Floating through space, with nothing to do and no one to talk to was, surprise surprise, also boring. Shocker, I know. Every new cloud of gas and empty patch of space did fillme, bizarrely enough, with a sense of wonder. It felt as if everything I saw was completely new, and not exactly like the last hundred thousand clouds of gas.

And at first, they were interesting. When light was still prevalent in every corner of the universe, each cloud reflected it in such interesting and unique ways. A thousand different fractals playing out across space.

Yet, you can only see so many fractals before even they start to lose their charm. Even the sense of wonderment got old after a while. I wouldn't necessarily say I was getting bored of them… just that my interest was begging to be placed else where.

That's when I began to get creative about my entertainment. Using a variant of [FORESIGHT], I could instead simulate the future instead of actually seeing it. This version would be rather useless if I had little or no data about what I was simulating, but for what I wanted to use it for, just my sight would be a good enough input.

Upon activation, this cluster would simulate billions of possible futures, each on different by the slightest action I could take. It would then comb through each possible future until it found the one that allowed me to accomplish the task I wanted with the least possible effort.

The outcome I gave it to search for was a fairly simple one. How could I disperse these clouds of gas using only physical force. Each time, I would have it search for a slightly different method. At first they started out fairly simple; a flick of the body here and a swish of my tail (is it really a tail if its just the end of my body?) there and the whole cloud would slowly disperse over the course of dozens of years, the fractals of light disappearing with it. However, after each cloud the methods grew slightly more complex. One of the most interesting examples of this complexity was when the cluster advised me to begin rotating at about a third the speed of light. The friction created would heat the nearby hydrogen to such high temperatures that nuclear fusion would begin. This process would cause helium atoms to be created and then thrown out with such force that they could initiate fusion in other hydrogen atoms, leading to a chain reaction that eventually lead to the entire cloud being blown away in a wave of helium.

Of course, even this became old once the amount of times I did it approached the hundred thousand mark, despite this process causing an unexpected sense of glee along with the much expected wonderment.

And so, that brought us to now, where I was floating through space, deep in thought. I had began to notice that I don't seem to experience time as I did before. No, that wasn't quite right. Time still passed at the same speed. A year was still a year long. But instead, time seemed to just… matter less. When I was human, spending an entire year just waiting would be entirely unthinkable. Yet now, I was content to spend tens of years simply watching and waiting.

Although, just because I was content with doing nothing for the next however many million years it will take for something interesting to happen, didn't mean I particularly wanted to. That's why I was now floating around, considering what I should do next.

With no sudden insights myself, I started crowdsourcing ideas. Of course, as there was no-one here but me, I was crowdsourcing whatever I could see around me. Lets see… gas cloud, gas cloud, empty space, portal to nothing, empty space, gas-

Wait. Portal to nothing? That… shouldn't be possible. Portals don't just happen! Especially not to there. Something, or someone, must have caused this portal. But what?! What could have possibly opened this portal when the only thing around was these god damned gas clouds!

I should investigate… Is what I would say if I didn't have a sudden sense of impending and unending death creep up on me.Immediately followed by… something… appearing on the other side that seemed to be peering in. Despite whatever it was having no discernable body parts, much like myself, I could still feel as its attention began to sweep across the exit of the portal.

I couldn't let it feel me. I had no idea what it was, what it wanted, or how strong it was, but I knew it would be bad to be noticed by it. It felt off. Like something that should not exist, yet does. I needed to escape, and fast. I could feel it's focus quickly approaching my area.

I couldn't slip into a close by universe, there was no way to guarantee that this thing wasn't actually just in the next universe over, or that it couldn't intercept me. I would just be walking straight into it's jaw.

Instead, I activated [SLIP] and began to flee. Space in front of me began to twist and shorten, whilst space behind me began to expand and propel me forward. It wouldn't be fast enough, but luckily it was nowhere near the speeds I could travel. In a field extending barely a fraction of a picometer of my body, reality became more pliable, more open to suggestions. In this case, the increasing in the speed of light. Using this I could travel speeds exceeding the normal speed of light a hundred thousand times over without any of the time bending problems that were usually associated with it. I don't want any time breaking paradoxes blowing up everything just yet. Preferably, they would happen never.

Luck was, for once, on my side. I easily escaped the beings range of detection long before it even looked in my area. And so, I mentally crossed of that general direction of the universe for viable holiday locations, and continued my venture through space in search of something to do. Something that wasn't battling beings outside my scope of comprehension and a few dozen orders of magnitude stronger than me.

Right. What to do, what to do, what to do. I could… look at gas clouds, or admire gas clouds, or bask in the glory of gas clouds, or do anything other than look at god damned gas clouds!

