Once Sol was settled in after another week, I started on the process of multiplying his species. While I loved the romanticism of an entire race originating from just one male and one female it would have been incredibly impractical to attempt. Any given species had a minimum number from which it could safely restart without too much inbreeding. For humans, that number was around two hundred. Less with social engineering. And, although I had beefed up my creation’s genetics enough so that their number was much lower, it still was not as low as two.

Before founding the general population, this was my last opportunity to improve upon the design or start over. Going forward, I had no intention of directly interfering. No wrath of God type business. They would be free to do as they pleased and evolve as they would. My approach would be soft.

Sol was the first of his kind. I called them, unoriginally, Martians.

His basic structure was like a starfish. Fully translucent and highly flexible, able to both flatten out and sustain contortions. This allowed him to take on forms conducive to flight, or rapid quadrupedal movement, just by flexing. And on the ends up his appendages, smaller tentacles could emerge for delicate manipulation. Altogether, he was as versatile as I could make him. A jack of all trades though not particularly optimized for any one environment. Still, far stronger than a human on virtually every metric.

And so, with no more improvements to make, I started churning them out.

“Let’s start with a hundred,” I said, giving an update to my two copilots, Walter and Hickory.

“If you’re sure,” Walter said, at my side as usual.

Hickory just chuckled. “Let’s teach them about gladiators. We should put on a show.”

“No,” I told him. “They probably won’t be violent for a while. Not until scarcity sets in, at least. And I don’t want to rush the process.”

“We’re going to artificially restrict them?” Walter asked.

Already, the first dozen Martians were being deposited on the surface world. Sol had been expecting them for some time, so he was there to greet the new souls. I figured I would let him handle the introductions from now on, as I’d made him plenty smart enough to lead. He would serve as my mouthpiece, then. “Not food and water,” I said, “but sex. That’s what will drive them to violence. The scarcity of reproduction.”

Hickory went from a slight chuckle to an all-out crowing.

I went on. “I could have made them sexless, of course, but then what would be the reason for doing anything? They would just multiply like bacteria up to the point that the food ran out. But we need them capable of obedience and rebellion. Social traits like cooperation and competition. That’s where all the interesting advances happen. And so, they needed a reason to care about status. That’s sex.”

“Boy,” Hickory laughed, finally catching his breath. “He got this shit from you, right Walter? You must have been real fun at parties, weren’t ya? A real lady-killer.”

The young man just shrugged in response. “No. I didn’t socialize much. But I had the theory down well enough.”

“I could tell.”

“Oh, give it a rest, Hick.”

This was not productive. So, I created a mental mute button.

“Have fun you two,” I said. And I meant it.

After putting them out of my mind, I got back to work. They carried on like that for hours sometimes, but I didn’t need to be a part of it. Only the important bits warranted my attention. The rest was mere personal conflict.

It was going to take quite a lot of work before Mars was properly terraformed. Even with my vast abilities, I would be confined to local terrariums for a very long time. We’d now passed thirty square miles of land, but it was a drop in the bucket overall. Still, it was all my children required for now. So, I set them free.

It was delightful to watch them congregate. Sol was a natural-born speaker, and he found a high place where they all could see, up in a tree-like organism. His speech was not eloquent, but it was clear, and it was kind. He slowly walked them through the situation as best as he himself understood it. And that was that they had been created by a being and this being watched over them. I was naturally an intimidating concept to them, but they understood that I was a living thing as well. I was not supernatural, just very complex.

I didn’t want a religion, but the vibes were naturally there. The awe and the fear and the reverence. I had undeniably and already received their loyalty and this I expected. But I was also in the mind of every single one of them, and their thoughts continued to astound me. They were not dimwitted herd animals, mindlessly desperate for guidance. They questioned and they wrestled with the significance of everything they encountered. Even within the first hour of their life, they were developing unique dispositions and personality. Individuals, all of them.

“Perfect,” I decided. It was going very well.

Now, what’s next, I thought.

Doing a quick checkup on the post-humans, I made sure they were all comfortable and stimulated. Much of my reprogramming efforts were coming along nicely and they were proving quite trainable. While I hated to treat them more like tools than the special snowflakes I knew them to be, I couldn’t take chances with the opportunity their Powers afforded. So, my efforts continued to focus on using neurochemical hacking for obedience.

It felt like slowly killing them, to some degree. If I dissolved their personalities into nothing but that of an eager slave, were they still alive? Or were they just objects, waiting to be used…

Harsh chemical addiction was my route of choice. The desperation it could produce was cruel, but once they felt it a time or two, they learned to avoid it.

For those who were already willing, like Daniel and his crew, I relied on more complex reinforcement. I told them of my plans and of the empire we would build. I promised a life of meaning.

Were the approaches really so different, I wondered. Just different forms of pleasure.

Meanwhile, something else was grabbing my attention, and it had been bothering me for a while.

The earth was blinking.

I’d been keeping an eye on her and it seemed like every few minutes, there was a new flash of light. One that was just barely bright enough to pick up at my range and with my equipment. Yet more interesting, the colors were varying.

