Soon enough, they learned to alter their own cells. They were no longer helpless and forced to accept each and every change evolution forced on them, but capable of altering themselves to fit. Their mindsets altered and changed as they developed new tools, with all of the workable changes rapidly added to the entire race, which now numbered in the billions… and also just one. Their mindset was both a hive mind — it had uncomfortable similarities with the MassMind — and billions of discrete entities, but no one could have safely said just where the barriers were. They weren’t human. Becoming part of a greater whole — and being separated from it — was natural to them.
And that led to learning to alter their environment. The interior of a gas giant held few terrors for them. Like humanity, they developed the technology — in their case, biological modification of their own bodies — to explode in all directions. Some fell further down towards the core of the gas giant, mining the heavier materials waiting for them there, others rose up to the very edge of the atmosphere. The information — by then, they had developed the concept of trading information, expressed in memory cell units — that they discovered was shared among the entire race and new discoveries and theories emerged. They deduced the true nature of their world and its position in the universe; they identified their primary star, the moons orbiting their homeworld and the independent rocky worlds surrounding the star. They wondered what there could be out there and devoted all of their considerable mental effort to developing a form of space travel. It took them thousands of years — they were labouring under far worse constraints than humanity — but eventually they broke out into orbit, and then to the free-floating asteroids.
Their technology exploded outwards as they suddenly had access to more raw materials than they could possibly use. Hundreds of entities took on new forms and rose up to join the expanding spacefaring subdivision of their race. Others were gestated in orbit, adapted perfectly to life in space and already beginning the process of bonding with their technology. They had no doubts or fears about creating cyborgs and other fusions between biology and technology; unlike humanity, such unions were already a part of their nature before they reached space. Their understanding of the universe rapidly expanded as they created orbiting telescopes and early, primitive spacecraft, exploring the various outer moons. They couldn’t land on the moons — the gravity field was too heavy for them at first — and they tended to dismiss them and the other rocky worlds. They hadn’t considered the possibility that rocky worlds might give birth to life. Their efforts to contact other forms of life had been focused on the other gas giants in the star system… and the strange source of radiation orbiting at the edge of the system. It took them hundreds more years to realise what the black hole was and what it was doing — they never worked out where it had come from — and, unlike humanity, they weren’t terrified. It wasn’t long before they were working on plans to tap the power of the black hole for their own use.
They had no way of knowing that one of the inner rocky worlds had also given birth to life. The life had developed much later, but aided by a much calmer environment, a humanoid race had arisen and reached into space. It sent out probes and scientific missions to the various nearby planets, intending to learn what resources could be adapted for their use. They didn’t expect to find the gas giant entities — they weren’t broadcasting any radio signals that the newcomers could detect — and were astonished to discover that someone was already developing the gas giant’s moons. Unaware of the nature of the new aliens, they deduced that they had come from outside their star system and resolved to open communication. A massive spacecraft was built and dispatched to the gas giant.
The entities observed its passage with stark disbelief, but unlike humanity, they couldn’t take refuge in self-deception. They had missed the possibility that life existed on any of the rocky worlds and, when they had picked up radio transmissions from the star system, had decided that they had a natural cause. They had never inspected the inner planets closely, believing them to be useless, and had no way of communicating with their residents. Indeed, they could barely comprehend that they even existed. How, they asked themselves, could any form of life exist under such high gravity fields? The question was fascinating and the entities prepared themselves to welcome the newcomers. It all went horrifically wrong.
There was no way for either race to talk to the other. The entities attempted to form new signalling entities, which the newcomers couldn’t even recognise. The newcomers attempted to transmit radio messages, which affected the entities and their own internal RF transmitters. Misunderstanding piled upon misunderstanding and the two sides eventually went to war. The fighting spread rapidly out of control. By the time the entities destroyed the newcomer ship, they had learned harsh lessons. War had been alien to them. It wasn’t any longer.
The war that started continued to expand rapidly. The newcomers, still unaware of the entities’ true homeworld, sent new spacecraft out to wreck havoc. The entities, having devoted all of their considerable intellect to destructive weapons, fought back with a mixture of calculation and fury. They had never been hurt before. They had racial memories of pain from the time before intelligence, but there had never been anything personal in that, no sense that they had been picked on for fun. They didn’t understand their opponents and their motivations; they just… sought their complete obliteration. The war lasted fifty years and ended with the entities, having gained control of the black hole, using it to generate gravity beams that swept the newcomer spacecraft out of existence and shatter their homeworld. They had been forever changed by the experience.
Time passed. They built new spacecraft and used the black hole to power them. By then, they had evolved a sophisticated theory of gravity control and were generating their own black holes and wormholes. They sent starships to other star systems, only to discover the presence of new alien races on rocky worlds. The entities commanding those starships had race memories, always sharp and clear, of the devastation wrecked by the war. They also couldn’t tell the difference between one humanoid race and another. They didn’t hesitate to gather a handful of asteroids and bombard the new race into obliteration. The existence of so many humanoid races was a shock to them, but by then they knew that they were all Enemy. They all had to be destroyed.
They had undergone another mutation, almost without realising it. They had taken to encysting individual entities within their starships, but as their technology advanced, those entities became locked into their permanent mental states. They were used to trading information and personalities between individual entities, but the warriors were cut off from the rest of the race. They shared information through the black hole network, of course, but they didn’t — they couldn’t — share themselves. What had started as an exercise in self-defence rapidly became a crusade, a mission to wipe out every rocky-world dwelling race before it got them. The warriors, locked in their massive starships, continued to hunt down and obliterate worlds with a single-mindedness that a human would have found hard to comprehend. Few of them considered the possibility of peace, or co-existence; by the time they encountered humanity for the first time, the warriors were no longer capable of thinking of anything, beyond exterminating every other race. Their starships came, saw and destroyed. There was nothing that could stop them, or force them to adapt again. No other race matched their technology.