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.