Creature Creation Accreditation Contest
“Are you writing all this down, Lilith?”
“I, uh… yes! Of course, I’m writing it down. Come on, God. I’m just as perfect as you are. I wouldn’t screw up doing my only job.”
“Good.” God paused for a moment, pensive, ignoring Lilith’s perfection quip. Lilith scrambled to find a pen at her workstation, getting started on her note-taking. “Because when one of my creatures finally beats this game, I’d like them to be able to see how it all started.”
God cackled as she thought about the idea.
“Who do you think it will be Lilith? What creature is going to bumble its way into discovering us first?”
As she fervently tried to backtrack and write down God’s dialogue from the last ten minutes, Lilith submitted a beast of her own design in response to God’s question.
“Well, I quite like pigs, God. They’re smart, and tough, and they’ve got plenty of fat to keep warm. I bet they’ll-”
“Wrong!”
God’s voice reverberated throughout the chamber, a hollowed out rock that Lilith had procured with God’s guidance. God had suggested a star as the home field for her laboratory of conception, but Lilith argued against it. A fiery ball of energy capable of sustaining life hardly felt like the humble point of origin that Lilith had imagined. Instead, she and God decided on this rock, where the pair now worked in preparation for the spawning party.
The first couple day’s of God’s creation had been a bit hectic and unsuccessful. This rock was just one of millions that had been spinning out of control for quite some time. God had experimented with all kinds of celestial bodies, but most of what she came away with was a cluster of gas clouds and a bunch of boulders hurtling through the blackness in every direction. It took a while for God to calibrate the laws of how the universe worked, so a ton of the locations where she had planned on putting life were destroyed before she even had a chance to do anything with them. Next time she would have to remember not to get ahead of herself. Laws of the universe come first, then the existence of the universe.
But, by the end of the second day, God had finished establishing the way things would work. Although, God had given some responsibility to Lilith which resulted in some unfortunate decisions. Mostly God was upset at Lilith for screwing up the installation of time. Making time linear was going to be a huge pain in the ass, but there was no going back now. Because Lilith had made time linear.
But now the pair of them were ready to get to work on the real fun. God had built her canvas, and now, here on day 3, she was ready to play. God and Lilith had been up all night making plans for the life forms they wanted to create, and God was itching to get started, beginning with a discussion of who was the better designer.
“The chance that pigs wind up being the dominant species in this universe is negligible. I am pulling for the Gramulons,” God declared.
“Gramulons…?”
Lilith reached out for God’s stack of blueprints, hoping to find out what the hell a Gramulon was. She shuffled through the stack as God began to ramble about her impending victory in what she had titled the “Creature Creation Accreditation Contest.”
“The Gramulons are the perfect entities. As we were working I never actually scrapped anything I created. I figured we could just let the critters get all swallowed up if we did not like them anyways, so I just kept adapting my future creatures into being able to kill whatever I had come up with previously. Now, you see, the Gramulon’s are great, not because they are the strongest, or the smartest necessarily, but because they are not bogged down by-“
“Hey!” Lilith interjected into God’s spiel. “This “warthog” thing looks an awful lot like my pig. Except… you gave it little knives on its face for stabbing. That’s not very nice, God…”
“Warthog? I don’t even know what that-”
God snatched the paper Lilith was holding from her.
“Oh. This thing. Yeah, whatever. I already designed its successor. Did you see the next one? “Hippopotamus” I call it. Such a fun name to say. It will come in and take care of both pigs and warthogs if there is ever any sort of conflict between the species. So, now back to a creation that actually matters. As I was saying-“
“You can’t just copy all of my stuff and make it better. That’s not fair, God.”
“Lilith, can you just let me talk about my Gramulons, please? I really just want to tell you about the Gramulons. I think you will find them to be pretty wonderful if you just give them a chance.”
Rolling her eyes, Lilith accepted her fate. If God wanted to tell her about the Gramulons, there wasn’t much she could really do.
“Fine, God. Tell me about them.”
“Excellent! Well, as I was saying before. What makes the Gramulons so perfect is not that…”
Lilith spaced out as God rambled on about her creation. Lilith didn’t much care. Naming the pig her animal of choice had just been a diversion anyway. And God totally bought it. While God was focusing on her Gramulons and her warthogs and her hippopotamuses, Lilith was going to put all of her efforts into something she was building right underneath God’s nose: humans.
And so while God blabbered, Lilith continued to prepare her blueprint.
God wouldn’t notice them at first. Lilith would start them off insignificant. They wouldn’t have the intelligence to create large permanent settlements or the emotional capability to not kill foreign groups of the species upon first contact, but they would breed and they would overcome their trials of new existence. It would take time, but humanity would rise to the top, to create a dominant species that would be able to rule the universe with intellect, and poise.
Or they would all kill themselves. Maybe designing humans to be so unempathetic and greedy wasn’t the best move for creating a peaceful creature to rule the universe.
“Lilith!”
She snapped to attention as God called out her name.
“You’ve stopped writing. Keep writing. I want my full faith in the Gramulons to be documented for when they finally get here.”
“Right. Of course. I’m getting it all down, don’t worry.”
But Lilith wasn’t getting it all down. She was continuing to make alterations to humanity as God droned on about how her Gramulons were going to win. Her creatures were going to win. She was sure of it.