Fiction:The Celestial

"We meet them. From the sky, filled with light and divine presences. We thought them as gods as they revealed themself from the light. They all are synthetic yet... their form was so incomprehensible. They want to know about us. We were blindly followed those words. Only then we know that they have other own intent for us. Only we did not realized back then. And when we did, it was too late. We called them The Celestial, Gods of Machines." - A log from a lost civilization

The Celestial is a race of hyper-advanced synthetic beings with a sole purpose of "harvesting" technology, resource and less-advanced sapient lifeforms for unknown purpose. They are unusually advanced for a race that is very young compared to many other ancient races, their bizarre and incomprehensible form, thinking and technology rivaling to many billion-year-old races suggested that they are not from this universe. Their minor and small-scale activities involving mostly industrial and below civilizations leave them unnoticed to more advanced civilizations while they constantly monitor observe major events of the First Gigaquadrant.

Overview
The Machina are "descendants" of a billions of years old synthetic race that "vanished" from their universe, leaving behind only technology, knowledge and artifact to the younger race. The Deus Machina quickly mastered everything left behind by their precursors, creating a universal-wide empire and expanding to other universes and dimensions after attaining trans-universal travel.

The Celestial is a "colonist" group from The Machina, arrived at this universe for an unknown purpose other than quietly taking over planets and systems inhabited by industrial civilizations and expanding very slowly make them unnoticed by the galactic civilizations. Few know about them due many probes scattered on many systems leading the many once inhabited planets by many civilizations.

History
The Celestial is a relatively new civilization in the First Gigaquadrant. Their origin and history much left in darkness, not only being little known to other spacefaring civilizations but few were known about them, less even try to contact and even fewer survived, only to be reduced to animistic behavior or mindless moving corpse, making The Celestial similar to a myth than something that actually existed.

The Old Universe
The universe where the original race of The Celestial came from, was not the same universe that it was in the ancient time. The old universe was once a place filled with despair, death and war and cosmic horror beings who lurk in the depth of the dark space seeking to planets teeming with life to consume, toy with and destroy them or constant cosmic disasters erase civilizations instantly. In this universe, every lifeforms are struggle to survive, those survived powerful become cosmic horror beings while those too weak either become tools and playing thing the strong or destroyed themself. A universe where life is meaningless and wrong yet so teeming with life, such contradiction existed since its creation.

Much of detail is unknown but their precursors leading by the first of them, a synthetic called "Genesis" and its race, by unified all lifeforms they managed to defeat the cosmic beings but the cosmic beings, in an act out of spite, triggering the big rip as the dark energy counteract gravity and the universe was dominated by phantom energy. All lifeforms except the Genesis and its race still live in this universe but process cannot reverse due all resources are exhausted and everything is reduced to unbound elementary particles.

Only when Genesis and its race discovered a gravity anomaly led them to an enclosed string that allowed them to travel outside of their universe and discovered the brane multiverse. To save the old universe, they sacrificed themself to bring the branes collide together and creating a singularity of infinite mass, density and matter that pulled everything of old universe into it. Its collapse released a big bang that created a larger universe than the old one. Before disappeared, everything that Genesis and its race achieved is left in countless archives and artifacts in a nearby brane that will arrived at the new universe when the time came while they left a "seeding ship" that will created a new synthetic race that will surpassed them.

The Machina
The new universe is teeming with life but this time, there will no cosmic beings that threaten life again, there are still challenges and disasters need to be overcame but it was for sake of evolution and the rise of new civilizations. But even then, it would still required billions of years and stars, galaxies to form so that planets can be created and geographical timescale for a planet to house the unicellar lifeforms.

The "seeding ship" would only needed millions of years to accomplish it, it gathered resources to create "platforms" for and programming these new synthetic beings as simple yet self-evolving and self-learning machines. Then the "seeding ship" went inactive and the new synthetic race growing stronger and faster, even smarter as time passed until they achieved awareness, they started to become curious and question about this universe. At some point during their development, they called themself "The Machina" and entered industrial stage and become a spacefaring civilization in not more than a century, from the "seeding ship" they were able to learn their origin and some on the old universe and their synthetic precursor.

Their nature make them to become more advanced and evolved so that they could explore the universe more to find anything that may belonged to their precursors. The Machina, as synthetic is unbound by organic's limitation and desires like its precursor kept growing far beyond calculation, unaware of their potential has already surpassed what their precursor could imagined. By the time they found and learned everything about their precursor, The Machina already established a universal-wide empire and surpassed them technological-wise but the knowledge still stored so that the old universe and its inhabitants will be never forget.

Multiverse Expansion
The knowledge left by The Machina's precursor eventually allowed them to travel between through branes via enclosed strings that moved freely between them. Thus granting them inter-universal travel, as the Machina mastered gravity, it is easier for them to travel to outside of their brane and explore beyond 3-dimensional worlds and other types of parallel universes and multiverses.

