Eternal Ones

The Eternal Ones are the principle antagonists of Star Control 3. They are a race of god-like extradimensional beings who consume all live in the galaxy to satiate their needs. According to the Daktaklakpak, their name forms part of the formulae that covers all aspects of their being, starting with the word “Eternal1”. Even knowing this true name can drive a sentient computer completely insane.

Biology

The Eternal Ones exist in a state of near-transcendence, stuck between the physical and the energy based lifeforms they were destined to evolve into. However, their fear of transcending and loosing that fundamental biological part of themselves has forced them into this state of stasis.

To maintain their current forms, the Eternal Ones needed increasingly refined forms of energy for consumption, to prevent themselves from turning into pure energy like they feared. This started with simple energy from suns and other interstellar anomalies, before moving onto the more esoteric energies elsewhere in the universe. Finally, the only energies that could sustain the Eternal Ones was the byproducts of sentient life. This forced the Eternal Ones to begin their consumption of all sentient races in the universe to keep themselves in their current form.

The Eternal Ones are monstrously powerful creatures, borderline gods in their capabilities, where one infinitesimal spark would be sent to the various galaxies to begin their consumption and if they found their sentience silos to be empty, the Eternal Ones were capable of directly manipulating the fundamental forces of a galaxy to introduce Interdimensional Fatigue across an entire one at once. This often has the unfortunate side effect of destroying the galaxy in question, but there are always more galaxies.

Culture

In spite of their god-like powers, the Eternal Ones are still somewhat rational beings that can be reasoned with. This can be seen in their use of Heralds, a practice that involves a chosen race to go ahead of the Eternal Ones on one of their many harvests to ensure the quick subjugation of local species to make the process of devouring their consciousness easier.

The Eternal Ones are a somewhat lazy species, unwilling to take the steps necessary to make their harvest more efficient and less devastating to the various species in creation. They have long since evolved past their Precursor Potential and now exist solely to devour the galaxies they come across. Their system is so mundane that any deviation from their consumption is borderline unthinkable.

Some Eternal Ones have expressed a fear that the destruction of galaxies is likely to lead to the eventual destruction of the universe and indeed the loss of a potential food source. Many other Eternal Ones are less concerned and instead see it like losing a single field in their farm of the universe. The naysayers have been long ignored by the Eternal Ones and seem to just go along with what the majority of their race believes.

History

The Eternal Ones evolved potentially millions of years ago in a far off galaxy, where they quickly developed their Precursor Potential to its highest degree. Outside of the Precursor’s themselves, none had ever possess Potential such as them.

In time, the Eternal Ones began to evolve past their Potential and came closer and closer to becoming gods with every passing millennia. Out of a collective fear of what might happen should they shed their physical bodies, the Eternal Ones turned their supremely advanced technology to developing a solution to remain in their quasi-energy state. This led to the development of their energy siphoning abilities, able to convert the energy needed to keeping themselves rooted to the universe from a number of sources.

However, as time went on, potentially over millions of years, the Eternal Ones came to require increasingly rare forms of energy to sustain their existence. Starting from merely stars and other interstellar bodies, they were forced to turn to the more esoteric realms of the universe to maintain their forms. Eventually, only the sentient byproducts of other alien races was enough to keep the Eternal Ones from passing on.

As such, the Eternal Ones began a programme of seeding universes with life, ensuring that any races would develop mentally along similar lines and be ripe for consumption when the time came. This explains the existence of similar races to one another, like humanity and the Syreen, as well as the existence of peculiar races like the Supox.

This plan continued for thousands of cycles, as the Eternal Ones would return to feed on the numerous galaxies they would encounter, often led by a Herald race to ensure their cattle were primed for devouring. It was during one of the last cycles to the Milky Way that the most recent Heralds were recruited, having been defeated by their predecessors, but were so devastating, the Eternal Ones recruited them anyway and devoured their predecessors.

It was also during these many cycles that the Precursors would come to recognise the system of consumption the Eternal Ones carried out and in turn, began to devolve themselves with each passing cycle, becoming one of only three species known to do so. The others were the Sylandro, who had evolved on a gas giant and processed thoughts in a different manner to most sentients and the other was the Arilou Lalee’lay. The Arilou escaped into QuasiSpace to avoid the cycles, but doing so has caused their bodies to become weak and frail and prone to breaking down. Thus they require occasional investments of fresh DNA into their gene pool to stop from going extinct.

During the events of Star Control 3, the Captain is able to find a new means of countering the Eternal Ones reckless consumption of life by discovering their Sentience Silos are working at only 1% efficiency and this was causing the complete destruction of species every cycle. By using technology provided by a re-evolved Precursor and the Herald’s own databases on the Eternal Ones, the Captain was able to save the galaxy and restore HyperSpace by allowing the Silo to passively collect the thoughts of sentients over the millennia and allowing the Eternal Ones to feast on that in its place, potentially saving trillions of lives in the process.