The "Darmats" (an abbreviation of "dark matter") are a sapient race of beings made out of a form of dark matter. They live in the open space surrounding the galaxies and have existed since the beginning of the Universe itself.
The Darmats are spherical creatures, each roughly the size and mass of Jupiter, which communicate by radio waves for short distances and hyperspace radio for long distances. The atoms that make up their bodies are made of two previously unknown "luster" flavors of quarks which form structures roughly analogous to protons and neutrons, but with no electrical charge whatsoever, so that the only way they interact with electromagnetism of any kind is through the space dust particles made up of baryonic matter that stick to their bodies. Besides that, they don't interact with baryonic matter at all, except through gravity.
They are mostly peaceful creatures which joyfully shape up entire galaxies as works of art. They reproduce by binary fission.
Society & Culture[]
Darmats live in interstellar space, in gatherings of several dozen to several hundred individuals. Each darmat community is shrouded in an immense cloud of non-living luster-quark "gas" and "gravel" that presumably serves some sort of essential function. A darmat community moves as one unit through a complex interplay of gravitational and repulsive forces between its members and the gravel around them - darmats appear to be mostly immobile on their own.
Darmats spend their entire lives, which last at least hundreds of thousands of years, in their communities. Among their own communities, they speak using radio. When speaking to other communities, which may be thousands of light-years away, they use hyperspace radio. The entire species, at least within the Milky Way, seems to use the same language. Darmats consider it rude to ask for context or to provide it unsolicited.
Darmats are the most ancient of all sentient beings. They have existed since the early days of the universe and can be found across its entire volume. Multiple communities working together can shape whole galaxies, and they sculpt galaxies into spirals as a form of large-scale artwork. If not for this custom, spiral galaxies would not otherwise exist, and neither would organic life, which can only emerge in such galaxies. Only the very largest galaxies in the universe remain untouched by this effort, since in a galaxy millions of light-years across the necessary movements would take too long to coordinate, even through hyperspace radio.