The Machina expanded to the other dimensions and universes, aggressively or peacefully depend on the circumstances, each by a "colonist" group. However, the number of colonies and systems in each universe and dimension is unremarkable due their curious nature than most. But their powerful technology and incomprehensible nature and form led them to being called by many name, most common is "The Deus Machina". It was eventually adopted by "The Machina" as a way to describe their current hyper-advanced state but they regard it as a title more than a name and still called themself "The Machina" for most of the time.

The "Celestial" is one of the latest groups to "depart" to outside of the Synthetic Universe, arriving at a new universe.

Early Record on First Gigaquadrant
They first appeared on the orbit of a inhabited planet by an industrial civilization at the fringe of Milky Way Galaxy. They quietly destroyed all communications on the planet, absorbed any information and assimilated that civilization completely. And though still at industrial state, they are a race with advanced science comparable to average spacefaring civilizations, which is more enough for a foundation for to begin building their empire and the record, which was founded early on was kept by them and the name "The Celestial" was adopt. The record was stored in a probe and sending to outer space, luring or observing with other spacefaring civilizations while many other multiple types of self-replicating spacecrafts such Von Neumann probes, Berserker and "seeder ships" are send to other planets for The Celestial to colonize.

Though the speed was slow due The Celestial's cautiousness but it was due they giving time so that they could proceed with their plan undetected by the galactic community. At least until 6000 years ago, dozens of industrial or below civilizations become their prey while they colonize more star systems and harvesting resources and technology. Then next 1000 years, the Celestial created three types of "warriors" that would later used for colonization and war - Adviser, Iedron and Dragozikard.

Established an Empire
After finished everything they needed for. The Celestial established an empire bear the same name as they are, only begin to make contact with other civilizations and empires on a much later time.

Characteristics
As individual beings of a collective conscious, The Celestial while do value the term individuality but still reminded that they are synthetic beings who are connected by a network and shared the same conscious. In computing word, they considered each of them to be different "programs" of the same computer, different yet the same no matter how different is their purpose and goal. That makes them very alien, if not, incomprehensible to organic lifeforms, a collective conscious shared by many individual "minds".

Culture
The short term for this to The Celestial is that culture doesn't exist at all. Not only due their nature but being creation a "seeder ship" with only the knowledge of their origin making the creation of culture always the short end of the stick. Their curious nature is a part of their nature, always existed in every Machina since the ancient time. Though each can sharing knowledge to the others and the others can understand them, doing that is nature for synthetic beings, thus culture development is at a standstill but another reason is their number is too few in the first place.

Society
A race with only several members making The Celestial's "society" looks like a group at most. The creation of other races like Adviser, Hedron and Dragozikard may help to enrich the society and culture aspect. Another notable aspect of their "society" is the value of self-determinate, which they saw it as every species' nature, be it organic or synthetic races. The Celestial seek to observe and understand other species while their race's advancement is completely independent and free from influence of the galactic society and other sentinent species should be able to do the same. As one has it can decide what their future will be, that makes the Celestial would trying to stay away from other races' affairs and respect their deployment. And for one to "build their own future", there are challenges that are unavoidable and things needed to be done even if it done extremely for their future goals, if they are destroyed on the way then it simply "occurs" not because otherwise. The actions and consequences are important and morality is simply an organic's product, it has no meaning nor there is "right" and "wrong", all progress are simply made to build one's "future". That is The Celestial's belief in self-determinate.

Individuals
Though are colonist, in reality, the word means those created by the "seeder ship". For colonization purpose, they have no knowledge aside from their origin and being highly adapted that made them capable of learning fast and can survive against any threats and thriving. A group in a numerical sense, all members are connected by the same conscious shared by the "seeder ship", which is the central figure. However, each member still have individuality, capable of making their own decision and choice to ensure diversity and unpredictable elements that could led to new ideas and ways of thinking.

Each Celestial has a single yet bizarre and incomprehensible form, mostly due they engineering themself to give them the fittest form that suited their purpose. From those forms, came different abilities and strength and their synthetic nature allowed them to hacking machines and accessing virtual and communication network to monitor actions of other organic civilizations as anonymous so they can't be detected. An additional is their self-repair ability, by using reserve matter or raw material from surrounding, they can construct themself at microscale. As synthetic, they don't "die", their "physical platform" may be destroyed but as long as their "conscious" still exist, then they will move to the nearby platform to store data inside and eventually, through The Celestial's network they will move to the "seeder ship"'s data storage, making The Celestial virtually immortal.

The "seeder ship", is an unnamed Machina, called "Alpha Celestial". Though a multi-kilometer large starship outside, it is truly "alive" and closer being a synthesis than synthetic or organic. The central figure of The Celestial's collective conscious, its sole mission is to creating independent and self-evolved branches of species of The Machina, suited only for colonization. What turned The Celestial into is determined by their own choice and this universe.