Character from deaths-end by
A worker-poet of an unknown high-civilization listening post — the operator who decides our system is worth a slip of paper, and fires it.
Singer is a low-ranking observer in a vast dark-forest civilization, one of countless workers tasked with cataloguing and cleansing emergent technological signatures. Its perspective is disturbing precisely because it is not malicious. It selects targets the way a clerk processes paperwork; it sings while it works. It chooses the dual-vector foil for the Solar System over the photoid not out of cruelty but because the foil is cheaper to deploy at this distance. To Singer, humanity is one entry in a list it will finish and forget. To humanity, Singer is the killer whose name no one will ever say.
Never described in human-comprehensible form. Singer's species has no body humanity ever sees; in the brief chapter narrated from Singer's viewpoint, it tends instruments, sings 'cleansing' work-songs to itself, and casually browses the records of a thousand condemned star systems. Singer is bureaucratic, bored, and polite to its supervisor.
Also known as: the Singer, the Cleanser