they were not of recognizable biological descent: their origins were lost in the depths of cosmological time, somewhere millions or even billions of jaunts away through the manifold of parallel universes. Whether they were a designed thing, or had somehow evolved in inconceivably alien circumstances on a world where nuclide-based DNA and RNA replicators had lost the race against organometalloid compounds, was now unknowable. But the hives existed. The hives were not limited by the constraints of carbon-based metabolism powered by sunlight: the hives burned hot and bright and dismantled entire
...more