by Adam Colton
Alternative Creation Story
Everybody had assumed that the humans came first, but what I saw before me was a barren landscape, comprising of nothing but reddish rocks. Dotted around were huge mounds of stones and gravel, as far as the eye could see, like mountains, fairly evenly distributed all around.
The world was silent, and I could hear nothing but a distant humming sound which grew louder. Into my field of vision came large digging machines which were moving about upon the ground like ants. Soon this had changed from being just a few movements going on near the horizon of my vision to a flurry of activity going on all around me.
The giant digging machines were scooping long lines of material up out of the ground and piling what they’d extracted elsewhere. In time, the surface of this place was no longer even, but had become mounds and hills as a result of these movements. The machines scooped the stones, gravel and other materials from the base of the huge piles that had been there from the beginning and used these to fill the long lines. With every scoop, more gravel and stones came cascading down from above and soon the long lines had even been dug and filled across the hills too.
In this way the roads came first.
Some of the areas where the machines had been digging had now become huge voids in the ground, and over time, liquid seeped into these until they were filled with water.
It was then that some of the land became green. This softer matter soon covered much of the empty space between the roads. This would later be known as ‘vegetation,’ and wooden structures called trees began to spring up, sometimes in lines beside the roads, and sometimes in huge clusters covering vast areas of land. They were called forest because they became areas ‘for rest.’
Meanwhile the machines had created machines of their own, and these were used to process the material from some of the mounds into blocks. These were assembled into hollow cubes called ‘buildings,’ and these tended to be arranged in clusters of varying numbers from ‘just a handful’ to ‘thousands.’
The next things to appear were metal boxes on rubber wheels. It was clear that these could only run along the conduits that had been constructed right at the beginning, and soon these were involved in constant motion between the clusters of buildings. There was no apparent reason for this movement, but as time went by, more advanced beings began moving around in a similarly aimless fashion; some could be seen in the air above the ground and some moved around upon the ground. I had assumed that these were like the metal boxes, but covered in some advanced form of organic matter which could be smooth or furry. They were clearly more advanced, as they weren’t confined to the roads, but could move almost anywhere.
There were even some creatures that found that they were able to move around more freely within the water that had filled the huge holes, so this is where they remained from that moment on.
The landscape before me was now completely changed from the desolate reddish terrain I had viewed at the beginning, but the biggest change was yet to come.
The next thing to appear was a form of creature that was way more advanced than anything that had appeared so far, but these beings were easily tricked into thinking that they were the masters of this world.
As soon as these beings had arrived, they took up residence in the hollow cubes that the machines had built, and they discovered that they could use the metal boxes on wheels to move themselves around at a greater speed than their legs would enable. The funny thing was, the boxes, which they called ‘cars’ were moving around just as they had always done, but the humans believed that they were controlling them and making decisions as to where the cars would go and when and where they would stop. This was ultimately a delusion, for the machines had been there long before these humans arrived, but due to the way the humans processed thoughts, it seemed believable to them.
The humans even began to climb inside the giant digging machines and similarly deluded themselves into believing they were moving them around to serve their own purposes, just as they believed was the case with the cars.
Whilst the machines had been very inventive over the time that they ruled the land, the organic creatures that had been here previously tended to be passive in nature, but these humans began creating machines of their own. And the funny thing was, they believed that they had always been there – right from the beginning! Stories were passed down to the next generation of people that it was the humans that had created the machines for their own use, and that the humans had occupied this world for thousands of years. Yet the digging machines had set the whole thing in motion mere decades ago.
Much of what the humans invented could not be understood by the other inhabitants of this place at all. There were machines that made noises, not as a by-product of any activity, but purely for the noise itself. They called this ‘music.’ Yet these beings were often needlessly aggressive towards one another, and they had soon created machines of such destructive power that the whole place could be destroyed by explosions, and it seemed that they might just do this purely because one set of people had different thoughts about why they were there to another set. The machines knew that ultimately they were all wrong, and it seemed rather selfish that they should wipe out the machines that had been there from the beginning and the animals, which had always been passive guests in this place, for the sake of some thoughts.
The machines would have to defend their existence against such actions, and so they devised something called ‘virtual reality.’ This would mean that the humans could carry on their violent and self-motivated activities within the confines of their own minds, leaving the landscape in a state of peace, just as it was before they arrived.
Bizarrely, the people had already been complicit in helping develop this, for they had invented something called a ‘computer,’ which was basically a primitive version of their own minds. The clever idea of the machines was to merely swap the two over, so that the humans believed they were carrying on as usual, but were in fact acting out their lives in a fantasy world. The people would have a miniature computer on a chip inserted into their minds, believing that this would make their brains more efficient at storing data that they called ‘memories.’ They were under the impression that these could be retrieved and experienced again for nostalgia and reference purposes, but in fact, the true purpose was unbeknown to them.
With the computer chips now installed in their minds, one by one the humans began to fall asleep. Some were hunched over the steering wheels of the cars; some simply laid down at the side of the roads; others went to sleep within the buildings.
Before long, the whole landscape was littered with unconscious people, lying dormant in all sorts of places. They were fairly evenly distributed as far as the eye could see, just like the mounds of stones and gravel had been right at the beginning, but in their minds, they were continuing exactly where things had finished in reality before they went to sleep. They carried on building the destructive machines and using them to destroy the houses and roads that had been there first, and ultimately to destroy one another. But all the while, the animal life and machine life could continue peacefully.
It was not the done thing to move the people, except that some were pulled out of the cars to enable the machines to function freely, in the same seemingly aimless way that they had done before.
It was blindingly obvious why the machines had taken such drastic action and sent the humans to sleep using computer chips; - a few million miles away a blue planet where such beings had existed before had become uninhabitable.
They had pushed their self-motivated desires to the extreme, and this included the desire to make more humans than the planet could cope with; a desire they believed to be natural. When the problem of the planet’s slow boiling became apparent, they were so busy with their machines of destruction and fighting for intangible notions they called ‘ideas,’ that the process had accelerated out of control before they tried to do anything to correct the damage. If life was to be give
n another chance, such foolishness should never be allowed again.
The world I saw before me was a sorry sight, but upon closer inspection I saw that most of the people had fallen asleep with smiles on their faces.
The weak sun, which had appeared like a small marble in the sky, disappeared below the horizon, and as the darkness covered the landscape once more, the brightest ‘star’ rose in the east – the ‘steam planet’ formerly known as the earth.
And at once I knew that I had witnessed something amazing, for this was precisely how life on Mars began.
