Interstellar colonization began with a fleet of pico-probes to the Oort Cloud.
The Cold People were created on the larger ice worlds beyond Pluto: superconducting cyborgs made of ultrathin wires, with a lifespan measured in hours. That seemed like centuries to them.
They invented and built a fleet of arks to explore interstellar space.
The wasteland between the suns contained many frozen asteroids, though most were tiny and hundreds of billions of kilometers apart. To the Cold People, time and distance meant nothing. Another generation always came along.
They soon forgot about the planets, and the stars became abstractions to be avoided at all cost.
Superfrozen ice and rock was reassembled into Bose-Einstein computing cores. A swarm of insulated spheres began to spread imperceptibly through the galaxy.
The Nebula Eaters abandoned solid matter entirely. Now they had nothing in common with those they had left behind. Earth's solar system had changed beyond recognition anyway. Then the same changes appeared around other stars . . .

All at once, the universal energy balance inverted.
Distant stars reddened and began to expand at impossible speed, transforming into globes of organized energy that filled the voids separating them.
Powered by the unraveling fabric of space, the expanding spheres approached at close to the speed of light.
Most intelligent nebulas had less than five minutes to organize and execute an intergalactic evacuation, and accelerate their members to almost 300,000 kilometers per second.
That would be the easy part.



The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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