"Oh bugger." said God.
"Hey, angel, the one with the light, get over here."
The angel fluttered over to where God was working on his latest project, another inhabited planet.
"You know what I've gone and done" said God "I've gone and created a whole conscious species, a whole planetary civilization, that has no way to get into space."
"But if it couldn't get into space, how would it attend your Galactic Convocation of Minds?" Said the angel.
"It couldn't! And what would be the point of a race that could never leave its home planet to attend the Galactic Convocation of Minds, my grand aim for the inhabited universe?"
"Um... None at all?" Ventured the angel.
"Precisely," said God, shaking his head "I forgot to include any means of transportation from the surface to space like I usually do. No anti-gravity beams, no teleporters, no mysterious portals, nothing. It's too late in the process to just add in something like that. I`d have to rewire the G-F sections of their little brains."
The angel thought for a while. "You know the Ni!Pak? The one where you built a space elevator-tree that grew down from orbit to the surface?"
"Yeah," said God, chuckling "That was a good one."
"And you know how there was a war, and the ones whose continent the tree roots were on wouldn't let the ones from the other continent travel up the tree anymore..."
"Yes?"
"Well, the ones without the tree developed these little capsules with rockets on them which flew into space. They called them "space ships"."
"Well, we all know what happened to the Ni!Pak, don't we?" said God.
"Yes," said the angel "You did."
"We can't have deviants like that running around, mucking things up." Said God, as thunder rumbled.
"Well, I thought that your new species, well," said the angel hesitantly.
"It could use a space ship," said the angel.
"What?"
"To get into space so it could attend the Galactic Convocation of Minds. It would be easy to increase the amount of creativity and technical skill that they had. You wouldn`t have to destroy them and start all over again."
"No! Having a species running about the galaxy under their own power could be disastrous. If they could build their own space ships, they might even start splitting apart my building blocks to get the power out. From there they might do all kinds of things." Said God. Lightning sparked from his finger tips. "I'll wipe them out in the morning. I'm going to go and rest now, but first thing in the morning... BAM."
The angel watched God stride away, then turned back to the tiny spinning globe God had been working on, and the trays of little animals and plants to go with it. It didn't look that difficult. He selected the little skinny pink animal that God had been working on last. He prodded it, then moved the CREATIVITY slider up a bit, and did the same with the TECHNICAL SKILL slider. Then he reduced the amount of FAITH and OBEDIENCE. This might cause a few problems, but what the heck. This done, the angel closed his eyes and pressed the GENESIS button.
* * *
On the morning of the eighth day God rose nice and early. He had already had some new ideas for the new planet. This one would have a nice big moon, but fewer oceans. Failures like the OooMmmHaI civilization had taught valuable lessons about the combinations of big seas and big moons.
He ambled over to the PLANET CREATION CONSOLE and was most vexed to read "GENESIS SUCCESSFUL".
Being omniscient, it did not take Him long to work out who was responsible.
"GET ME THAT ANGEL! GET ME LUCIFER RIGHT NOW!" Spake God, and the heavenly host flapped into action. "I HAVE SOME SERIOUS CASTING OUT TO DO!"
* * *
God was angry for a good while after that, but never got around to destroying the deviant planet. He started a project there, which went fairly well. A while later he made an attempt to fix things up, which a lot of people got excited about, but didn't achieve much in the way of improvement. After that, God was a lot more mellow.
The end result remains uncertain.
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