God's creations

In the beginning there was a god, a god who was bored, with little to fill the infinity of time at his command. One day he was sorting through the discarded junk in a corner of the universe and came across some long-abandoned planets.

‘This would make an interesting project’ he thought to himself. One planet in particular had potential, for it contained great oceans of water, the stuff of life. This blue-green planet he named the Earth, for it was a word he liked using.

He purchased a new sun from a store which specialises in such things, and crafted his own solar system.  After an entire week of fiddling about with the bits and pieces God switched on the sun, and behold, there was light. It flickered, went on and off a couple of times and the light was lost. After changing the fuse, the sun worked properly this time and behold, there was light.

To the earth he dedicated every spare hour he had, creating creatures as numerous and diverse as only a godly mind might imagine. But the main focus of his muse, the creatures who dominated the world, were a collection of giant beasts, creatures as great as gravity would allow, who swarmed across every surface of the earth. Oh, how god enjoyed the play of these mighty beasts, their fights, which shook the very earth with their ferocity, their muscles, their speed, their sheer bloody immensity.

And so god played with the giant beasts, and thus was the way of the world, undisturbed, for hundreds of thousands of years. But the stray corner of the universe where god had discovered his planets, was littered with a mass of other junk and debris, miniature planets called comets, millions of them, great rocks hurled through space by who knows what. And it came to pass that one of the bigger comets did fly straight into the earth, causing a rupture that caused the end of god’s giant beasts. 95% of all lifeforms were wiped out in the ice age which followed and, short of the cash with which to purchase a second sun, (because even gods aren’t made of money) all he could do was watch in great sorrow the end of the era of the great beasts.

Undaunted though, god decided that in a precocious universe a new champion was needed, a race with the intelligence to devise a means of withstanding any comets that may decide to stray their way. A universe-proof animal. And so he created man, using his own image, indeed, any portly gentleman with a greying beard and glasses could almost pass for god, so closely did the new race echo god’s own form.

Thus began the age of man.

What an era this was. From doing clever things with sticks and stones, man soon rose to become masters of the world, nay of the universe, for they came to build not just great cities, but ships with which they could travel through space itself. And yes, they soon realised the threat posed by comets and produced a diverse range of missiles, deflectors and other means by which to identify and prevent attack by comets. Their planet was invincible.

Or so it seemed. But mankind had a flaw, though man was intelligent he was, perversely, also extremely stupid.  So proud of his knowledge was he that he came to dismiss and abandon god himself. ‘Who needs god to hold up the earth’ they argued, ‘when physics holds the very sky in place’. And without his connection to god, man became adrift. His obsession with making things, of creating, of inventing, led him to rip apart the earth, drinking her oil and burning her coal, fossilised remains that had taken millions of years to develop, all to produce the latest novelty.

Thus did man’s doom begin. The air clouded with the belched-out smoke from burning the earth’s innards, and this cloud doubled the power of the sun, creating a desert that was barely capable of sustain life. Mankind’s great cities collapsed and crumbled, the vast body of knowledge was lost, the billion billon brains’ worth of knowledge contained in their computers became wasted, as there was none left who knew how to turn the computers on.

95% of all lifeforms were lost in the great heatwave that caused man’s demise, mankind being not the least of these.

Thus ended the second age.

But god was not deterred. A third time he repopulated the earth.

After the failed attempts at a world dominated by might and a second time by brains, this time god determined that the dominant character would be beauty.

He created creatures of such perfection that it would break the soul of a lesser creature to so much as behold them: the frog of golden slime, the newt of untold perfection, the stunningly attractive warthog.

And, thanks to the anti-meteor devices with which mankind had fitted the planet, this earth was protected from any danger the universe could fling at it and the beautiful animals lived a long, peaceful existence under the gaze of a loving god.