Deus Servavi III

It was the rocks that started it really. Bouncing around in the wind, as they often did, throwing sparks, they’d been an intriguing sideshow to the pale apes, and once combined with the conveniently flammable creosote bush, those literal sparks had become the metaphorical kindling of the human race. There was, God thought, a rather satisfying circularity to the whole thing; he’d looked at the rocks and longed for interesting companions to admire, adore, and even to interact with, and eventually the bald simians had arisen. They in turn had stared at the rocks and seen an opportunity to meet new and interesting creatures, then kill them, eat their flesh and wear their skins. God recalled being a little shocked at that initially; they’d always been viscous buggers, even before they’d started walking upright, long before they lost all their hair, but it seemed that the violence wasn’t just an externalisation of the irritation of dusty knuckle cuts or the anguish of fleas. They just seemed to like killing stuff.

That was, of course, the downside to humans as far as God was concerned. But oh how exciting they were! The last 6000 millennia had just flown by. They were so inventive! Where God had seen a rocky ball abundant with life, they saw sunsets and landscapes, they heard grand oratorios, they dreamed brave new worlds and whole new dimensions. And the baths! The baths alone were worth every effort God had put into trying to create life.

But there had been something more. The nervousness of first contact bubbled in God’s memory like rose-scented Johnson & Johnson’s (God was aware other bubble-baths were available). How would those tentative first words be received? Who to approach? Would the sheer majesty of exposure to the cosmic consciousness, the infinite made entity, the grand being be too much for their simian mind? God grinned as he thought of Urukli, that first contact; tall, strong, and clever, the leader of her tribe and the first human to use a notched stick to make a pointy stick fly really far. God had come to her as a rock (it seemed fitting, given the role such has played in their respective stories). “Urukli”, God had said, “I would speak with you of the world”. The shock on that face! The surprise! The gentle, almost motherly way she had lifted the rock in her arms! The resounding splosh as she hurled it into the nearest river, and wandered off to hunt more aurochs! Far from being cowed (or auroch-ed) it seemed that, at least initially, humans were more concerned with the calls of the day than the philosophy of existence. Initially, at least. Initially.              

Deus Servavi: II

The purple duck bobbed, ploughing the suds with the tenacity and vigour only attainable by the very finest rubber ducks. God sighed contentedly, and flicked the duck with her foot, sending it swashing off to new adventures in the far-flung outer reaches of the bathtub. The bath had been a good idea, and God let her auburn hair fall down the sides of the tub to brush the warm slates of the floor below. Of course, being the manifestation of a shared cosmic consciousness, the auburn of the hair could easily have been grey, or blue, or even ultra-puce, and, given that there was no observer, it was all three and none, all at the same time. But the bath was real, and the room was too, a little piece of metaphysical engineering of which God was rather proud. It might be made of the coalescence of countless trillions of thoughts and dreams, but it was as solid a foundation as rock. The trouble was, God wasn’t a huge fan of rock; and, looking at the duck, now fighting bravely against the impossibility of progression beyond the ceramic cliffs of the bath’s sides, her thoughts strayed back through billions of years…

 

Rocks. That was what they were. If God had been in a generous mood, she would have admired the fascinating geology crafted by the effects of the few simple rules she’d established right at the Bang, rules that now led to plumes of fire and crafted new types of rock in the heart of the planets. She didn’t admire it; they were rocks. Squeezed, leaking rocks. Truth be told, she was lonely. Oh there were the angels, alright, but they were merely extensions of the same cosmic consciousness as her, and as such dull. She’d swiftly found that conversations with someone who held exactly the same thoughts as you couldn’t be conversations at all. She might as well have been talking to the backs of her hands, and she’d given that up after a few millennia, so the angels had never got off the ground as companions. But here, in the stuff that had come from the nothingness, there was potential. The rocks were oozing with it, or at the very least oozing. She summoned all of the power at her disposal, which, given the whole omnipotence thing, was quite a lot, and focussed, forced consciousness into the very matter of the planet below, crafting a spark within it; life! The planet, new, aware, a sudden entity in a vast unknown, was confronted by the beauty and wonder of creation. The stars! The planets! The endless gaps between them! It drank it all in, and, with a surge of its newly acquired life force, blew itself into a billion pieces.

God sulked for a week.

But when she returned, something was different. Far at the edge of boundless space, one rock was, well, weird. She walked on its surface, the blistering heat doing nothing to the cognitive mist of her soles. Her soles of souls. Within the green pools of this world, there were… things. Tiny things, little more than chemical strings, but things nonetheless. She felt a brief moment of concern that she wasn’t sure how they got there. Oh she knew, of course – it was in the description, as it were – but the exact details were foggy. It was like the beach on which she walked; she knew it was made of 123434776463 grains of sand; it was just that finding grain #100352834586 would be more than a bit of a bugger. The conscious rock had exploded, and that had, in some fashion, brought about this stuff, this essence, this life. Who cared quite how it had got there, it was the chance she had wanted.

She considered the next move. What she really wanted was something to watch, to be fascinated by, maybe even to talk to. But to just make it… that seemed wrong, too simple, too limited – she might just make a slightly different version of the angels, and frankly there’d been enough games of celestial charades where everyone played “the endless bounds of eternity” to last her, aptly, eternally. No, the best move seemed the least. She looked back at the planets, spinning in their full nothingness, and thought of the rules she’d put in place. She smiled.

 

And so it had been. A few simple rules had seen to it that survival begat survival, and off the little things went. And God sat, and she watched across the millions of years, and she wondered at the brilliant branching it all took, flying off in all directions. Here, a line had taken to the skies, soaring across the planet on limbs replete with feathers originally designed to cool the blood; there, life had stayed simple, but now ruled deep within the crust of the planet, all but unknown to its distant brethren above. All had come from those little squiggly lines; so much, so amazingly different, so fantastic. And God felt a little guilty to pick favourites, but there were favourites to be picked, and among them walked the funny little pale apes…

 

But, thought God, as he arose from the depths of the bath and shook the water from his silky fur, that was a story for another bath.