They were. This was no longer sufficient.
Mue bestirred themselves, and made nothing.
They were nothing, amidst nothing. This was sufficient, but not ideal.
Mie roused themselves, and manifested a singularity – all things in one. This was ideal.
Moe got up, made time, and poked the singularity with it. Everything went everywhere.
“Whoops,” said Moe.
***
They descended, dropped from elsewhere to here.
Here was where something expanded and cooled and calmed. Bits of it plinked and cooled and turned almost comprehensible.
Mue flared their aperture. Space was tamed, space was calmed, and with it, time. Gravity gripped and didn’t let up.
Mie pronated their rostrum. Particles precipitated into place. Gluons glued; bosons bustled; photons phlew.
Moe rubbed their limbs together and blew on them, then rolled a bunch of particles into a ball called hydrogen and sent it spinning down space and time, where it promptly spawned an absurd number of increasingly complicated imitators.
“Strike!” shouted Moe.
***
They diminished, shrank from everywhere to somewhere.
They shrank, but the universe didn’t – it spread itself wide and broad, differentiated itself with vigor and vim. Hot and cold bubbled in its stew like potato and carrot.
Mue spoke, and stars coalesced from bleeding nebula, flaring hot and burning brightly, filling the firmament with light.
Mie sang, and dust ravelled and spun around the stars, sweating and bleeding and clotting, a titanic and dusty new disc spun from old matter.
Moe hummed a little ditty and the dust started to tear itself apart into little clouds, spraying shrapnel from there to here to all over the place and congealing into squat little blots.
“I meant to do that,” hedged Moe.
***
They squinted, turned their attention to the smallest large objects nearby.
Half-baked planets roiled in the deep of the solar system; red hot and pulsating. Rock melted, ice shrieked, fresh-cooked skies boiled with furious vapours as gas turned solid turned occasionally plasma turned back to gas again.
Mue spread their digits and they began to cool and solidify, turning round and ripe – some small stones, some gas giants.
Mie swayed their abdomen and they began to clear their orbits, sucking small neighbours and stray matter down bit by bit, tidying the space around them.
Moe did something with their feet and swerved two of them into each other, giving the larger a terrible black eye and sending the smaller spinning into the other’s orbit at less than a tenth its old mass.
“Split,” mourned Moe.
***
They slid into orbit and did not wish to slide away.
Mue’s trowel crunched and chewed to itself as they patiently probed the depths of the new-formed-stone for gases that coalesced into water, flooded the fresh valleys of the planet with quiet seas.
Mie’s needles danced as they wove the magnetic field into a tight web, shielding the frail orb from the sun’s terrible shrieking winds.
Moe’s glass overflowed as they spat some of their backwash back, emptied it on the planet, then watched as simple inorganic reactions accelerated away from being either of those things.
“Neato!’ said Moe.
***
They observed and interacted.
Mue tended the little things that took in the heat and smoking minerals of the world’s heart, deep under the seas, and taught them to grow and multiply.
Mie sheltered the little things that took in the distant radiation of the sun, floating at the top of the waves, and taught them to spread and replicate.
Moe picked up some of the little things and taught them to eat each other over and over until a few of got wedged together that way, teamed up, and started aggressively getting larger.
“Not my fault,” lied Moe.
***
They nurtured and nudged.
Mue tended the first shoots that sprouted on the distant shores, greener, yet greener; taller, yet taller.
Mie assembled the first shells and notochords that scaffolded and supported tissues, bigger, yet bigger; stranger, yet stranger.
Moe picked up anything that swam close enough and threw it out of the water onto the land to see what happened. Mostly it didn’t work out well, sometimes it worked out way too well.
“Trial and error,” excused Moe.
***
They guided and cared.
Mue raised the seas and lowered them, turned the nutrients of the ocean floor over and brought them back to the light for all. The waves were adrift with plankton and awash with nekton.
Mie midwifed the atmosphere, made sure the ozone was thick enough, was thin enough, kept the greenhouse warm but not boiling over. Oxygen drifted up from a billion billion billion stomata; carbon wafted from a billion billion billion lungs.
Moe slipped and dropped an asteroid on all of it at least twice. Kerplunk, badoosh.
“I was trying to help clean up,” explained Moe. “Butterfingers!”
***
They aged and rested.
Mue set the currents and the continents in their manner then laid down in the rifts of the deepest parts of the earth and let themselves slide underneath it all, lulled to rest by the hot glow of the planet’s core that reminded them of the earliest days, grinding the deep processes along in their dreams.
Mie spread themselves wide and broad, twining into the soil, into the air, until the biosphere was them and they were it and not one could be told apart from the other, and so all loved all even as all fed upon all, and grew from it, and changed from it.
Moe got lost and got distracted and dithered for ages, wandering farther and farther and growing thinner and thinner for longer and longer until at last they were just a stray wisp, not even matter, and all they could do was crawl inside the hindbrain of the first passing creature – a vertebrate of some kind; a tetrapod; bipedal – and squish themselves up as small as possible – tiny enough to tuck between neurons, turned once more into neither something nor nothing.
“Hey friend!” greeted Moe. “Wanna do something really funny?”