The Great God Jenkins
Jenkins was a prominent geneticist, an ardent disciple of Darwin, a ferocious critic of religion and a man of swollen, tender sensibility. The beneficiary of many of his own advances, he lived to a ripe old age thanks to implants and stem cell therapy. But at length he sensed his end draw near. His supporters suggested some form of memorial, and who was he to demur? It should, they thought, have the power to the rise and fall of cultures and civilizations.
The problem was what and how. What message should it convey and in what medium? Paper and even digitised media decay, languages and scripts become incomprehensible. Finally they settled on a giant granite bas-relief dominated by a carved figure of Jenkins, From a test tube in his hand spewed a cornucopia of books and articles, mixed with foetuses and babies which as the stream descended evolved into sturdy, handsome adults. The base bore the single word: JENKINS. Satisfied that he had finally achieved some form of immortality, Jenkins breathed his last.
In the years following his death genetic enhancement advanced apace. Eventually humans split into two races, the Naturals and the Enhanced, who lived long, disease-free, highly intelligent lives. The two waged war on each other – savage internecine nuclear war – finally not only destroying the other but all life on Earth. As time went by, all traces of what had been were swallowed in volcanic eruptions and squeezed into the narrow folds of geological strata.
Aeons passed. Then by chance an alien expedition, wandering off-course, landed on the lifeless crust of Earth. They were an advanced race, who called themselves the Seekers, devoted to the pursuit of truth and knowledge, driven in their hearts by something hollow and unquenched. Again by chance, Jenkins’s monument had been thrown up by some geological convulsion near their craft and it didn’t take long for the aliens to stumble across it. The artefact showed them that Earth had once been occupied by a civilization, but its exact meaning puzzled them. After much debate they concluded that it was a religious icon and the figure it displayed a primitive fertility spirit, the giver of birth and new life. Unable to guess the original sound values of the inscription they assigned their own: X/*!>+? which in the symbolic complexities of their script also by chance signified ‘God’s Gift’.
They transported X/*!>+? back to their own planet where it enjoyed pride of place in a new Museum of Earth. Crowds crammed in to view the monument in all its power and mysterious majesty. Then strange things started to happen. Flowers were left at its base, messages, requests and even prayers. It became a place of pilgrimage, the shrine of a new religion. As the new religion spread, the aliens became totally absorbed in its proliferating intricacies, abjuring all forms rational enquiry. Their quest had been no more than a long, stretched wire waiting to be tripped. Fulfilled at last, they had finally found their god.