by SASKATCHEWAN KOLONOSCOGRAD, Alternate Reality News Service Fairy Tale Writer
The day was dark and cloudy, as it had been for the last billion or so years. Lightning, as they would come to say, flashed and thunder, as they would come to add, roared. It was tremendously hot and sticky. But, today was no ordinary day.
A stray bolt of lightning hit a stagnant pool of muddy water. Before you could say, "Bob, The Flying Spaghetti Monster's yer uncle," an atom of carbon spontaneously replicated itself. Then, it replicated itself again. And, again. And, again. This was the beginning of what some experts have already started referring to as "Lif."
Reaction to the creation of lif has been mixed.
"Carbon?" Odin asked, his good eye twitching skeptically. "Lif on this planet is based on carbon? I had Herculaneum in the pool - sorry, boron to you. There...there must be some mistake - Aten is never going to let me live this down!"
"At last," Yahweh enthusiastically stated, "something I can work with. In time. In a lot of time, actually. Surely, nobody could object if I just tweaked things a little - you know, fast forwarded through some of the less interesting bits of this process known as lif..."
"I say thee: nay!" Thor thundered in response. "I wouldn't do that if I was you," Bast cattily replied. "If I were thee," Janus sternly advised, "I would choose what was behind Door Number Two." "Bad idea," Poseidon rained on Yahweh's parade. "Danger lies in the path you are considering. Reconsider," Lord Shiva annihilated his dream. Pretty soon, the individual objections merged into a vast river of negation.
"Okay," Yahweh unenthusiastically stated. "I get it. Bad idea. It was just a suggestion..."
"Cast not thine lettuce before the swirling Jacuzzi lest the merry goatherd loseth his eyelids," Jesus said. He speaks like that.
"Nothing good can come of this," remarked Baal. "It starts with atoms that can split into exact copies of themselves and, before you know it, you have hairless ape creatures destroying the ozone layer in the atmosphere and releasing deadly radioactivity and other poisons into the ground and water and generally making the planet dreary and awful and uninhabitable. Soon, it will be impossible to tell the difference between their realm and mine. Mark my words: nothing good can come of this!"
"Oh, don't pay Baal no mind," Lillith responded. "He had hydrogen in the pool."
"That's not it!" Baal hotly retorted. "That's not it at all! There are some serious questions about whether the universe is better off with lif - you just wait and see! You'll be asking them yourself soon enough! And...anyway...hydrogen was a perfectly reasonable choice for the basis for lif - it is a noble element, after all."
"Oh, please!" Lillith chided. "it's highly flammable! What kind of lif could exist that combusted all over the place?"
"All the good elements were already taken," Baal muttered.
Do the supernatural beings that have existed since the beginning of time and will exist until the universe ends feel at all threatened by the birth of lif?
"Why, whatever could you possibly mean?" Loki asked, somewhat disingenuously since he had suggested the question to us in the first place.
Until lif came into existence, supernatural beings had the universe all to themselves. Are they not afraid that lif could perhaps some day grow too strong to be their playthings, perhaps even take over their roles at the center of the universe?
"Naah!" Zeus answered.
"Couldn't happen," Ganesh replied.
"I just don't see it," Anansi responded.
"It does seem unlikely," Yahweh added. "Still, if that's a concern, all we have to do is make all life worship us. As long as they look up to us as their superiors, they won't dare to rise against us."
Yahweh looked around him and found the disapproving glares of some members of the other pantheons. "Oh, what?" Yahweh stated. "It's not like the rest of you weren't thinking it!"
Various entities muttered to themselves, but none actually contradicted him.
We tried to get an interview with one of the growing number of self-replicating atoms, but their press secretary said they were too busy coming to lif to talk to us, and that we should try again in a hundred million years. No, to be on the safe side, better make that two.