The flock moved through space like a school of invisible fish, and Shepherd Void Walker was losing them.
"Gravitational lensing at sector 7-alpha," her apprentice, Echo Darklight, called out from his monitoring station. "The herd's splitting again."
Void cursed under her breath, adjusting the exotic matter projectors that allowed their ship, the Invisible Hand, to interact with dark matter. Being a Dark Matter Shepherd was the loneliest job in the galaxy—tending to creatures that couldn't be seen, only inferred by their gravitational effects on the visible universe.
"Deploy the containment field," she ordered. "We can't let them scatter. Not this close to the Magellan Cloud."
The dark matter entities—if they could even be called entities—were crucial to galactic stability. They were the universe's gardeners, unconsciously maintaining the gravitational wells that kept galaxies from flying apart. But sometimes they wandered, and when a herd of dark matter creatures decided to migrate, entire star systems could be thrown into chaos.
"Containment field deployed," Echo reported. "But Shepherd, I'm reading something odd. The herd isn't running from something. They're running to something."
Void frowned, checking her instruments. In twenty years of shepherding, she'd never seen the creatures exhibit what could be called purposeful behavior. They usually drifted with the cosmic currents, following gravitational gradients like cattle following grass.
"Show me the trajectory analysis."
The holographic display materialized between them, showing the invisible herd's path through space. Echo was right—this wasn't random movement. The creatures were converging on a point in empty space, light-years from any star.
"There's nothing there," Echo said, confused. "Why would they—"
"There's nothing visible there," Void corrected. "Remember, we see less than five percent of the universe. Plot a course to follow them. And prep the deep field sensors."
As they pursued the herd through the void, Void found herself thinking about the old Earth legends of shepherds following a star. Here she was, following invisible creatures through invisible terrain, trusting in forces she couldn't see but knew were real.
The deep field sensors began registering anomalies as they approached the convergence point. Space itself seemed denser here, as if reality had been folded into origami patterns too complex for human minds to grasp.
"Shepherd," Echo's voice was barely a whisper, "are you seeing this?"
She was. Through the exotic matter interface, the dark matter herd became partially visible—ghostly outlines of things that defied description. They weren't animals in any sense humans understood. They were more like living equations, entities of pure spacetime curvature that existed in dimensions beyond the familiar four.
And they were gathering around something vast.
"It's a dark matter structure," Void breathed. "But look at the complexity. This isn't natural formation. This is..."
"Architecture," Echo finished. "Someone built this. Something that lives in dark matter built a structure larger than star systems."
The structure pulsed with gravitational waves that the shepherds' instruments translated into something like music—deep, resonant tones that spoke of eons of patience and purposes beyond human comprehension. The dark matter herd swirled around it in patterns that looked almost like worship.
"We need to report this," Echo said, reaching for the communication array.
"Wait." Void put a hand on his arm. "Look at the patterns. The herd isn't just gathering—they're participating. This is some kind of... ritual? Communication?"
As they watched, the structure began to change. What had seemed like solid architecture revealed itself as something more fluid, more alive. It was growing, unfolding like a flower made of gravity itself. And at its heart, something was waking up.
The instruments screamed warnings as gravitational forces spiked beyond anything they'd ever recorded. Space itself groaned under the strain. Whatever was in that structure, it was vast beyond imagination—not in size, but in mass. A consciousness made of dark matter, as heavy as galaxies.
"Hello, little shepherds."
The voice came through every system on their ship simultaneously, a communication method that bypassed electromagnetic radiation entirely and spoke through the fabric of spacetime.
Void found her voice. "Who are you?"
"I am what you call dark matter, given thought. I am the shepherd of shepherds, the tender of the universe's hidden garden. Your kind has finally learned to see beyond light. This is good. It means you are ready."
"Ready for what?"
The structure pulsed, and suddenly Void could see—really see—the universe as it truly was. The visible matter, all the stars and planets and galaxies, were just frost on a window. The real universe was dark matter, vast currents and structures that dwarfed anything astronomy had imagined. And it was all alive, all conscious on scales that made human thought seem like a single neuron firing.
"Ready to understand your purpose," the entity continued. "You call yourselves shepherds, but you do not know what you truly tend. These creatures you follow—they are the universe's immune system, its maintenance crew. They flow where they are needed, adjusting gravity to prevent catastrophes you cannot imagine."
"And you?" Echo asked, his voice shaking. "What are you?"
"I am one of many. We are the dark matter civilizations your scientists theorize about but cannot detect. We have watched your kind since you first looked up at the stars. Now you have learned to see in the dark, and so we reveal ourselves."
The entity showed them wonders: cities built from folded space, powered by the universe's expansion itself. Networks of communication that spanned galactic superclusters instantaneously. Beings that existed as living gravity wells, their thoughts reshaping the cosmos on scales that made terraforming seem like sandcastle building.
"Why show us this?" Void asked. "Why now?"
"Because the universe is sick," the entity replied, and for the first time, Void heard something like concern in its gravitational voice. "There is an infection spreading through dark matter, a pattern that undoes patterns. It has already consumed several galaxies in what you call the Great Nothing. We need allies who can move between both forms of matter."
The structure began to fold back in on itself, the vast consciousness withdrawing. But before it disappeared entirely, it left them with a gift—or perhaps a curse. Their instruments now showed dark matter in perfect clarity, revealing a universe so full of life and activity that the visible cosmos seemed like a desert in comparison.
"You are no longer just shepherds," the entity's fading voice said. "You are ambassadors. The flock will guide you to others of your kind who are ready. Together, perhaps we can heal what has been wounded."
The dark matter herd began to disperse, but now Void could see they moved with purpose, each creature a note in a vast symphony of gravitational engineering. She looked at Echo, seeing her own awe and terror reflected in his eyes.
"What do we do now?" he asked.
Void turned their ship back toward human space, her mind reeling with the implications of what they'd learned. "We do what shepherds have always done," she said. "We tend our flock. We just have a bigger pasture than we thought."
As they flew through the void between stars, Void couldn't shake the feeling that they were being watched—not with malevolence, but with hope. Humanity had spent centuries looking for alien life in all the wrong places. They'd been searching in the light, when the universe's true inhabitants lived in the dark.
The age of dark matter shepherds was ending. The age of dark matter diplomacy had begun.