Editing Xeelee Sequence (section)

===Photino Birds===
[[File:Photino_Birds.JPG|300px|right|thumb|A Flock of Photino Birds.]]
{{Topquote|I just don’t think it’s helpful to think of them in that way. They’re doing what they’re doing—wrecking our Sun—because that’s what they do. By accelerating the stars through their lifecycles they’re building a better Universe for themselves, and their own offspring, their own future.”<br>“They’re like insects. Ants, perhaps. Do any of you know what I’m talking about? The birds are following their own species imperatives. Which just happen to cut across ours, is all.|Do take note that this comes from the fact that the Photino Birds barely noticed the Xeelee, just to show you how lopsided the war was, from Ring.}}
{{Topquote|But there are places in the universe, little pits of gravity, where they could squeeze down and find the compression they need."<br>
''"In the hearts of stars, right! We know gravity works on dark-matter creatures; we know they are immune to heat and radiation. So the Galaxy is like a great reef, to them, full of these tight little pits, the gravity wells of stars, where they can deposit their . . ."''<br>
''"Their eggs?"''<br>
''"Which hatch out to become photino fish, as we called them, swimming around inside the stars, like the Sun. Like larvae. And when they are mature . . ."''<br>
''"Ah. They hatch out. As if a star was an egg. They fly back up, out of the stars, out of the disc, up into the halo. And – open their wings.''|The Birds breeding cycle aka self-cloning, mind you these Birds were just juveniles but they were the ones that attacked the Xeelee Cosmic Ring with ''weaponised galaxies'', from Redemption.}}
{{Topquote|We’re trying to map the dark matter, for example. Its distribution around the Galaxy: it makes up most of the Galaxy’s bulk by mass but is entirely invisible to human eyes. A thin sheet of it lies within the plane of the Galaxy itself, the spiral arms. That much is well known. But now, beyond, in the halo, we are observing huge, tangled towers . . ."<br>
''"Towers. Structures of some kind?"''<br>
''"Indeed. Not unlike tendrils, in some places, reaching down into this puddle we call the Galaxy. The dark matter constitutes the bulk of the universe’s matter; why shouldn’t it contain structure? And I know what your next question will be.''|Now these are the real adult Photino Birds, makes the [[Anime|Anti-Spirals]] feel inadequate eh? from Redemption.}}
The Photino Birds are the main adversaries to the Xeelee and the undisputed masters of all dark life, with absolute mastery over dark matter. Unfortunately for the Xeelee, dark matter just so happens to outmass Baryonic matter 9-to-1, meaning that the Xeelee are outnumbered and out-[[Dakka]]'d. First encountered somewhere between the late Planck Epoch and the early Hadron Epoch 20 microseconds after the Big Bang. They are acausal, von Neumann swarms of self-replicating dark matter entities who are not bound by the effects of temporal entropy. All Photino Birds resemble an ovoid/seed-shaped mass approximately 40 meters long and rarely interact with baryonic matter due to being made up of dark matter. The only thing that could kill them are exotic weapons with extreme - and we mean <u>'''''EXTREME'''''</u> - gravitational forces like monopole cannons, the singularity lasers of starbreakers, or a cosmic string to the face.

The Photino Birds attempted to destroy the Xeelee Ring, as they view it as a threat to their manifest destiny on making the universe more comfy for them, preventing the baryonic lifeforms from ever achieving a safe haven in which to live. In a nutshell, these guys are selfish dicks who can't even share the same bed with the Xeelee, and instead try to create a complete mess of the Universe. All because the Xeelee held most of the blanket when they try to go to sleep. When angered sufficiently, they also use Galaxies as glorified weapon systems by ''flinging the entire fucking Galaxy at whoever pissed them off''. They are responsible for creating a war (to use "war" generously; the slaughter is so one-sided that some books imply ''the Birds didn't even realize the Xeelee existed'') that makes the [[War in Heaven]] look like a well-accustomed tea party in comparison. and would give the Last Great Time War from [[Doctor Who]] a run for its money.