The Bowerbirds

dear father,
i must relate to you a very unusual system.
as you know, i've currently spread myself out over a good portion of the inner rim of the galaxy's orion arm.
that part of me that i shall call frank was lazily biding my time within the heliosheath of a small g-type star, playing in the eddies and the soft turbulence, contemplating a quick dip in the star's bowshock, when, what should enter into frank's perception but a funny little bit of tinsel.
at first frank thought it a piece of debris, but closer examination revealed - could it be? - a hint of artifice about it.
rather a simple design, and so at first frank thought it a child's plaything.
frank pinged it with a gravity pulse and received no answer.
on closer examination, frank saw that the object was shining with anti-neutrinos.
the sources were three small chunks of plutonium-238.
clearly produced by artifice, and yet, the object contained no transmaterials!
no metamaterials!
no gravitic, nucleonic, or electromagnetic cloaking!
just raw, purified, elemental materials in the crudest arrangements and configurations!
highly peculiar indeed!
we weren't even looking for horses, and we found zebras.
frank summoned the rest of me, and we zoomed down into the g-type star system, clearly the source of the object (given its velocity, trajectory, and decay products from the plutonium, it was easy to determine  when and where it originated from).
a rather feeble little aqueous rock of a world, possessed of a decidedly non-equilibriated oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere.
the planet radiated strongly in the radio portion of the e/m band.
there was a large agitation of relatively long-chained carbon molecules infesting the surface.
life, one form of it, not very organised.
from whence the object?
we infiltrated ourselves into the systems, trickled through the metabolic chains of the network.
quietly, of course, father.
we were nothing more than mist and dust.
no matter where we looked, we could find nothing.
only programmatic heuristics, instincts, and commands.
but no intelligences. no souls.
from whence the object?
clearly, it was designed and built?
ah, eventually it was sorted out.
a crude proto-language, really more of an quasi-organized set of signals really, was discovered amidst the networked collectives, traced to a bipedal species, related in turn to other primates species.
the object they called "voyager".
the proto-language suggested an almost, but not quite, sapient species.
ah, the ceaseless wonders of the cosmos!
imagine that, father!
the object was built by animals!