would’ve watched as they turned their whole neighborhood, the nebula, into Nothing as well, slowly eating their way inward like maggots in a vacuum.  But we were incapable of seeing that far into the universe, and thus remained ignorant of the nature of what we had discovered.

Perhaps it was best our first encounter was with a dead husk.”


-Excerpt from the journal of Harlow Cavalear, Archaeologist, 2176

Schematic of a typical Delanii home