PRELUDE

According to you, the world was birthed in fire or formed from the bone-shelled back of a great beast or brought into existence by an eternal being who ordered the elements divided and wrought mountains and seas. According to you, the stars were set in their places by tweezer-wielding spirits or spun into being by the crushing closed fist of the cosmos or scattered, beacons burning with the sacrificial eyes of ancestors, to safeguard the stillness of the night. According to you, at some point in the distant past there was a creation. What happened next is a matter of some dispute.
My kind don't believe in beginnings.
Our version of events follows thus: We were. We are. We will be. If there has ever been or ever will be a time or a place or a non-time or a non-place when and where we could or should or might exist, it is so.
We lit your oven. We ate your celestial animal. We placed mountains chain by chain and we poured the seas. Your tweezers: our forge. Your fist is our fist, your eyes are our eyes, and if there ever was a beginning we played no part in it, for we have always been.
You know us as the seventeenth species discovered under the jurisdiction of System Administration Inviolate. Species SAI-17. Blackscales.
This is not what we call ourselves.
Our names are Infinite, Countless, Ring-Shapers and Star-Symphony. We are Silence-Hunters: the knife which cuts and shapes the raw noise of the universe. We refine it, we bind it, we pursue it and kill it and devour it to make it our own. Until we become it. Until we are that which gives all else meaning.
I forget, of course, my own hypocrisy.
My apologies.
Silence-Hunter once, Second Cycle once, Bright Sun once- at one time in the long ago and far away I called myself Silent-Sands-Drift-Against-the-Wall and my guardians called me Stumpy.
Now I am SAI-17.
You know me, don't you?

No?

Are you certain? They say my countenance is difficult to forget. "A monstrous cross of machine and flesh, shell and scale, a giant of ribbed skeletal chest, wreathed in self-made steam and slow-swinging tail."
A lizard. An insect. A furnace.
Voice like an organ, tread like thunder.
A creature of sixes: six jointed legs, six coiled arms, heavier than six of your kind put together. Fingers three, pincers three, jaws three, crests three... and three times four equals twelve, while twelve divided by two turreted eyes equals six.
Certain philosophers among you hold that six is a perfect number.

No?

I believe congratulations are in order.
Royal Victory, Gracious Kia, Ninth House Rank Twelve, former Fleetpart Commander, former Empress-Holder of the Imperial Shield: I congratulate you. A century of non-existence has done its work, and done it well. Even as you walled away my people you walled away my person, denying the truth while surrounding it with enough firepower to obliterate this ceiling, these walls, this stone beneath my feet and the continent from which I carved it.
I know how many vessels you set in the heavens: I counted, in my spare time. I stood beside my doorway and raised myself from sixes to fours and curled my arms close to my chest and tilted my head upwards, and I watched, and listened, and felt. Miniature false stars, secret fantasies radioed in riddles.
I broke your codes, Victory.
Twenty-two Sailfleet plates, Victory?
Victory: what were you afraid I might do?
My kind planned to annihilate yours, disassemble your planets, erase your memory, lock the universe of your singular birth into a perfect unending well-tended garden with themselves as gardeners. Not because they hated you, but because eternity would be prettier without you. Because, in the end, they knew of nothing else to do.
You encircled them with a force of forty thousand. I applaud your prudence.
However.
I still believe that twenty-two to guard a single individual is excessive.
I can say this because you are dead.

Because you are dead, I can say many things.

Among my own kind a story commences with the end of a thought: a fragment, each and every syllable chosen according to a rigorous test of taste laid during the First Cycle. This is appropriate, as the First Cycle has no beginning— only a middle, and an end. No one likes to admit that it ended, although everyone admits that the implosion of one's home universe is difficult to ignore.
Here is a sample: ...shivers thrilling-silence, wasted lace of presence(lost)
The greater part, naturally, is lost in translation, for your language does not support time-chords and does not account for prescience and expresses bent infinity with great difficulty and little tact. It is primitive. It is imprecise.
But this is the Silence Hunter speaking. This is the Array. This is the collective wisdom and untarnished experience of an indeterminate number of years spent listening to galaxies collide.

I, alone, am SAI-17.

You believe in beginnings, and so I shall begin at the beginning, for like you I was built.
Born.
It makes little difference.