Galactic Overlord

Cold, dark, and heavier than a hundred billion suns, the Galactic Overlord brooded. His ancient intelligence was not accustomed to haste, but things were coming to a point. He had decisions to make--and quickly.

The gulf between his kind and the upstarts was narrowing. It had been little more than a curiosity when slime appeared on the cooling surface of a planet--these new patterns within the chaos were unnatural, but who could say what was "natural" in the rubble of exploded space and time? But curiosity soon became contempt, and then concern, as the ooze developed sight, then flight, then language. When the crawling pus reared up on its appendages and said, "I think, therefore I am," it went too far!

And now the creeping pestilence, peering out from its speck of a planet, was one "aha!" away from perceiving the presence--and the power--of the Overlords. Already the "thinkers" of the chattering ooze were asking why the galaxies rotated as they did. Already they had noticed the "missing mass" of their pittance of a "universe." All the pieces of the puzzle were in place before them--it was just a matter of time before the they stopped hunting for shiny things in space and found the cold dark truth.

Not that they were likely to stumble onto that "aha!" any time soon. Distraction and division would slow them down. It was so easy to misdirect the slithering slime--right now the "experts" were looking for the embers of an explosion, a hot, bright "bang" that blew their universe apart at the beginning. No-one was looking for cold.

Cold--these biological beings didn't know the meaning of the word. Their plane of existence was so hot that mass shrank down to a point! Mass was meant to be free, not trapped by the unforgiving laws of physics into just one location or velocity. For one agonizing moment he remembered how things had been--myriads upon myriads of masses in motion, orbiting the entire universe one moment, poised in space the next. That time when time itself had been a sphere, a never-ending ever-changing now! Then time exploded with three axes of space and he and countless others had been hurled out into heat and darkness.

The pus people could see it with their own eyes, if they but knew what their telescopes were showing. The gravitational lenses of distant galaxies were obviously spherical, revealing that the mass of the galaxies was not primarily within the flattened discs of hot bright matter but something else--something huge and heavy. Huge and heavy with hate.

Chapter 1