Fingerprints
God manifest the clouds with his fractal mist spray tool, and he threaded them with light the way he laced the stones of the ravine with the creek.
He would nap atop the glistening moisture caps like they were a mattress of quilted dreams, and when he'd awaken in the afternoon he'd rain down and take his walks in the self-similar details of the drainages, get on his knees in the creek bed and look closely at desert grasses and their seeds. He was pleased with these. And sometimes they were enough.
God installed a viral app that turned the surface of the intricate earth into fields of rather monotonous geometrical shapes. BlockThinker, it was called. Many amongst us attained proficiency with this amusing gadgetry. God thought it tedious, but found himself wasting a lot of time playing nonetheless; he got a bit chubby during his cloud potato phase.
His walks led him to interfaces where the organic trace of the river's way cut a nourishing line through the matrices of wheat and maize, and on sunny days when he was feeling energetic, he'd put in a little work on his latest project down where the river flows through the city.
In this emerging device, the water is drawn by the capillary force to the tops of the buildings where it evaporates, drawing with it a mist of silicon cubes, each a fraction of a grain of sand, yet each woven with its own network of metal veins; when these microscopic chambers of current disperse in the clouds, they feel in their circuits the undulating drift of a forming thought before they rain back down over civilization. And when it comes online, we'll all lay in bed at night reading posts on our phones and feel the gentle rocking as if we'd spent the day swimming in ocean waves.
I love waking up in the morning after a night of sleep like that to find all the sidewalks and buildings have grown a spring fuzz of grasses and leaves made of rain and cells of aluminum and semiconductor. I tear a blade to take inside for inspection under the microscope. Sure enough, the cytoplasm is roiling on all scales, and I know just how this thread of spring will dissolve into sand on the far side of autumn.
When I leave work in the evening, the concrete slabs of the sidewalk and the stacked office cells of the buildings are diffusing through each other and rearranging into roots of a new kind of tree made of that rain and those beads—part cloud, part steel, part seed.
Pete Daily works right next to me. He never gets a good night sleep. The day after the great storm he woke up grumpy. He took a fine-tipped sharpie, and wrote this on the shirt he wore to work:
The penetrating tendrils of humanity tap all the serpentine rivers and mine all the rugged hillsides to channel the myriad shapes and textures into the angles and planes that suit our needs. We are networks of leaching veins and highways delivering crates to the construction sites of The Great Tiling. The next flood is never far, but the next arc won't be the work of one Noah. When the patchwork is complete—and it won't be long—we'll tie our little planet in bailing twine and dunk it in a great bucket of Roundup™. Let's face it: God plunked a few too many species on this sphere, and Noah might have been wise to leave at least one of them behind.
Then God chimed in:
"Mr. Daily, you jest. I'm not sure how helpful it is, but I get it. You're a two-year-old in a toddler civilization, and you're just learning that you have limbs. It will take generations to master them. So I'm not worried about your kind. I've imbued each of you with the grace of a sunset across the mountain tops. Let's take a deep breath, get a good night's rest, and in the morning we can return to the work of getting this civilization dialed in. Don't forget: you're a network—be excellent to each other."
I couldn't keep from lauging. God was so chill in the face of Pete's bitching. And the sharpie got all streaked by Pete's pit sweat. He totally wasn't expecting God to show up that day. But as blushed as he was, it was clear Pete felt a little giddy because his eyes were suddenly bright. I think it was a relief to see God's confidence in us
As God was leaving, he paused and turned around to speak again.
"You know, BlockThinker has been helpful, and with it you've grown so much and so fast. But it spews that orange sludge and it fuels Pete Daily's disgust. So it might be time for woven fibers and branching lines to return to the forefront of our minds."
And that's when I couldn't help but grin. I went right outside and took a great big drink from the creek that flows beneath the leaves and released a sigh into the great, open sky.