Day 3, 8:30 am
Sunday, 31 March 2233
Denman Glacier, East Antarctica
Micah was deeply intrigued by Apollos’s creation story. “You know the age-old puzzle of what came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“Why would that be a puzzle?” asked Apollos. “They would have had to exist simultaneously, with the same starting point. A chicken can’t exist without logical reason to have begun as an egg. The chicken already has the mechanism to create eggs. Neither can an egg exist if its intention is not to become a chicken. Otherwise, it’s not on a path to being an egg but a final life form in itself. Furthermore, for a chicken to qualify as a chicken, it would be purely female in form, meaning that it cannot develop a fertilised egg without a male, a cockerel. So, neither the female, nor the male, nor the potential hatchling can exist independently prior to the other existing. This analogy applies to any what came first questions as far as animals are concerned.”
“You’ve really confused my thoughts with all of this,” Micah exclaimed. “Let’s look at bigger things. What came first, the stars or planets?”
“Stars, of course. You need stars, a sun, to provide light and energy. Without a sun, there is no gravity to keep the planets in their orbit.”
“And then came Earth, right?” Micah asked.
“Wrong. You need all the other planets before there can be Earth. The gas-giant planets especially protect Earth from being bombarded by space matter. Strip out Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and you wouldn’t exist.”
“And the moon?”
“The moon came after the Earth,” replied Apollos. “It steadied the Earth’s rotation and balanced weather systems. According to the instructions in the Chamber of Laws, the moon was to be perfectly balanced for its tasks at 400 times smaller than the sun, and the sun is 400 times further from Earth than the moon which is why we have perfect eclipses. Next question?”
“That was an easy one, then,” Micah laughed. “Okay, plants or animals first? And don’t ‘chicken’ out with your everything-has-to-exist-simultaneously speech!”
“Plants. They give oxygen as a waste product. As a prime example of an animal, you couldn’t exist without plants because you not only need their oxygen but also need to either eat plants or eat an animal that first ate a plant. A plant can make its own food from the sun and carbon in air and water, but you can’t. Dead or alive, plants sustain you.”
Micah nodded, “Don’t call me an animal. But I like your explanation. If you only knew that our civilisation was fast-tracked by coal and oil deposits from dead plants and animals. Since the eighteenth century, in just a couple of hundred years, we rapidly caught up from millennia of primitive existence. That coal and oil is all gone now, though.”
Apollos shook his head. “It is true. You are not an animal even though you dwell in the body of one.”
“I feel like you’re insulting me, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“This whole business about man not being just an animal is what initiated the entire evil-versus-good battle. Lucifer was already annoyed that, unlike angels, all of creation had DNA with the ability to multiply. However, what God did with humans sent Him off the edge.”
“What was so special about humans?”
Apollos’s eyes lit up. “So, all along, Jesus was speaking things into existence from a distance, the Holy Spirit was hovering over creation, and the Father was overseeing everything. The only difference we noticed was that some animals were particularly sociable and playful, they had the capacity to enjoy life and be companions to humans: wolves, the entire cat family, whales and dolphins, for example. We, us angels, I mean – were watching through the portal and were intrigued when Michael said, ‘The conditions are now perfect for your masterpiece. Everything you have created is good, but I believe this will be very good.’ The Trinity said, ‘Let Us create man in Our image.’” Then God got up from his throne and left.”
“To go where?” Micah pressed.
“He entered the dimension, this dimension, and went to Earth. We watched Him create this special being instead of just speaking it into existence like all his other creations. To our surprise, He brought Adam to life by breathing life into him. And after Adam, He created the female in another special way, extracting stem-cell DNA from the man’s rib to create an Eve.”
“Sounds amazing, so why would this have upset Lucifer?”
“All along, Lucifer had paraded around as the most exquisite, created being – I’ve already explained how amazing and richly adorned he was. Now, here was the newest pinnacle of creation, and Lucifer would have to serve this new creation.”
“What did he do?”
Apollos shivered and his face grew serious. “I, for the first time, encountered evil. A darkness I had not known before. It was as if someone you once thought was exquisitely beautiful took off all their clothing and suddenly revealed a dreadful hideousness that leaves you shaken to the core. Lucifer revealed another side of himself that day that none of us knew existed.”
“We watched God walking with the man and his wife in the garden, in the cool of the day. God hadn’t walked and talked like that with us. Lucifer got up from his elegant chair on the stage. He studied himself slowly and meticulously, and then looked at the human creatures that had been formed who now had God’s favour. Then he shook with indescribable rage and stormed out.”
