Myths From The Dawn Of Time

They used to say that the gods created humankind for their own amusement, so they could have a bit of entertainment when they were bored, but this isn’t true. This is far from being true – the activities of human beings are infinitely banal as far as the gods are concerned and watching their behaviour is merely nauseating.

 

They also used to say that the world was created by the Dark Gods, who enjoy persecuting the humans that live there, playing cruel tricks on them and generally making their lives miserable. This is their sport, so it is said, and they derive enjoyment from it. This too is entirely inaccurate; human beings are no fun to persecute for the very same reason we gave before – their responses are far too predictable and reflex-driven to be of any interest to the dark gods. No – this story is completely untrue and we are just flattering ourselves if we allow ourselves to think that it isn’t. As ever, we’re being anthropocentric – the activities of humankind don’t matter to anybody, hard though this revelation may be for us to take. It would be closer to the mark to say that we are insignificant bacteria-like creature whose main characteristic is that we don’t like to face the truth about ourselves! It wasn’t always this way however; there was a time when things were otherwise and that is the topic I would like to talk about today…

 

The teaching machine then launched into a long and extraordinarily tedious story about the great and splendid heroes of the past and how we should venerate them and strive as hard as we can to be less useless in this life in case we end up being reincarnated as cockroaches or crab lice. I walked away at this point, unable to take any more of the teaching machine’s dreary preaching. I was off-duty and I still had a few hours to kill before my next shift. I wanted to find some better use of my free time. This was an awful hole of a planet I reflected (and not for the first time, either) and I would be heartily glad when I got a chance to transfer out. On the star charts this planet was referred to as Mandarus-6 but it is more colloquially known as Muggins World. Actually, of course, it was just another analogue world created by the Galactic Over-Mind just before the universe imploded. Creating untold millions of analogue Earths had been the last thing the Galactic Over-Mind had done before it too imploded. Needless to say, this meant that if any of the analogue Earths malfunctioned or proved faulty there was no longer anyone to hold accountable.

 

Also needless to say, most – if not all – of these copies had indeed proved to be duds in one way or another – it had been a bit of a rush job after all. Most (if not all) of the analogue worlds proved to be defective copies and Muggins World was more defective than most. It was a dud even by the very low standards to which humankind had unfortunately had to become accustomed, so perhaps you can have some idea of just how dismal life is in Mandarus-6 and why it is such an unpopular place to be stationed. Something had gone alarmingly wrong with the past in this virtual world; the past had become unstable and as a result temporal anomalies multiplied daily. Most were dealt with easily enough – and this was the job I was engaged in – but it was time-consuming and tedious work. Then one day it happened that one small and apparently harmless anomaly slipped the net and went on to become an unstoppable world-mutating glitch which changed the future of the human race in ways we could never have imagined.

 

This then is the true and unbiased story of that seminal event, which only I am in a position to give a full account of. It might sound rather arrogant of me to say this I know, but that isn’t the case – I am the operative who failed to correct that particular anomaly, you see. It was my decision to let it run wild and become the horror that it did become, and I have to take responsibility for that. In the pages that follow you will learn how this terrible error of judgement took place, and what the consequences to humanity were. How you will judge me for the role that I played I cannot say, but that is of course your own affair. I leave that to you. The only thing that I would ask is that you would read this account to the very end, before deciding what to think of it…

 

 

 

Art: , Strategos, PichiAvo

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *