Invisible Sun (Empire Games, #3)

by Charles Stross

The human Forerunner empire was heir to primate consciousness and social behavior, and all the messy squabbles and inefficiencies that handicapped their ability to flourish in an essentially uncaring cosmos. Limited to just the one world and a limited environmental range, the Forerunners nevertheless iterated and prospered on a myriad versions of that planet. And at some point, centuries or millennia into their expansion, the Forerunners miniaturized their world-walking machinery and engineered it into their bodies, giving it the ability to self-replicate so that their infants were born with it. Like a new sub-cellular organelle, the jaunt nodes proliferated and replicated and their carriers flourished, threatening to become as indispensable as the mitochondria that had allowed humanity’s first unicellular ancestors to exploit an oxygen-based metabolic cycle. The Forerunner civilization expanded across millions of parallel Earths, reaching heights of wealth and sophistication that neither the contemporary Commonwealth or United States could imagine. They threatened the hives. But the hives had ways of dealing with threats.