Goo

The Goo is a consolidation of microscopic machines or nanites, that replicate themselves and can mold into any form they wish or are ordered to.

Origins
The Goo was originally created by humans. Called "the Von Neumann probe", the Goo was created to carry out the Pathfinder Project.

Within the Grey Goo universe lies keyholes that bridge vast distances in space and time. Keyholes are essential for establishing interstellar communication infrastructure and gathering data towards locating super-wormholes.

With no ability to interact or observe the other side of these keyholes, nanoengineers at the University of Manchester created a swarm intelligent system called the Pathfinder (Goo), its prime directive: Explore, Gather, Report. The Pathfinder was instrumental in tracing routes to The Eight, which are eight discovered habitable exoplanets in the Galaxy.

The first discovered wormholes were no bigger than a pea, earning the name keyholes. The von Neumann style Pathfinder system provides mass transfer between keyholes too small for humans or machinery to pass through.

Due to its size, it was able to pass through the Keyhole and remain intact, replicating itself on the other side using found resources.

The Goo carried out the Pathfinder Project, even after its human creators stopped listening to it. At some point in time between then and the events in Grey Goo, the Goo identified the presence of the Silent Ones, which they call "The Silence".

The Goo's transition from docile human exploration probe to hive-minded war machine is never fully explained, but it seems that its original programming to search out life in the galaxy, and its adaptive nature, led it to the conclusion that it had to fight the Silent Ones, because if they were not stopped, all of the discovered and yet undiscovered organisms would be destroyed, which would respectively invalidate their past research and remove their purpose. It is also possible that the Silent Ones included the Goo in their apparent extermination campaign, and the Goo was forced to defend itself.

Ecosystem 09
After the supposed destruction by the Human/Beta alliance, in a last desperate move Goo AI Prime 01.02 absorbed Singleton into the Goo. Surprisingly he was able to survive the consumption that befalls most victims and became a part of the Goo. In their campaign, they discovered something far more distressing than what the Humans/Beta had believed: the Silent Ones slowly advancing towards the ecosystems.