THE BIG BANG AND BOB

A bit different from my usua type of yarn...

It was chaos in the firmament. There never had been so much gorgeous stuff created out of absolutely nothing. Whole star systems, entire galaxies occupying more space than even the gods could imagine came into being in one cataclysmic coming-into-being event. It was magnificent and half a dozen deities scurried through the flaming chaos to sit on a planet all of their own. I mean, to own a planet and actually sit on it with your nether regions tingling at all that gorgeous power was really something. It was what they’d been made for. Somewhere.

One particular deity was Omuk. He had the daftest of smiles on his face as he let the seething turmoil of creation warm the cockles of his heart as well as other more delicate regions, and when things started to cool down a smidgeon he decided it was time to give the object that was toasting his ethereal bottom a proper name. He could have called it Omuk’s World or My Place, but that sounded a tad too possessive for his liking, so he ended up calling it Bob. That was, he thought, a lovely name for a brand new planet.

Bob hung there in the skies as did thousands of other globes or planets, call them what you will,, some smaller than Bob and some a darned sight larger, but none of them was called Bob. The very uniqueness of the molten rocks that still gurgled on its surface and the simple but powerful name Bob gave the celestial object a kind of uniqueness that made Omuk feel all warm and cosy inside.

So he gave Bob the wherewithal to sustain life, and because that’s what life does in the first place it started in the warm seas that eventually rolled and crashed over most of Bob’s surface and became a perfect home for life.

Omuk was delighted and, because he was thr sort of deity that hated the idea of interfering when it wasn’t necessary, he skedaddled and sat on another unowned and sadly nameless planet a few thousand light years away in a totally different district of the turmoil that was still going on.

But Bob didn’t mind. It had its name and that was really all that it wanted. What planet could possibly need more?

Well, possibly a little bit of life for it to tease and enjoy, and it was pure coincidence that the moment Bob yearned for toys to fascinate him that toys formed in the aforementioned warm seas that rock ‘n’ rolled over much of Bob. And what toys they were!

The creatures called life were really tiny to start with and Bob found it hard to detect them. But he did, and he rubbed what might have been his hands together in glee, but he didn’t have hands or really know much about glee. But he rubbed something with something else, so all was well in the eternity he called the Universe

Time passed slowly, and Bob got bored. Well you would, wouldn’t you, if all you could find to interest you was a single-cell amoeba sort of creature, far too small to have much of a brain and almost certainly no awareness or consciousness. They maged to move around, and he waited for them to form a football team, but that didn’t happen. They just lethargically drifted here. There and everywhere.

“Grow up,” he growled at them in planet language, which probably consisted of a thunderstorm over the highest mountains. And if they ha dears the amoeba would have heard. Instead the vibrations got to them and made them shudderl.

“Crikey,” the tiny amoeba-like creatures might have thought if they could actually think, and they started dividing so that there were millions of them as a defence against a possible invasion from a place that may or may not have existed.

But then, much to Bob’s never-ending delight they started swelling and dividing as well, making even more of them. A whole sea full of tiny little useless creatures!

“Crikey,” thought Bob, “this is getting to be too much like that other place, what did they call it, Earth? And look what happened to that! I’d better put a stop to it right away or some deity will pop by and tell me I’ve infringed his/her copyright, and then they’ll decide on building a hyperspace bypass or something equally unnecessary and that would be me gone for good!”

So with a wiggle of his planet-sized bum he put an end to all the squiggly things that were evolving, which meant that corner of space was a great deal safer because there wouldn’t be any possibility of a nuclear war on Bob absolutely ever. Which was nice.

© Peter Rogerson 29.04.23

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