“A nuke maybe?” I asked, searching for a second opinion.

There was no response from Hickory and Walter. Apparently, they were ignoring me too. Or, they were still too busy bickering. Either way, it was nothing but silence from them. Sometimes I forget that they could just do that. Ignore me.

So, I simply waited and watched on standing orders. As more time passed, the flashes kept coming. The timing between them felt evenly spaced. The colors were shifting in clear patterns. These clues combined to give me an increasing certainty that it wasn’t any nuke.

It was a signal.

Without further wait, I hooked up my backup brains and started to brute-force the problem. After just a few minutes, I knew enough about cryptography that I could program out a system of translation. It wasn’t an alphabet, exactly. Instead, it was an analog of sound, much like the kind I gave my Martians.

In fact, it was exactly an earlier version of the same design. And that could only mean one thing.

The message was a loop. “Please respond,” it said.

This was my handiwork, alright. One of the genetic presets I had given Dawn, now being used in quite a creative fashion. I felt like such a proud father, though she wasn’t really my child. It was more like the pride you might have from someone else mastering your own machinery. Yes, that was more accurate. She was a different form of Creep entirely.

Once I had my own light show set up, I was ready to beam back a response. It was exorbitantly biologically expensive, but my excitement had me ready to liquidate half the colony to do it. “I read you,” it went. “Is this Dawn?”

Hours were minutes in this exchange, but both of us had patience.

“Affirmative,” she said. “Is this Creep?”

“Yes!” I was so giddy that I just let the endorphins flow. It’d been a while since I felt an involuntary chemical reaction so strongly. Pleasant emotions spilled over into my tone and I didn’t try to hide it. “How are you doing?”

“Good!” She matched my enthusiasm and it caught me off guard. She was all too human for a Kizmet turned sentient super-predator. But that was what I got for modeling her off them. “I have taken Russia.”

Oh. Well that was impressive. “The entire thing?” I asked.

“With help.” That was all the information she offered, and things fell quiet soon after.

Trying to start the conversation back up, I offered a joke. “Have they nuked you yet? It’s not pleasant.”

“They haven’t bothered,” she said. “But even if they did, I would survive…”

I had designed this medium so that it was still possible to convey a laugh, and I gave my heartiest attempt. She should know that I expected nothing less. I’d made her mind so that it kept decentralized backups in the DNA of her entire mass. She was almost as tough as I was, therefore. “Wonderful. What about Seraph? What have they done, then?”

“They’ve mobilized their armies. But they’re leaving me alone for now, so I stay where I am. I continue to grow. No doubt, they are listening to us speak now.”

This was all very good to hear. She was much smarter than I had anticipated, however. Not a simple product of destructive instinct. And so, I tried to remind her of her purpose, but I needed to do it in such a way that it did not spook Seraph into rushing the prize. “Don’t forget that they are your enemy, Dawn,” I said. “The longer they exist, the greater the threat.”

“I understand my position.”

It was strange hearing what had once been a mindless animal speak so clearly. Yet, she was also cryptic. Everything she did spoke to a far greater mind behind the action. An unmistakably sharp quality. Far more mature than my other creations.

“Very good. We should conserve our energy, then. We can talk more later,” I told her.

She did not say anything more after that. Slightly disappointing, as I had at least expected a goodbye. But I didn’t worry. Once I got back to earth, we would have all the time to chat that we could ever want. Me and her.

For a brief moment, I had a flashback to Pensacola, Florida. I saw Markus in his little house, standing at the back door, staring at my naked self. I could vividly feel my human body once again, bounded to two arms and two legs. Just two eyes and two ears by which to take in the world. So limited and finite.

It was a moment of incredible dissonance as my current sensations came back to me. It was like my mind went into a panic. Everything was huge and alien. It was far too big and loose, and my flesh was more of a giant ocean than a place I could call home.

Enough of that, I thought. We don’t doubt ourselves.

I had to shrink down my senses to get a grip again. I detached my backup brains and put all of my systems on autopilot, letting the vast walls of my being shrink back in. Making the world small again.

“I think I’m stressing my Power, using it over such a vast area so intensely,” I commented. “Hmm.” That wasn’t good. Such a thing hadn’t even occurred to me.

When all of this was finished, I wondered what I would do with myself. Once Seraph was defeated and a new age started, I did not want to micromanage all the life in the universe, or even on my planet. It wasn’t a necessary or beautiful thing to do. It was a petty thing, indeed.

Instead, perhaps there would be more like me. Dawn could be given all my designs, and she would be able to do what I did. Not as efficiently, but still. She could be given mechanisms to alter her own DNA freely. Then, she could invent her own designs. Like me, she would have no limit.

I had thought so much about my own Power and growth that this idea hit me in a quiet moment. What would come after I had everything? Maybe one day, it wouldn’t just be me. It would be countless living planets…

Once my army was built up enough, I saw no reason to delay. I wanted to meet Dawn in person so I could grant her this upgrade. And then, I could make this vision a reality.

Once Seraph fell, the age of Creeps would begin.