Size was the issue.
From the actinic churning press of the galactic hub, to the ragged trailing veils of her arms, thin even at their impossible scale, size was always the issue. In her vastness she thwarted us more completely than any mountain or sea before her. No one species could hope to chart her.
And so, we became many.
Our collosi, dancing in the billows of gas giants, their silica skeletons glinting through translucent skin, each many times larger than Earth's former giants. Each so light, the merest breeze sent them tumbling, their bodies just as much a product of incomprehensible pressure as our biological trespasses.
Our navigators, floating in fine oil, surrounded by shimmering hair emanating from every pore, the slightest current in their environemental simulacra giving them hundreds of millions of times more information than eyes or ears alone could hope to cull. Nearly lobotomized through sheer focus, masters of movement.
And our thinkers, our persisters, harriers, messengers, oracles. We entered the First Diaspora with our arms flung wide to wonder. We turned ourselves to our tools; as our tools had once given us mastery over the world, tiny blue thing it was, so they would again.
Until we found their bones.
A rocky world, bleached by hard x-rays, what little magnetic field it had, long ago gone. There stood steel spires, like ours, now gone to flakes and nothing. Ashes, and quiet ruin, and in every home an orderly pile of carbon. We knew what we were seeing, but we worked on believing. They had nearly made it. Just a little more, and they would have shaken gravity from their feet like snow. But they perished, quietly and alone.
We took a few things of theirs, we made them a humble monument. And we left.
And then we found the next. Swampy, methane-soaked ammoniacal life turned to death, and only the grid buried under their frozen sea spoke of them. This time, we found a few of their sharpened obsidian razors. We knew what happened now, but not why.
40,000 times we saw this. Our hearts dimmed with sorrow, with despair. 40,000 gravestones we built for planets.
It was one of us, not an Oracle, not a Mind, but a Finder, small and nimble, with a mind made for spotting patterns, which noticed the crude scratches on the floor of one humble hut, noticed how they almost matched an arrangement of bricks piled around a body a photon's lifetime away. And so we followed the thread.
Each world, it changed slightly. Sometimes, it refined itself, others, it added new complexity. But it was just a pattern. Just a squiggle. No formula, no mathematics, no transcendent theory could unravel it, make it have meaning.
And then we looked at the time. Nearly instantaneous, jump to jump. A few thousand years, sometimes less. Sometimes much less. Impossibly fast.
We had long ago uncovered the secret to quantum entanglement; instantaneous communication was simplicity itself to us. This felt...cruder, more biological. Like feathered wings, serving the same function as our floating artifice.
But still, the pattern. It was nothing, meant nothing. It was nonsense, like the idlest daydream.
It was that, which prompted the revelation. Thoughts.
How does a galaxy think? Not with light, too slow. Not with ansibles, they took too long for natural forces to form by chance. Size was the problem, but nature finds a way...
With minds. With lives.
A civilization is a galactic neuron. It fires itself once, every mind fixated on the thought, entangled within a signal of nearly infinite information density. And as it reaches the next 'neuron', the thought iterates one step on its progression, and it passes on, leaving a guttering candle of awareness behind it.
The galaxy thinks, and we aren't even a finished figment. We are a synapse, we are an axon.
And we have no need to worry.
We have sprawled to every nook of our manifest home. Our ansibles are many times more efficient than the galactic mind's previous genocidal transmissions. It thinks at a speed comparable to us, now.
And soon, it will talk to us.