It was far too early for any of this. Well, it depends on your definition of early. And time. And space.
So while the Earth turned on its axis as it orbited merrily around the Sun, the Moon orbited the earth and at the same time spun on its own axis in coincidental lunar synchronicity. The Sun flared boisterously, emitting those fizzing, mysterious photons at the speed of itself, probably not knowing even what day it was. Or even that it was day. Turns out it’s always daytime for the Sun. Which is nice for it. Explains why it’s so jolly.
Meanwhile, somewhere less relevant but at the same time extremely more relevant for this story, light began to creep through the shutters of a door of a very small cuboid office, down a long cuboid corridor in a vast cuboid building. Those curious photons making trouble. On the door beneath the shutters was a dusty sign in an official-looking font, that at certain angles looked like exotic animals in stern conversation and which read:
Planet 23235123131241
Underneath, someone had written in biro — the sort of biro you think you should lick to get going but you know it never works like that — was nicely printed in all caps, with a heart and a question mark wrapped around it:
❤️EARTH?
The photons, meanwhile, had entered the room.
Dave creaked his eyes open as the photons scattered on them like tiny annoying glowing marbles. Imagine a small Lego winch machine attached to each eye, desperately pulling his eyelids up, squeaking and creaking but all the time facing the gravity of the situation at hand.
He had fallen asleep on the job.
‘Oh.’
‘My.’
‘GOD.’
GOD.
He stared reluctantly at the green screen blinking at him as he blinked back at it.
It responded to his struggle by typing at him in striking, staccato bursts.
‘God? This is Admin. Looks like you fell asleep again. Is your report ready yet?’
Dave closed his eyes again and tried to remember if it was four or five beers he had had the night before. That had to be the only explanation for his predicament. Then he realised he was doing Dry January again. He had told everyone in the office many times this month that he wasn’t drinking but would still be loads of fun. Everyone nodded, but they knew what he really meant: his entire personality hinged on alcohol, and without four or five beers he was just a husk of a man.
‘Dave. Wake up.’ A voice boomed in his head. This clearly wasn’t the computer talking now.
‘No, for god’s sake. I am obviously asleep.’
‘Dave, you fell asleep. That’s my thing.’ The voice boomed again.
Dave opened his eyes again and stared directly into the face of God.
Standing by his desk was God. Well, technically a minor god. The main God — the one who made the universe, the one who wove space and time from nothing and brought matter into being — that God had the big office with the big desk and the big chair. You never really saw them; you just knew they were there. It was a belief system most of the time, and that kept everyone in check when it came to timesheets and managing interplanetary belief systems.
Belief kept it all working seamlessly.
· · ·
You have to remember that with 2 trillion galaxies, each with 200 billion stars, each with a couple of planets thrown in, the big boss of the universe had been busy. The universe was endless and so was God’s to-do list. No rest on Sundays — they just cracked on and kept going. Galaxy here. Planet there. Supernova sprinkled for good measure. Boss God didn’t have a boss themselves telling them to ‘just chill now — you’ve probably made enough stuff to go around.’ No. There was now a lot to manage.
So here is where the minor gods come in. Each and every planet was assigned a minor god to look after it. To discover if it could have life, to nurture and cultivate that life, to encourage intelligence, culture, society and — when needed — tolerate a dash of religion. Just keep an eye on it. It’s like being given a chameleon for Christmas. For you, keeping it alive is a big responsibility. For the Madagascan rainforest, it doesn’t matter either way.
So in the vastness there was a bit of a pecking order as you can imagine. Some of these gods just spent eternity looking after lifeless floating space pebbles, some made some terrible decisions and ended up with a black hole. Some had nothing to do but occasionally check on a huge gas giant that emitted space farts (scientific nomenclature) once every 400 million years.
At the same time some were gifted with life and decided to be absolute rotters, torturing their people and planets with spiked pokey things. Others were just your classic spotty swots — casually developing life that existed in eleven dimensions and had transcended their mortal bodies to achieve a higher level of consciousness and intergalactic spirituality. Those nerds.
The God of 23235123131241 was definitely in the lower divisions. If divisions had depths, they were truly plumbed by our God.
You have to remember that Earth is 4.5 billion years old and had mainly been a big sweltering ball of lava, being pummelled by errant meteors and asteroids for most of that time. It wasn’t until 200 million years ago that our God, God of Earth, finally got some things to play with.
Lizards.
Now a whole gamut of lizards was what he got and for over 180 million years lizards were all he had. God had lizards. And the lizards were terrifyingly great.
· · ·
Dave sat up despite the gravity of the situation and realised he both needed the toilet and was having a religious epiphany at the same time. God grabbed him by the shoulders and spoke very close to his face.
‘You fell asleep, Dave. I leave you for ten minutes to get started on this report and you fall asleep?’ God’s voice was tinged with disappointment with a dash of panic.
‘For just ten minutes.’ Dave refused to take this lecture lying down. ‘You know this whole experience has been pretty exhausting for me.’
‘This is serious, Dave. We can’t miss this opportunity..’
‘Um. You fell asleep and missed the entire human race.’
Dave regretted his words as soon as they came out of his mouth.
Oh yep. Too soon
God, for all his grace, looked defeated. He slumped down into his chair and spun to face the wall.
‘Ok. I fell asleep on the job. For about one second. Turns out that’s millions of years for you people. Listen — I DIDN’T KNOW I COULD EVEN SLEEP. And then when I woke up my lizards were apparently dead and there were lots of tiny metal boxes on my planet. All my lizards are now gone because I’m sure that awful god from down the corridor threw a rock at Earth while I was asleep. I want my lizards back. There was one lizard with little arms that used to pray to me, I’m sure of it, and even that one is gone. And now WE have to file a quarterly report on the state of my planet and I was just going to say “oh my lizards are absolutely fine” and get my usual ’B+... could do better”, like I always do, but instead I’m in a big shit because I have no idea what is going on.
Actually, we both are.’
Dave blinked.
Maybe being dead is preferable to this.