The bearded man sat quietly on the promenade, enjoying the sun and taking in the view across the harbour. He sat totally unnoticed by the tourists swirling around him. Not even the many hawkers and the supposed “fortune tellers” (who would convince anyone who stood still long enough that they were very lucky and would have many children) disturbed him.
It was the usual problem, he thought. It was almost perfect, but there was something somewhere that felt wrong and so for the thousandth time he’d just have to change it all again.
He blinked his eyes and in a flash it was night. The lights from the sky scrapers of Hong Kong Island lit up the harbour. The irregular twinkle of flash bulbs from Victoria Peak was visible next to the massive stark white profile of the IFC Two building, visitors capturing the view. Always best, he remembered, to see things in all seasons, all lights, all conditions. Something amiss at one time of day could become a glorious jewel in the right conditions. And time… Time can make such beauty. But time can also make fools of us all, a thought which brought a smile as he remembered his age.
The dazzling vista reassured him a little, but at the same time made the bearded man feel melancholy. His role in this world was one of creation. He had come into consciousness when the planet had formed from the dust orbiting around the sun and he had been on Earth ever since, subtly leading the planet’s evolution. He had a feeling he had existed long before the Earth took solid form, but no memories earlier than his first moments floating amongst the primordial soup that would form the basis of future life.
Over the millennia he had taken many forms. A turtle watching prehistoric man in northern Australia painting cave walls, then a cat in ancient Egypt watching the building of the Sphinx, then a lynx in the German Alps watching the construction of the Kehlsteinhaus.
Throughout that whole time he’d known himself by a simple name. The Builder. And much like the builders who constructed buildings in the cramped space available on the waterfront opposite him he knew that to create, you first had to destroy. Make space.
He knew that simply by focusing his mind he could make everything around him would stop. He had done it many times, sometimes just for fun. The world would smoothly come to a halt. People frozen mid-step, birds hanging motionless in the air and fruit falling from trees caught in a strange limbo.
Then the people would disappear. They always went first. When they were gone everything just seemed that much… he struggled to find the right word. “Tidier” seemed appropriate, if a little cold. The people who had previously been noisily milling around him on the promenade would fade from sight, passing from existence with whatever inane face they were holding for the camera-wielding friend.
From there it depended on his mood. Sometimes he felt like an engineer of some kind and he would focus on the mechanics, starting by draining away the water. He could make the harbour in front of him drain dry in minutes, the boats and fish held in place by some unseen force. Had people still been around they would have been able to dispense with paying for the Star Ferry or MTR and make the journey from the Kowloon Peninsula to the Island on foot.
Then the buildings would go. He could have the 72 floors of the Bank of China Tower crumble into dust that would then be carried away invisibly by the wind in a three millionth of the time it had taken to build it.
Taking away the flora and fauna of the world, a trivial mental exercise, would leave before him a simple landscape he could sculpt at will. He could rejoin the island to the mainland, or turn all of south-east Asia into a series of small islands, before reintroducing life to the planet. He’d worked through this landscaping exercise many, many times before. To his mind Italy was his favourite creation.
He made his plans as the world continued around him, as unaware of him as he was of them. One of these days he’d have to rethink his whole approach. Did he need to re-run the whole human evolutionary process? He’d only done that once. The previous attempt hadn’t been much different from the current Homo sapiens, but had been far more prone to violence. That knowledge had carried him through some of Homo sapiens more troubling periods.
Maybe it was time. Interfere a little at the early primate stage perhaps. He’d read that scientists had recently dug up a primate fossil in Germany, so he’d start there. It amused him to make his plans based on “current” affairs.
Or truly clean the slate, start the experiment again. Experiment? Was it really an experiment? Not a responsibility? He’d had no brief when he started. Until now his objective had simply been to achieve perfection. But was that actually achievable?
He looked around, his eye caught by a family walking past; two parents preceded by a pushchair, the child asleep. Suddenly the man’s mood changed and he felt his heart soften, only to be followed by a moment of disappointment. He’d had a sense of resolve, but it had been easily broken by the simplest of human activities. He looked away, only to find he was sat next to a young couple holding each other while they quietly looked out across the harbour.
No, how could he follow through on his plan now? For all the bad in the world, surely there was more good? So what was wrong? Something had caught his eye, something amiss, something needed his attention. He looked carefully again and slowly realised. Was it that simple? Had he nearly reversed millions of years of evolution for… a broken bulb in a streetlamp? He twitched the right side of his mouth and the streetlamp sprang back into life, startling a cat that had been skulking through the darkness. A small patch of dark hillside filled with a little light. That felt better.
But what of humanity? This was the longest he’d gone without making any dramatic changes to the world and its inhabitants. Would this evolutionary route prove to be the right one? Would it achieve perfection? It was impossible to tell.
But he had time. He would be there to see. And if not…
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