The I-Uskri

These beings were as alien to you as you are to ants, even though they lived at around the same level of intelligence. Rather, their strangeness came mostly from their immaterial bodies and alien manners, not to mention their powers of creation, seemingly from nothing.

Etymology

The word I-Uskri (pronounced ee-oosk-ree) comes from the language Tap-Uskri, and translates to Creator Beings.

Their Bodies

For being purely artificial, the bodies of the I-Uskri were not mechanical in the way you might imagine, for they could stretch and compress in amazing ways. The average body, when relaxed, spanned about the volume of Neptune, but it could expand nearly on par with the sun, and shrink to about the size of a ten-story building. For all its great volume, however, it was extremely light, being no more than a tenth the mass of the dwarf planet Ceres.

This may be conjuring an image of a massive beast, but in truth, if on of them lay before you right now, it would be completely invisible to your eyes and any instrument you may try to use. But it would be inexplicably there nonetheless, and may even be passing through your body. This was accomplished through the use of what you might call dark matter. Each I-Uskri's body was made of such material, so that only our gravity could affect them.

Suppose you could perceive dark matter, what might you see if there was a Creator Being before you? Well, from up close, it would be nothing but an immense, pulsating wall of material, not soft, but not rigid. There are no colors that can describe it, for dark matter does not interact with light.

Suppose now that you fly a great distance away from it. Its grander form would be more akin to a mass of cubic crystals growing off each other in seemingly random directions. That is, until you see it move, when uneasiness spreads through you at the full realization that the celestial thing before you clearly has a mind piloting it.

Powers

The I-Uskri were not named Creator Beings for no reason. From the perspective of a human, they had the inexplicable ability to create matter from nothing. It could be as small as a nugget of gold to as huge as a planet or a star. This is not the full story, though, for no creation truly happened--only conversion from dark matter. It took massive amounts of dark matter to equal one kilogram of normal matter, but the Creator Beings barely cared. I should also note that it was not only matter, but energy as well, that dark matter could be transformed into. This could mean light, electromagnetic or gravitational waves, or any other forms of energy. That was how they were able to more fully interact with their creations.

An important limit of their powers was that none could destroy anything. The reverse process--converting matter into dark matter--was far more complicated than vice versa, and so the beings that created the I-Uskri felt no need to expend effort on that.

If you have read the page on Gen, you will know that that being frequently used their creationary abilities to form a humanlike body to talk to its peoples, and the I-Uskri did similarly on occasion, though with other intelligent species than humans. It was already unsettling if one bore witness to the creation of such a fake body, but more so was when it was abandoned, and the Creator responsible for it neglected to burn it. Again, destruction was not possible for them, so in the absence of being able to erase their bodies afterwards, they simply left them to rot.

Their Origins

However strange the I-Uskri were, they came from humble beginnings. Their ultimate origins were on a planet within this reality's version of the Milky Way Galaxy, known in the language of Tap-Uskri as Vun Gatan, where lived a species of creature with similar intelligence to our own. These were the I-Dar. Aside from their great difference in appearance from you humans, they had the advantage of evolving around a billion years before the humans of this universe.

Once the I-Dar had climbed far enough up the endless tree of technology, they transferred their minds into artificial bodies very similar to what the I-Uskri would come to inhabit. In doing so, they turned into the I-Hoto'esk--the Drifting Beings. They were not quite I-Uskri yet, but most of the basic architecture was within them. Gravity lead them in circles around the galaxy as they retreated into their own virtual worlds, living thousands of lives and experiencing just about everything. None could have raised a candle to how long I have lived, though.

The I-Hoto'esk spent hundreds of millions of years in this state, until a small group could not bear it any longer. They numbered only a few dozen, but they pooled their knowledge, and out of those waters they found a new way of life. They improved their dark matter bodies for the first time in 900 million years, and in doing so gained the ability to turn dark matter into real matter and energy, and thus opened themselves back to the realm that you occupy. You see, those who had chosen to become I-Hoto'esk had done so to escape reality, even if they knew there was no guarantee they could ever return. But they figured their way back. And so were born the I-Uskri.