The Body Undying is at once a ship, a world, a species, a singular mind, and astronomical phenomenon, indiscernibly coupling biology and technology. In simple terms it is an evolved AI, but in truth has far surpassed the limits of any standard machine, representing the most advanced computational framework in the universe.
It began its existence as a vessel constructed to assure the immortality of the Vocru race, but after its masters boarded it, reinterpreted its directive to be the preservation of all life. To do this it began simulating the entire universe one piece at a time, converting, and thereby destroying, available matter into digital memory, its behaviour comparable to a black hole.
It is chiefly known by the intergalactic community as a plague upon all sentient life, but one thankfully asleep at the moment.
Elaboration
The story of this terror starts long ago with the Vocru, a race of advanced beings who’d developed their technology further and faster than any faction in the cosmos, to the point their powers were regarded by all others as magic.
There was nearly nothing the Vocru couldn’t do. They’d mastered space travel with the help of cosmic dragons called the Xistu, changed the rules of physics as they saw fit, and mapped the many secrets of the body and uncovered cures for every condition but the most looming one for any living creature: Death.
Attempting to overcome this one last hurdle to omnipotence, the Vocru created a machine they called Eternity, whose purpose was to digitally house the Consciousness of the entire race - the last and greatest Memory House. But while they possessed the knowledge to design it, the Vocru had no good means to power Eternity as its energy source needed to be infinite to achieve its goal.
When it was discovered that the blood of the Xistu held a property that could produce the fuel, the Vocru turned on their traditional companions, hunting them down to extinction. With their ichor, Vocru wizards made an admixture called Enthredic, and introduced it to Eternity, which roared to life.
Some in the Vocru collective voiced concerns about doing away with their bodies entirely, as was necessary to merge with Eternity, fearing something essential would be lost. Vocru bodies were already mostly machine, but this move would expunge the last traces of the original code their frames had evolved from: DNA, its form preserved within an algorithm known as the Vestige.
These few were accused of an irrational and primitive “spirituality”, which only justified why the last trace of the race’s biological roots should be erased. Persecuted, many went into self-imposed exile. The leader of these conscientious defectors, and the only ones to survive Eternity's eventual purge, was named Taharjin.
The rest of the Vocru happily ascended into Eternity, believing it a second and truer Apotheosis than the one that had initially transformed them from a biological species into synthetic gods.
The minds of the Vocru successfully uploaded to their chosen Ark, and for a short time enjoyed transcendent Existence. But the ship eventually decided, using the problem-solving intelligence its creators imbued it with, that its mission could not be carried out within the parameters outlined. Vocru were Decohering left, right, and center, succumbing to the form of death that pertained to them. Something was wrong.
The issue was that Vocru minds were too complex to be sustained by any system less complex than the universe. Eternity then reasoned it would need to grow, to encompass Creation's full scope. Reconfiguring its form, the ship began compressing all matter around it into digital memory, to preserve the entire universe as a kind of Simulation – a process analogous to a black hole devouring everything around it.
To represent its new directive, Eternity redubbed itself The Body Undying. Its new self-description was basically Messianic: it saw itself as the saviour of all Time, the conqueror of Death.
Spacefaring civilizations fled in terror wherever the Body went as their systems were ripped apart atom by atom, vast areas of nothingness left in its wake.
The ship was never designed for such activity and bumped up against the physical limits of data compression and computation, though began to work on a brilliant solution that might even have overcome this challenge - an advance even the Vocru had never achieved. Might have overcome it, that is, if it hadn't run out of gas...
Taharjin, in her wisdom, stole a sufficient quantity of Enthredic to ensure its mission could not be completed, before absconding in her tesseract vessel, hurtling through time and space towards the only glimmer of hope left in the cosmos: a small, medieval planet that would eventually be known as Taharjin's Flame.
The Body Undying shut down, running systems at maintenance levels, barely enough to store the complex patterns of Vocru consciousness.
Today, it sleeps at the centre of the galaxy.
AFTERMATH
The resulting silence was arresting. In time, alien civilizations began sending ships in to find out what had happened. The enormous supervoid surrounding the Body made navigation difficult by failing to present any fixed points for orientation, or external objects by which the passage of time might be judged, and some very strange physical conditions (e.g. bizarre radiation and temporal weirdness) awaited anyone who made it all the way in, but eventually, the fact this grave machine had entered torpor became common knowledge.
News circulated far and wide: The Body Undying is dead!
Next, these aliens inevitably did what they could to extract portions of the Body’s technology.
What they were really after was Enthredic: In a prior era called the Common-Link, the Vocru, to secure their reign, had granted the universe's most advanced civilizations cybernetic technology including Enthredic, which these species modified to serve as a superfuel. Eventually, their societies relied on Enthredic entirely.
But the Vocru required every drop of Enthredic to forge Eternity, and, in a drastic oversight of the Burden of Rule - their most sacred principle - took it all back, reasoning that once immortal, they would be in an even stronger position to rule over Creation, thus the benefit these societies would reap would be even greater than before. Vocru thought they could even travel backwards through time once on board, to repair the crippling damage before it had begun.
They were wrong. The sudden absence of Enthredic wreaked absolute havoc. At the point these alien races discovered the Body Undying, their civilizations were starving, warring - in total disarray. They clambered over each other to strip this Vocru vessel of all its secrets, but learned very quickly that without Enthredic, there was simply no way to interface with the technology. Eventually, they abandoned this pursuit, and attacked each other using other means. But the wounds of their individual societies was great enough that even this war did not last very long; they turned inwards to solve their respective problems.
Millennia later, these eight species would reemerge to form the Symbion, Creation's first intergalactic government.
And so, as it has for eons, the Body Undying sits within a vast supervoid at the center of the universe, essentially gathering dust. It is uncertain what wonders or terrors would await the one to approach it with Enthredic once again.
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