In the time before calendars, when Earth was but a quiet green marble spinning to its own music, a light crossed the heavens—blinking, pausing, descending.
Johny Sky had arrived.
He wasn’t a god, although the locals would later call him one. He wasn’t a devil either, though some would suspect as much after what happened in the quarries. He was a prospector, a cosmic dabbler, a space-miner with a cluttered dashboard and a slightly above-average IQ for his species—which was saying something, considering most of them had moved on to creating new galaxies as weekend hobbies.
Johny, though, had earthly tastes. Heavy metals. Clean water. Stable gravity. And a deep, almost philosophical aversion to manual labor.
“You know what this place needs?” he said, peering through the ship’s translucent hull.
“Helpers. Cheap, organic, reliable.”
So he wandered into the jungles, observing the locals - apes, gorillas, and the occasional fruit thief with a suspiciously intelligent glint in its eye. One chimpanzee looked up at him and threw a fig.
"Close," Johny said."But not quite union material."
So Johny opened his Field Gene Toolkit, which came with a warning label in six dimensions. He spliced. He tweaked. He hummed. He added a dash of his own code, accidentally spilled some neural accelerant, and got bitten twice.
The first batch melted. The second batch screamed and ran into the sea. The third batch sat in silence and tried to eat him.
But then came Fred
Fred blinked. Fred stood up. Fred scratched his head and said something suspiciously like:
"Uh...who are you?"
And Johny, proud and slightly alarmed, replied:
"I'm your creator, kid. Now grab that shovel!"