The Creation of Intelligent Life

It wasn’t that we had not tried to create intelligent life before. Product Development had been insisting on it for some time. There of course was that absolutely dreadful first effort that if you knew all the details would remind you of a student’s first attempt to write poetry. All the angels always laughed about it when we got together at Quality meetings. There was essentially no music to any of the languages. Abstractions, rhetoric and vague generalizations were considered wisdom. We’d laugh – so talk about cable news on steroids!

Mostly though, there was this major problem. God of course in His infinite sense of propriety had noted that the primary issue was how the specimens were going to replicate in some kind of rational and respectful manner. His solution had been to leave it up to them as a matter of obligation and responsibility. Each would decide on its own logically when it was time to contribute to the next generation. It would get no special rewards or pleasure for doing so. That should not be needed in a rational society, He supposed.

I may be getting ahead of my story, but of course, we didn’t call him “He” then. That was before there even were pronouns. For God’s sake, let’s keep matters straight. Pronouns came after the creation of intelligent life, but we were not so arrogant not to use what our own creations made up after a time and pronouns are one thing you just can’t get by without, it seems now. I suppose they are the true basis for intelligent life. I just wish they weren’t so gender specific. As if gender even applied before pronouns. You get people now arguing whether God is a He or a She. This is as absolutely ridiculous as applying gender to mountains, the sea, or even the stars. But then the French even do that. Jesus!

Sorry to digress. Anyway, back to my story. The great angel Lucifer had gone along with this procreation thing although he was skeptical, but God was used to that. As it turned out however, Lucifer had been absolutely right. That first creation failed to maintain its numbers even for the first one or two generations, and in a mere 500 years, the whole civilization was thinly dispersed, emotionally bankrupt, and soon died out. Some guy named Homer as I recall had written a few long poems but that was about it.

So the creation experiments went on for a while and the result was always about the same. You couldn’t even get any of those creatures excited to have a good war, although by this time we had many more poets beating the drums. Lucifer said “they couldn’t get it up” — whatever that meant. That is, until God gave in and started paying attention to Lucifer, although He never let on anything to us. It was rumored that He (if you will forgive me) was tinkering with His concepts. Later we learned, He began to play with an idea that He wouldn’t discuss even with Lucifer. He couldn’t afford Lucifer spilling the beans all over Heaven and make God Himself explain how it was going to work before He got the idea down really tight.

And then we even began to hear specific rumors about the XES Project. As we began to hear more and more about it, the idea seemed to be to create two different kinds or types of creatures and let both “the man” and “the woman” have a little pleasure and excitement in the basic act of reproduction. At first, He thought maybe it would not need to be a big deal, just a little comfy and snugly feeling while “they” (see how it was all coming to be about pronouns) were committing to making their contribution to the next generation. Unknown to us, He had got some promising results in a few test creations and only a few setbacks that He quickly solved.

I think her name was Lilith or something. We never did get the whole story. Lucifer was particularly secretive about it. Anyway, God increased the intensity of the pleasure just a shade on weekends, after a few beers, and right before they fell asleep, and handed out a few rewards which he called “jollies” here and there. Of course, God never was real creative when it came to language, but he did adjust the meaning of the phrase sleep with. Lucifer was always the professional word guy. But with just these tweaks, God got a creation to last over 1000 years.

Finally, God decided to go with the idea big time and stake the longevity of a permanent creation fully on it. This creation he would call The Human Race. He called all the angels together, told us that He was implementing Project XES, explained the concept, and told us it was a go for next week. It would all be installed in seven days. All of us agreed to support the program, although admittedly a few of us looked at each other and smiled. God looked at me and said “Now, Michael, who is like God?” I was clueless what that meant. God playing a trump card?

Like I said though, all of us were on board. All except for one. It was at this point that Lucifer stood up and decided no way. He wasn’t going to let God screw this up. Not anymore. He would go out on his own, compete with God, start his own business. He knew he could beat God at His own game. God had it all backwards. SEX would have the primary billing, to hell with that family stuff.mGod just didn’t get it. Lucifer would call himself Satan, incorporate, move to Washington to lobby Congress, and would really goose it all up for the guys. Let it kick in with greed, power, and money. Let people get rich on it. Of course, it would take some development over the centuries, but just think what you could do, say after about 6000 years, starting easy and building it up slowly. That would be the approach. Epicurus, Cleopatra, Marquis de Sade, Las Vegas, Hollywood. And finally, his lips curled in anticipation, the Internet.

Well, I guess you already know pretty much the whole story after that, so I won’t go on and on forever like those 19th Century Russian novelists. Holy Tolstoy, Batman! We lay bets all the time though just how it is all going to turn out even still. We recognize that at this point in eternity, it appears to everybody that Lucifer was right after all, although God keeps assuring us that we will win in the end of days and Satan can’t keep it up much longer. (Yes, sometimes we catch God smirking when He says “keep it up” and we remember those old times when Lucifer would say something like that.) Lucifer really wasn’t such a bad guy if you sort of overlooked some things, you know, and God knows that too. I’m sure God misses him.

Some of the angels think about those days nostalgically even. They say that maybe creating the human race was the most fun we ever had in Heaven. Of course, it has had its ups and downs. That Attila the Hun guy, remember him? And Napoleon! Jesus! And the angels around here call me the bloody Warrior?

Actually, come to think of it, you got to sort of feel sorry for Lucifer, being the lord of it and all and not being physically equipped (so to speak) to do it himself. You know what I mean? Admittedly, we angels ourselves sometimes catch one of those commercials for Viagra or Budweiser on television and wonder want it would be like to be human, really human, to enjoy sex and all. But that will never happen in this forever. God would not allow it, of course. That is, unless…. Unless.… hey, maybe I should text the old Satan himself – he’ll surely bust a gut when I call him that. Or at least shoot him a face-book message, friend him, and find out what he’s been up to since old times. I’m sure he never forgot me and once we were the best of buds. He was an inventive guy and with all this internet he’s into, maybe he’s figured out a way to do it without physical bodies. You think? But who am I even kidding? It probably doesn’t even deserve this speculation.

 

Paul Dickey has appeared recently in Plume, The Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, I-70 Review, Plainsongs, failbetter.com, and Apple Valley Review. His recent book of poetry volume was released in September, 2022 in Anti-Realism in Shadows and Suppertime. He has also released in the past year a volume of flash fiction by What My Characters Should Have Said and a poetry chapbook A Reading of Dali (Likely Misundersood) Which is Twenty Meters Becomes This Poet’s Self – portrait.