One such world, in an unknown location of the Galaxy, had been seeded heavily with life that the T'zeche shared an ancestry with.  It was much as if a colony of Earth might establish a biosphere with other animals of Earth, on a brand new world.  The T'zeche likely did this many times, and in many places.  But on this particular world, one of those forms of life gave rise to intelligence.  These were the Eiyogsha.

Some 447 million years ago, the species learned the art of agriculture and animal domestication, and thus became civilized.  This was the beginning of a two million year span that saw them spread across most of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, as well as to establish a tentative presence in the Sagittarius Arm.  Most remarkably, this wide-reaching presence, while not nearly equal to that of any of the other Ancient Four species, was made possible through an altogether remarkable method, one that Humans have begun to adopt as well.

The Eiyogsha built starships.  Varying greatly in size and purpose and power, these ships sustained the Eiyogsha by carrying everything from culture to cargo to pure information.  Certainly they were limited to speeds slower than light, yet the sheer distances involved  with transport over even a Galactic arm's scale would seem insurmountable to any other species.  The other Ancient Four races had dealt with their  Galactic realms by utilizing artificial wormholes, or by the mere transmission of data alone, without the bother of actually traveling from place to place.  The Eiyogsha, on the other hand, regularly plied the oceans of space between their far flung worlds, colonizing and charting.  And they did it without worry of the huge travel times simply because of a single biological fact:  the Eiyogsha were, for most of their space-faring career, bodiless and for all intents and purposes immortal.

At some point, the Eiyogsha urge to travel throughout space exceeded their biological capabilities, and they began to expend their scientific energy on the technology that made possible the uploading of their minds into mechanical mainframes.  In essence, they made themselves into artificial intelligences, and as such gave themselves the free run of the Orion Arm.  Their mighty starships were never meant to transport a crew.  Certainly they would carry passengers, and indeed had accommodations for a variety of creatures.  Whether these were willing passengers or merely a living form of cargo is not known, but it is certain that the Eiyogsha themselves never traveled biologically between the stars.  The starships were, in fact, their bodies.

With this advancement, the Eiyogsha became a race of living ships, capable of utilizing advanced nanotechnology in order to manipulate their surroundings.  Some ships, when chancing upon a garden world in a new system, might use this technology to forge a surface installation, capable of housing the Eiyogsha intellect.  Others might use the technology to create space stations.  But most apparently never gave up the urge to simply explore space.  And this very urge, combined with the bodiless form of the Eiyogsha, lead to their general demise.

Without the ability to procreate, there were only ever a finite number of Eiyogsha to begin with, once the uploading of minds began.  This number may have been in the millions, even the billions.  But for the two million years that these ships traveled space, expanding their influence and communications lines, entropy slowly took its toll and their numbers began to dwindle.  Whether by accidents, poor self-maintenance, or even the ugly truth of a frail biological-bred mind that still held room for depression or even murderous rage, the Eiyogsha became fewer and fewer.  In time, the busy lines of communication that networked across the Orion Arm began to grow silent.  Eiyogsha lost contact with one another.  Ships failed and ancient minds died, while in other cases those ships simply kept on roaming, no longer caring about concerns such as species preservation, and instead only interested in going to the next star, or exploring the next nebula.

By a method of elimination and diffusion, the Eiyogsha realm fell into silence by 445 million years ago.  Without a doubt there are still many individuals out there, in the Galaxy or beyond, exploring and likely, on occasion, dying.  But never again will they grace the haunts of their original homes, not in the numbers that first saw them expand into the oceans of space.

Updates

March 8, 2006:  Established this page and its data.

Classification:  Immortalis mentis eiyogsha
Biochemistry:  Originally carbon-based terrestrial form
Morphology:  The original biological form is unknown.  The great ship-minds took a variety of shapes and sizes, largely dependent on the wishes, or even whims of the minds which constructed them.
Environment:  Originally native to a Gaian habitat.  The ship-minds, of course, could be found in any space environment, and many were capable of atmospheric flight as well.
Reproduction:  The original biology was asexual reproduction; the ship-minds were incapable of propagation.
Intelligence:  The advent of the ship-minds did not increase the mental capabilities of the Eiyogsha.  While they were still capable of learning and expanding their knowledge, base, they did not possess the faculties often fictitiously ascribed to true AI's.

The Nu Phoenicis system is one that hosts a world which, biologically speaking, should never have existed.  The planet, whimsically named New Phoenix by the Hegemony Colonists which first settled it, is deficient in metals and quite warm, which most of the surface being desert or scrub environments.  However, originally it was likely an even less hospitable place, with a thick atmosphere of methane and carbon dioxide.  It was an EoGaian world, and one that was slowly freezing as the volcanic activity of its youth was spent and adding no new substance to the atmosphere.  The surface oceans were fading, and the simple biological forms that had managed to form were becoming extinct.

The arrival of an Eiyogsha ship changed all of that.  For whatever reasons and motivations, the ship-mind arrived to this world and began to modify it, embarking on a major terraforming project that was aided by its nanotechnology resources.  At the same time an artificial biology was being established, one that may well have been the sole invention of that Eiyogsha individual.  Whatever the case, the planet was given the breath of life, and became a true Gaian world.  And the Eiyogsha itself descended from space and converted itself into what could be called a city, though no part of it was ever meant to be used as a dwelling place.  From here, later named the Lowell Complex, the Eiyogsha simply sat and watched life develop, possibly amused to simply see how it might change over time.

Remarkably, the Eiyogsha intellect seems to remain intact.  Colonial explorers, and later Hegemony scientists, were given access to computer records which were eventually translated into a variety of Human languages, once the appropriate data for translation was made available.  However, no true dialogue has been started to date, and many wonder if the Eiyogsha mind hasn't simply fallen into an extreme senescence after over 400 million years of being sessile.  It is possible that the mind within the machine has become, itself, little more than a non-intelligent computer program.

Others believe differently.  The Cath'thetiki, a native sophont species that evolved on New Phoenix, claim that the Lowell Complex is the home of their gods, and that the spiritual leaders are in regular contact.  Some colonial experts have postulated that the Eiyogsha mind does not communicant its sapiency to Humans simply because it does not wish to, and is content with passively providing data to investigators.

Whatever the case,  the Lowell Complex is the only known Eiyogsha artifact (if it can even be called such) in the Local Neighborhood, and is the sole source of our knowledge about the Eiyogsha race, and the Galaxy of that distant time.