Actually, as much as I loathe to admit, the gas clouds could actually be used for something other than being boring. These gas clouds were made of hydrogen and helium, the main elements used in stars. I could use these clouds to make stars, and stars could then make other elements. Other elements means that planets can start to form. And planets means life! Actual, honest to god life!

Only problem was that despite my reality defying powers, I had no actual ability to manipulate matter. Sure, I could theoretically use [SLIP] to move manipulate the space the matter occupies and move it that way, but that was extremely inefficient and most importantly, came with very little fine control. Plus, once I deactivate the cluster, all that matter would simply slingshot back to where it originally was. No, I needed something more specialised. I needed to create a new cluster, one specialised in manipulating the physical world.

As I began to activate [PROTOTYPE], I could feel it almost thrummed in excitement. This would be the first time I had used this cluster, and it seems it has been looking forward to it. I set the cluster out to it's task and started to wait.

Despite having the ability to run almost a billion simultaneous simulations, shard design was rather finicky, and it was likely not to make much headway on its task for the next few centuries. It's not like I could just conjure up mind-bogglingly powerful, reality manipulating abilities on a whim. So, I waited.

…

And waited.

…

And waited.

…

And wai-

Screw waiting.

I didn't mind waiting, but waiting was boring and I was doing all of this to avoid being bored. I should at least do something to distract me whilst I wait. With no one but me and these positively thrilling clouds of gas around, my only real choices were using clusters I have not used much before. And, since no one was around and nothing was happening, that left only the [TECHNOLOGY] cluster. Usually, I would not be able to make use of this cluster without any materials. Fortunately, for much of the technology, raw shard material, and the various effects I could program into it, would be sufficient.

But first, I needed matter to convert into raw shard material (I really needed to think of a better name for this. Perhaps… shard-stuff? Ehh, works for now). Luckily, there was abundant matter all around me. Unluckily, it was all gas clouds. God, I hated gas clouds. Although, absorbing these clouds of gas and turning them into something actually useful towards me would be almost therapeutic.

I approached the nearest cloud, approximately 300 light years away, and began to convert it. And immediately hit my first roadblock. Shard-stuff was immensely dense. A single cubic metre of it had a mass approaching 20 million kilograms. Hydrogen, the material that formed the majority of the clouds, was less than a single kilogram per cubic metre.

I'm going to needed to absorb astronomically high amounts to even begin to create the smallest of devices. Fortunately, there was an astronomical amount of hydrogen just about everywhere.

Haaah. Well, I've got to start somewhere.

So, I began to capture and convert the gas. It was better than doing nothing at least.

Time passed. A lot of it. It was not in waste, though. [TIMEKEEPER] informed me that, on an Earthly scale, roughly 300,000 years had passed. Which, was a lot. Very much a lot. It seemed that an entities experience of time was more divergent to a humans than I initially thought. It seemed I instead saw time in a more cosmic fashion; in the grand lifespan of the universe, a million years would be equivalent to less than a week for a human and so to me, it felt much closer to a week than 300,000 years.

I had managed to build up around 200,000 cubic kilometres of shard-stuff in that time. That would be enough for some of my smaller projects.

The [TECHNOLOGY] cluster had come pre-packaged with small assortment of technology already, ranging from simple devices, such as laser weapons and subliminal engines, to more advanced devices, though these were sparse and often missing certain elements of their design. Though, I don't know where these blueprints came from in the first place. Same place as the rest of the knowledge I had been gifted I supposed; something currently outside my understanding.

However, there was one item that I had my mind on for quite a while. A beacon. More specifically, a beacon that I could find from any corner of the universe.

Since my run in with the portal, and the near miss by the strange being on the other side, I have had a faint tingling in the back of my mind, a faint sense of anxiety bordering on paranoia. Each time my I had thought back to that moment, I began to almost obsessively plan for any scenario that could happen. I had come up unfortunately short. Something told me, almost a gut feeling if not for my lack of guts, that nothing I could throw at that being could harm it. At least, not at my current level of strength.

The only plan I had remaining that held any water was this beacon. I had remained relatively close, within a million light years, to where the portal was. I originally wanted to go further, to escape to the opposite end of the universe, but something inside me was screaming to stay nearby. The same paranoia that drove me to build the beacon would not let me stray to far from the portal. If I had done so, then whatever it was that was on the other side could come through with me none the wiser, and I would be wholly unaware until it was too late. Or, I may have accidentally returned to the area without realising and been noticed by the being.

That's where the beacon came into play. With it, I would know exactly where the portal was at all times and could safely keep far, far, far away from it. And, with a little luck, anyone who is tracking me will notice the beacon first and follow it, straight into beings open jaw.

