Xeelee - Origin

Origin

In the Xeelee sequence life and intelligence are ubiquitous throughout the universe. The universe has a fundamental tendency toward complexity and autocatalystic systems are easily created. This is not limited to particle matter, but also applies to more exotic structures such as dark matter, quarks, and flaws in space-time itself. Thus, life emerged when the universe was extremely young, to within Planck Time of the Big Bang, and there were intelligent civilizations that witnessed, and indeed consciously influenced, major events in the early universe such as inflationary expansion, symmetry breaking, and various phase changes. At the close of each of these epochs, as the universe took on a fundamentally different characteristic, there was a corresponding mass extinction, but small enclaves of the intelligences would survive in one manner or another, witnessing the universe becoming progressively colder and slower-reacting.

The novel Exultant describes the progenitor of the Xeelee, referred to as the proto-Xeelee, as one of the few survivors of the last phase change (when the universe had cooled enough for atoms to form). The proto-Xeelee established symbiotic relationships with other survivors as well as autocatalystic reactions in the new baryonic matter, thus emerged what would later be called the Xeelee. This potentially dates the Xeelee to when the universe was only a few hundred thousand years old, but with direct knowledge and observations that reach back to within minutes of the Big Bang.

The Xeelee used primordial black holes as a habitat, construction tool, and computing devices because, at the time they emerged, the event horizon was one of the few thing that survived from earlier epochs that they understood. More so, heavier atoms were exceedingly rare because stars had not yet had the time to create them through nuclear fusion. As the primordial black holes evaporated over time the Xeelee eventually migrated to using the supermassive black holes around which Galaxies were forming. Although the galactic black holes were trillions of times more massive than their ancestral homes, the Xeelee proved to be quite adept at using the complex physics around the event horizon for their own purposes. Over the billions of years since their migration, the Xeelee have become a ubiquitous part of the complex ecology of the super massive black holes along with an unnamed number of other species that are also veterans of the same very early eras of the universe.

There is no explicit physical description of the Xeelee throughout the series. In the novel Exultant it is alluded that the over their exceedingly long history, the Xeelee have combined themselves with their technology and, as such, may not have a distinct individual presence that Humans would be familiar with.