From The Top

    'Well, this is just great,' intoned a disembodied voice from the infinite blackness. 'What the hell do I do now?'

    The void that berthed that great booming voice grew in size, but that didn't make any difference. When you’re the essence of nothing floating around in a nothing of nothingness, there’s no decisive way to tell the size ratio of said nothing.

    'I guess I should make something,' the speaker thought for a milli-second. 'I know!'

    And it started.

    First came the brightness of gases forming. They gathered together in a ballet, so grand in scale that if a human had even existed to witness the event, their brain would have boiled from the sheer unimaginable grandeur.

    Slowly, at least in the cosmic sense that a million years goes by in the blink of an eye, the gasses formed together. At first they swirled around each other, like a bathtub emptying backwards (emptying normally if you’re reading this in the southern hemisphere) and then they took shape as the first primordial suns. The light they gave off was blinding in comparison to the void that had reigned before their formation.

    Next, the remaining particles, later classified by humans to be the building blocks of all things in the universe, but to the universe itself they were nothing more than the left over over bits of cosmic hot dog fillings, came together and formed the planets that would populate the galaxies from one end of the heavens to the other.

    The floating voice was happy. Now it had company. There was light for it to see, minus the fact that it didn't have eyes. It had places it could go for a nice quiet stroll, nevermind the fact that it had no feet, or legs for them to be perched on.

    'Now, lets play a game,' the voice told the expanding space. The galaxies, filled with more suns and planets then sand on all the beaches of the modern world (even including the man-made places filled with whining tourists, complaining that their weekend getaways to sun filled resorts consisted of entirely too much sand) noded in agreement and started the game of life.

    Out in first place was an unregarded solar system in the forgotten western arm of the milky way galaxy. First a proto-plasm began to bubble in the ooze that covered most of the planet. To the naked eye, it would seem nothing more than a gray spunk, spewing from pools of super heated water, bubbling forth from the cooling lava. But on a microscopic scale, the ooze was teaming with life.

    'Good start Milky Way, but be careful,' the voice chided. 'The Andromeda Galaxy is fast on your heels. I think it might already have a quadra-pedal creature roaming its surfaces.'

    And so the game of life began.

© 2014 Mark Fiske