­Eater had been doing what Eater does for so long that time itself failed to provide an appropriate frame of reference. Not only did his existence span the long, slow contraction and subsequent explosion of the previous Universe, it would not be inaccurate to say that Eater was the previous Universe. Of course, it would not be accurate, either.Eater “remembered” its previous conquests, but awareness of the parts of itself left behind on those worlds did not span the vast interstellar gulf. Each time it ventured forth, it was alone.There was one world that circled fast and close to a young, hot star. The beings that lived there were intelligent plasmoids that floated on thin electron winds at the upper boundary of the ionosphere. They had no physical civilization, but they had poetry, philosophy, complex relationships. They already had a shared, planetary consciousness, so when Eater infected one of them, his job was done.Eater recalled a race of arthropods swimming the methane seas of a moon circling the single Jovian planet of a dim, red dwarf. They were a fierce, proud race, building elaborate cities that they destroyed in genocidal wars every ten generations or so. That conquest had been long and slow, but long and slow was Eater’s forte.There was a race of bipedal avians -- intelligent dinosaurs, really – that had developed a spacefaring civilization that reminded Eater of these humans. In an effort to destroy Eater, they nuked their own race to extinction. Eater didn’t care – he inhabited the cockroaches that inherited dominion of the homeworld.It was all the same to Him.