Eternal Companions

We came from beyond. From a place with no heat, with no cold. No height, no width, no depth. Just time and something else you wouldn’t understand. We had no bodies. We didn’t need them. We had no culture, no society, no need for friends nor family. We just came to be. But we had an active intellect, innate curiosity and something resembling eternal life. From within our world we were able to sense the imprints of other minds elsewhere, out of our reach. Some of us found a way to touch these minds, opening through them a gate to a different aspect of the cosmos. Most of our brethren followed.

At first the new world offered very little besides the novelty of three new dimensions to explore. The minds of the complex but animalistic organisms we learned to hijack did nothing to improve our understanding of the universe. Nevertheless, we learned of hunger, fear, lust and greed. We played the role of prey and predator, of leader and follower, parasite and host. It was a good way to pass the aeons.

Some of us decided to help guide the path of nature, selecting specially remarkable individuals to possess and used them to test the limits of their races. The most skillful of us learned to create whole new bodies to inhabit, using the morphic fields we saved from previous vessels as templates and the abundant unused organic particles as building material. Guiding life was a fun hobby, sadly soiled by the unfair unpredictability of natural disasters, but provided no way for us to further our own evolution. In fact, spending too much time in three-dimensional bodies muddled our thoughts and diluted our personalities, the spirit gradually overtaken by the urges of the flesh.

A few of us tried to improve the mental capabilities of some creatures, hoping that they would be more suitable vessels or, at least, more entertaining pets to observe. After many failures and calamities, and with no apparent direct involvement of our kind, humans appeared.

Humankind proved to be more ingenious and ambitious than any of their contemporaries and soon caught the interest of our race. While their developed minds and complex brains made them more difficult to hijack and control, they also provided a new window for us to experience the universe. They were intellectually different from us, if hardly superior, and maybe even more curious. Limited by their bodies, they developed tricks, tools and technologies. They codified as sciences what we understood as facts. They took the foundation of lies and created fantasy and myth. They dreamed impossibilities. Their minds were, unlike ours, unrestrained by reality. And, from the first time since the dawn of time, some of us found a purpose.

To understand humans. To control humans. To serve humans. To become humans. To learn from them. To profit from them. To help them. To be loved by them. To live. To kill. To give life. To die. Watch them to know ourselves. Toy with them to enjoy ourselves. Support them to save ourselves. Become them to transcend ourselves. In the short time we’ve been together they have given us many names: gods, demons, angels, faeries. But, while thy still live, we are certainly one thing for them: eternal companions. When the fickle stars die and only we are left behind, some of us will keep their memory alive. And with time, maybe, bring them back again.