“Did other angels follow him?”
“No, most didn’t. The angels sang for joy when they realised how God was giving purpose to their existence. The privilege of working with a creation in God’s very own image amazed them. They sang this song:
Heaven declares your glory and the work of your hands;
Let all of creation under heaven and in heaven revere You in all lands;
Everything on earth belongs to You;
Whether day or night, that is true.”
Apollos winced. “I didn’t sing. I wish I had. Many of us who had been sitting at God’s left hand didn’t sing along when we saw our comrades run out. Don’t ask me why the left side. The truth is that I still don’t know if we had been pre-selected in some manner – if God had known from the beginning which angels would rebel and which would remain loyal and placed us to one side to set us apart.
“Most of us didn’t know how to process those new emotions that emerged that day. Jealousy, hatred, feelings of rejection and selfish ambition were not concepts we understood. I felt movement on either side of me and saw Abaddon and Azazel join some other angels, hurrying to Lucifer’s side as he left the divine gathering. I briefly hesitated before realising that I wanted to join my lifelong friends. I felt no allegiance at all to evil, of course. I just didn’t want to be left behind, without my friends. As I got up to chase after them, Gabriel appeared at my side. He cautioned me to be careful who I chose to follow because there would be a sorting, separating the House of God and the House of Everything that Stands Against God. I insisted that I wasn’t choosing houses or sides. Gabriel tried to hold me back, but I shook him off and ran in the opposite direction to my private quarters. There, I cried for the first time ever, flooded by a torrent of unfamiliar emotions tugging in conflicting directions.”
Micah looked at Apollos, compassion in his eyes, and realised that this was another very painful memory for Apollos. It was clear that he felt he had made the wrong decision and wasn’t looking forward to going to hell. Apollos looked at him, eyes pleading for him to change the subject as he reflected on his destiny. As Micah’s hand inadvertently touched Apollos’s skin, he was slightly surprised to discover that the angel’s skin was naturally cold when he wasn’t intentionally generating heat.
Micah tried to lighten the mood. “Let’s play a game of Top Trumps. We’ll start with animals! I’ll go first, and you must aim to ‘trump’ me with an animal with better statistics.”
Apollos smiled weakly. “I nominate birds. Your move?”
“The eagle! You won’t beat that. It’s truly majestic, boasting a wingspan of two metres and a length of almost one metre. It is diligent, effortlessly covering over a hundred kilometres while hunting for food. It can spot prey tens of kilometres away. When it finds something, like a rat, it can dive at 320 kilometres per hour and snatch it up in the blink of an eye. See if you can trump that!” Micah smiled to himself, then hastily added an extra rule to swing the odds in his favour. “You can only nominate birds currently in existence, and they must be able to fly. So, you can’t choose a pterodactyl or an ostrich.”
Apollos thought briefly, then said, “The hummingbird!”
“That tiny thing? Smaller than my thumb? That’s no match for my eagle! Let’s see you explain this one. If you win, I might even help you with your combination lock.”
Apollos rose with a glint in his eye. “Faster wing beat at 53 times a second. Trump! Faster speed relative to its finger-sized body at 54 kilometres per hour. Trump! Greater species variety at 320 types, each with a different humming pattern! More feathers per square centimetre with some 1000 feathers, surpassing the 7000 feathers covering that giant eagle of yours. Trump! Can fly forwards, backwards, sideways or hover while your eagle can only go forward! It eats half its body weight daily and can lick 13 times per second! Trump! Heartbeat reaches up to 480 beats per minute when in action, compared to your eagle’s 45 beats at rest! It can even breathe 420 times per minute ...”
“Okay, okay, stop! You win! Clearly, this is an unfair contest because you saw these creatures being made. Besides, all these birds evolved from dinosaurs anyway, so they trump everything with their size.”
Apollos chuckled softly. “What’s a dinosaur?”
“The word means terrible lizard.”
“You mean those giant reptiles we had before the Flood? Are there no more lizards and reptiles on Earth now? In those early days, animals were bigger, and reptiles especially don’t stop growing at the best of times, especially if they are hundreds of years old. The atmosphere was richer and held more oxygen. People and animals lived five to ten times longer. Have you not heard of the likes of Noah and Methuselah living to be over 950 years old?”
“Spoiler alert,” Micah answered. “You just burst my bubble about dinosaurs.”