The beacon also served as an early warning system for if the being does cross through the portal. It would broadcast a warning, reaching almost the entire universe, that would hopefully give me enough time to either escape or prepare to fight. It would, with a little luck, also trick nearby civilisations to attack it, providing me with cannon fodder to distract the being.

I began building the beacon. Normally, building these types of devices would involve a whole lot of wires and circuit boards and screws. Shard-stuff let me… cheat. I had no need to run a hundred thousand wires throughout it if a lump of shard-stuff could carry a million signals. Although, where shard-stuff makes up for it in versatility, it was sorely lacking in specialisation. That caused the beacon to be much larger than it should have and a glutton for power. Thankfully, whatever caused my body to generate power ex nihilo extended to the shard-stuff I had created.

The final result was a perfectly spherical orb of light almost 6 kilometres in diameter; the immense amount of power usage causing it to radiate light like a star. This did act as a sort of rudimentary camouflage, from a distance what appears to be a star is far less noteworthy than a large golden sphere.

Hopefully this would stop anyone moving it, or god forbid destroying it.

The second machine I wanted to build would act as almost a prosthetic for the [CONSTRUCT] cluster. Even after all the time that passed its repair was slow going, especially as the other damaged clusters would be far more useful to me.

With [CLOAK] repaired, I would be able to actually hide from any future threats, instead of being forced into combat or making a desperate escape. [HINDSIGHT] was even more important. If it was fully repaired, with a bit of improvement and slight modification, I may be able to use it to observe how my damaged clusters used to work, greatly increasing repair times and possibly repairing [BROADCAST].

Whilst [BREACH] would greatly increase my mobility, with that thing potentially living in-between universes, I couldn't risk using it lest it spotted me.

Anyway, the machine I was currently building would act as a temporary band-aid for [CONSTRUCT]. It would open a small, unstable pocket dimension that would connect to a constructs core. I would then fill it with the remaining shard-stuff, which the core could use to build a more resilient body than it was currently capable of.

However, this was not exactly a perfect fix. I could only supply it with a limited amount of shard-stuff at once, or else the gravity would be strong enough in the extremely unstable pocket dimension to cause it to collapse.

It also didn't do anything about the cores durability. So, whilst it did offer it an incredibly hard armour with an even high regeneration rate, it also meant that if the core was exposed, even a baseline human could destroy it.

The final completed device was massive, it used up almost half of the remaining material. Upon activation, it began to glow. Though, this was not the same all-encompassing glow of the beacon. Golden lights slowly ran up the side, starting from its thin tapered bottom and up to its wide top, indicating the slow and gradual activation of the device.

This machine had been particularly fragile, if it had activated all ate once it would have promptly torn itself to shreds before leaving me with a rather nasty sunburn and a gaping hole in my side. Thankfully, none of those things happened.

Though that meant that the activation process was slow. This was partly because I was using a barely completed blueprint of primitive and outdated technology and partly because I filled the rest in with a (un)educated guess. It had worked. Just not very effectively. I couldn't even speed up the time around it, or else I would risk destabilising the dimension, causing it to backfire. Which would, once again, lead to a hole in me. I wasn't particularly fond of unwanted holes in me.

So I had to wait. Fucking wait. Ugghh.

…

The wait was, mercifully, short, lasting only 13 years. Practically no time at all.

The machine was now completely glowing, and space began to distort and tear around it as it began to create and anchor the pocket dimension. After a few brief seconds, a large tear opened up in spacetime, the top of the device disconnected and entered the crack. It would have to remain inside the dimension to give it some semblance of stability. All that was left behind was a thin, needle like device barely 3 metres long.

I moved my body closer to absorb it; I would store it inside my body whilst I waited for-

Ding!

I felt my non-existent metaphorical eye twitch. I didn't know if this was [PROTOTYPE] mocking me, or simply how it was, but it pissed me off. Why the hell did it make a Ding! sound?! It's not a toaster, it doesn't need to inform with some upbeat, childish noise when its-

Wait, [PROTOTYPE] was done? Yes! Just in time as well. I practically felt my annoyance turn to elation. Right, first I needed to create a cluster for this new design to reside in. It seemed I would have to use the remaining shard-stuff I had gathered to house it instead. It was nowhere near enough for it to have any reasonable strength. However, now I would be able to simply sit back and have all nearby matter deliver itself to me.

Secondly, it needed a name. Cluster names were thankfully simple. I did not have the abundant creativity required to to come up with a particularly interesting name. Not when I was human, and certainly less now in this new body.

It was a rather simply affair to name it. There was no dramatic fanfare to announce its naming, merely a sort of… acceptance from the cluster towards my new name.

I activated the cluster, and it did exactly as its namesake suggested.

[CONTROL]