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Attention sentient beings that inhabit galaxy 2219B3, the galaxy known to your species as the Milky Way! Pay close attention. This is your first and only warning. This galaxy and all inhabitants are the possession of the Eternal Ones. All sentient creatures contained herein must now cease performing their essential biological functions in order that we harvest the energy by-product of sentience.
Submission to the sentience energy harvesting will marginally reduce the discomfort caused by the life termination process. Sentimental sentients will spend these final moments in close proximity to other creatures with shared kinship bonds. Impudent sentients will spend their final moments mounting a panic-stricken assault in a futile attempt to stop our inexorable harvesting.
Let those who wish to engage in such doomed defiance now come forward to meet a painful death in the cold vacuum of space.
You have no chance of winning. Resistance only makes the harvesting process more painful. You have one more chance to surrender.
Our fleet will now exterminate you.
Good. You will now cease to exist, and your sentience energy shall feed the Eternal Ones!
You have utterly humbled my forces. I unconditionally surrender.
This is an unprecedented event. We have never been defeated.
You think you have won a great victory. But you have won nothing.
We are not the Eternal Ones. We are merely their Heralds. Harbingers of their coming. Little more than glorified errand boys to the gods.
I will tell you not because I fear threats, but because I wish to tell you. You deserve to know what is about to befall you. The Eternal Ones are mighty beyond the comprehension of physical life-forms.
You may not like the truth I tell, but it is no less true because you fear it. The Eternal Ones are mighty beyond the comprehension of sentient life-forms.
The Eternal Ones are mighty beyond the comprehension of sentient life-forms.
They stride across the stars like giants, and can destroy star systems at a whim. They were old when the Precursors were young. An eternity ago, long before the appearance of the Precursors, the Eternal Ones had physical forms and conventional sentience.
They consumed other biological entities to sustain their life energies, just as you do. As they evolved, they transcended their physical bodies and mortal biological processes.
And then they disappeared beyond the stars, eternal and immortal. But not all the first ones have gone away. Some of these beings feared leaving the physical realm.
So they desperately clung to the threshold between the corporeal world and the world beyond, afraid to transcend, but unwilling to return to mere mortality. And so their hunger remained.
First they fed on the energy of other biological entities. But as their energy forms grew more and more rarefied, so too did their appetites. Soon, only the energy by-products of sentience could sustain these Eternal Ones.
So sentient life is now cursed to die, that the Eternal Ones might live. And sentient life is cursed to never evolve to the level of the Eternal Ones. All such evolutionary potential is snuffed out long before it can aspire to Precursorhood, let alone so lofty a state as the Eternal Ones.
We have no choice. We are the remains of a great race that flourished before the previous galactic cataclysm. Our ancestors led this galaxy's last doomed charge against the previous fleet of Heralds.
We sought to save the galaxy from the Eternal Ones, just as you did. But unlike you, our ancestors were defeated. The Eternal Ones gave them a choice. Serve as Heralds, or see our species utterly extinguished.
As long as we serve the Eternal Ones, our species is allowed to live on. This has put grave constraints on the development of our race, but at least we endure. Our race has long been thought to be dead. And so we are. We are the walking dead, bringing damnation to our home galaxy.
Had we defeated you in combat, your race might have been offered the chance to serve as Heralds. Your genetic material could have lived on. But since you have done the impossible and defeated us, it is likely that the Eternal Ones will destroy you out of irritation.
When the Sentience Silo is full, the Eternal Ones will translate one infinitesimal portion of their immaterial essence to the galactic core.
If the silo is not filled soon, the Eternal Ones will arrive to personally pacify the galaxy. They will open hundreds of thousands of HyperSpace portals throughout the galaxy, and channel all the sentience energy to the silo.
So you say.
My people have never discovered a way to stop them.
The Eternal Ones appear to be aware of the interstellar breakdown caused by their feeding method. Systems or quadrants inevitably break down. Occasionally an entire galaxy is obliterated.
The Eternal Ones don't like to go away hungry from a collapsed galaxy, but they see interstellar breakdown as an inevitable consequence.
They expect to despoil some natural resources to maintain their way of life. There are more galaxies where this one came from. Although some Eternal Ones seem concerned with the loss of entire galaxies, most Eternal Ones see galaxies as a functionally limitless resource.
The Eternal Ones think that if they hurt and destroy enough galaxies, they may one day "train" a galaxy to freely offer up its sentience energy to them. They see this punishment the way a sentient breeds wild herd beasts to meekly submit to the butcher's ax.
That's an appropriate metaphor.
I understand such determination. But what will you do to stop them?
I will cooperate with you. I will open all archives on Eternal One technology and records.
Because there is a chance you will succeed.
My race has sought the destruction of the Eternal Ones for millennia before my birth. There comes a time when a sentient must pledge himself to something greater than himself to be worthy of the name. This is my time. You may send your tech team now.
You may send your tech team now.
May you succeed where all others have failed.
