It seemed that I had been alone for millennia.
I can remember the creation of the galaxy, the white-hot gasses coalescing into suns and worlds, the ever-increasing black hole at the very epicenter.
I can remember the first tentative attempts of starfaring races to populate the worlds of the Milky Way. I remember the laughably small ships racing from planet to planet, and ultimately from system to system.
I remember the explosive wars, the deathdealing weapons, the campaigns, the englobements, the explosions and implosions, the lifeless bodies spinning off into space to take up their eternal orbits.
But what I mostly remember is the aching loneliness, the terrible, frightening knowledge that I was finally the last member of my race in a cold and impersonal galaxy. There was no one with whom I could share my hopes and my fears, my dreams and my longings and my terror.
I'm sure that I had a beginning, a birth, but it was so many billions of years ago that I can no longer remember it. Once, so long ago that I can hardly recall it, there were others of my kind. We floated through the void, fed upon the vast dust clouds, touched in a way that I cannot begin to explain.
Then, one by one, they vanished. Killed, I presume, since otherwise we are eternal. It seemed that one moment the galaxy was filled with us, and the next instant there was only me.
And so it remained--for days, for years, for centuries, for millennia, for time past measuring. The loneliness closed in around me, became almost tangible, beat me down and dulled my perceptions. Oh, there were still ships traversing the void, but they held no interest for me. They were not my kind, and I was not theirs, and communication seemed futile. I fell into regular but mindless patterns, moving from one feeding ground to another, trying desperately to forget the past until at last I succeeded, and then trying just as desperately to remember it.
And then one day I sensed something different, yet similar. It was a small metal ship, barely a thousandth of my own length. It was not unlike a thousand others I had seen and attempted to avoid--but this time I was struck by a loneliness as deep and bitter as my own. I knew it could not belong to the ship, which is an inanimate thing, but rather to the being that commanded it. I reached out a mental tendril, and was appalled.
The pilot, indeed the only being aboard the ship, thought of itself as a "man". Its name was Nicobar Lane, and it was a professional hunter--which is to say, it killed things for its livelihood. I had hoped two starfarers might have something in common, but I could not force myself to make contact with the killer of so many things, let alone consider forming any kind of personal bond with it.
The ship had seen me, or possibly Nicobar Lane had sensed my presence, I did not know which at the time, but there seemed only one thing to do, and so I did it--I fled at many times light speeds. He followed for a few moments, but I darted into the parsecs-long dust cloud, and he pursued me no further.
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