Lumina

Fourteen nanoseconds after the Big Bang, God was bored again. In the ensuing seconds, while energy and matter worked through the first blind date, He decided, this time around, I’m going to kick some ass! Like it was His decision. But that was a long time ago, and really funny shit takes a while to incubate. About fifteen billion years later, out in the western spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, an exploration ship puttered along, looking for a good place to burrow its tap root. The mission was simple: find a planet frothing with life, and play “Darwin.” That is to say, catalog everything that moved through the air, beneath the oceans, and in between. Write it down, take pictures, whole samples, bit and pieces if you can get them, and send it back to anxious nerds waiting in rooms without windows. But tribalism is as old as life itself, and once out of the local neighborhood, these compromisers relaxed, more intent to sidle up next to a comfy, warm planet, and invent the perfect libation. If they could add to the Great Knowledge of It All, fine, but shedding loco parentis was pro forma.