Stories by Louis Urbanowski

The alarm blared fifteen minutes earlier on Sunday. 

Refusing to open her eyes yet, Dottie swiped for her phone. Simon’s side of the bed was empty. 

He was probably nose deep in a book downstairs. Hard Religence text, the sort of non-fiction that doubled as a valium for her. 

The Heaven Expedition, his latest page turner. A play-by-play detailed analysis of St. Paul I, the first mission sent to find it. 

Four-hundred and fifty pages on deep space probes, their orbits and payloads. The search for where the God Particle came from. 

Just let me know when they find it, cut out all the crap.

Dottie lay there for a moment longer, envious of her husband’s simple ability to just “wake up”. 

A small stretch preceded her legs swinging over the side, one by one making contact with the floor. Sunday was the day she wished it gone, so she could remain marooned in bed, floating back to sleep. 

Lution Day was a bonafide pain in the arse. Always and forever. Still, it’s what her family must do, keep up appearances you know. There was no point complaining. Instead Dottie resolved to get on with her staggeringly dull list of nags. 

Waking Joseph and Faye was easy enough, getting them moving wasn’t. Her plan was simple: rip the curtains apart, crank the breakfast news up and sing one of the screeching hymns on transmutation. 

Protests and objections followed. 

‘We don’t want to go to stupid lab. It’s for children. They’re made up stories.’

Dottie winced. Each week was a battle. She couldn’t blame them. When she was a child, if you objected you were dragged along after a good smack. Nowadays, their generation was wising up to the tricks of Lution. More and more were being brought up evangelical. 

Back when Religence couldn’t answer most things, that was when Lution thrived.

Nowadays though? How could there be room for fanciful tales of natural selection, of organisms changing when we knew that God was real. Hell, soon we would know the exact location of Heaven amongst the stars.

Negotiation was required. 

‘Do it for Grandest Father, it’s a tradition, think of it like that, a silly little tradition.’ Dottie pleaded. Groans came back as a reply. Ace up the sleeve then. 

‘Okay, fine, Angel Network Premium if you come…’ Dottie’s bribe lingered for a second. 

‘Fine, but I’m not drinking from the petri dish. I don’t think the Theorist washes his hands.’ Faye moaned. 

Dottie pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Faye, he’s got rubber gloves…Oh fine, sure, whatever, just put on your lab coats and come down for breakfast.’

Children placated, for now, Dottie turned her attention to herself and Simon. They’d be sat on the front bench like always, they were VIPs – the VIPs in fact. 

The living descendants of Grandest Father Darwin, they must look the part. 

She rummaged in her drawers for a cleaner pair of eye protectors. The constant experiments tarnished them. Dottie found a pair with minimal scratches, she gave them a rough polish on the sleeve of her embroidered lab coat and shrugged. That would have to do. 

You could still make out her eyelashes, and seeing as that was the fashion, she could live with it. The closer you were to the front bunsen, the bigger your eyelashes needed to be.

The thought of bunsens was like a lightbulb. She called out to Simon who was downstairs.

‘Simon, dear, did you reattach the tubing to the burners? We’ll be called first today and I don’t want to be up there fiddling with them.’ 

No answer, so she called out again, louder and this time without the “dear.”

‘Erm, sure I can do it right now.’ Came the reply. 

Dottie pulled a face, running the household was hard enough, could he not just do the one thing they agreed. It was his sodding family after all, Darwin-Wedgwood, hell of a double barrel.

The car journey to the lab was unremarkable.  

Simon wittering about the Heaven Expedition. Scanning the Andromeda galaxy drained the Popescope in thirteen minutes, four additional supply Cherubs had to be sent. 

Dottie found her thoughts drifting. She was caught between a rock and a hard place, so to speak. Her imagination was playing with her. The High Theorist on one shoulder, Chief of the Papal Board on the other. 

Her evidence in Lution was fading. Descended from Monkeys? It didn’t seem feasible. A nice story, but how did that explain gorillas at the zoo?

But on the other hand she struggled with the depressing nature of reality. The actions of their God. 

Take Global Warming for example. It was proven religentifically with hard facts and faith now, beyond a doubt. Sinners caused it, every time one of the deadly seven was infringed upon, the world heated up. 

Or even something more modern, like the advent of AngelGPT making millions of jobs obsolete overnight. 

Surely this internal tug of war was played by every single human being? She didn’t know the answer, but what she did know was that when they did find God up there in the Heaven’s – oh he had some explaining to do.

The car park was full when they arrived. If people did struggle with their evidence then they weren’t going to let it show. One by one they filed past the Theorist who greeted many in his long, flowing coat. 

Ceremonial eye wash stations were used, conical flasks drunk from. The cohort settled down into their work benches ready for the first experiment to begin. 

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here today to prove that our species, in fact all species, are a result of Lution. Our original prophet, of course, the famed Charles Darwin, dreamt it. We are very lucky, as always, to be joined by his family today.’ A nod to Dottie and Simon from the High Theorist.

The usual cavalcade of slides, live specimens and deep scientific texts followed. Dottie and Simon were called to light their bunsen first. One by one the rest of the cohort came, and soon the benches were a sea of dancing flames as the Theorist read from the textbook.

Passages on inherited traits, of the struggle to survive droned on. These stories Dottie knew by heart, hearing them since she was a child.

Sometimes when alone, she pondered changing field. Lution’s popularity dimmed in the emergence of competing theories. Tivity seemed interesting. What about Bangism? A waste of time, she was a Darwin-Wedgwood and Lution needed her, far more than she needed it. 

Thanks Grandest Father.

She thought of him, it was said that Charles Darwin planned to go to the Galapagos in order to bring evidence of his Lution. HMS Beagle never made it in the end. A freak storm took it down off the coast of Cape Horn. It was never found. 

Grandest Father Darwin a Theorist only in death. Lost at sea, but his writings found at home. As Religence moved forward, the masses needed a new opium. Lution rushed to take up the space, consuming the air. It probably started as a small meeting of minds in some wayward tavern, but it grew – exploded in popularity. 

The idea that Human Beings were a result of a process of perfection was tantalising. Every part, continually assessed, every generation better than the last. All traits, all species evaluated over thousands, maybe millions of years? An intoxicating tonic to boost a collective ego. 

The problem was that God was real, he controlled everything, everywhere, all of the time. Your fate was predetermined. Regardless if you were happy with it or not, you were a part of his design.

No wonder Lution found a following, there are always those who seek an alternative truth. 

Dottie and the family got home after the lecture at the lab. She stuck the oven on, and began peeling potatoes. Simon sank into his armchair and cracked open his book, whilst Joseph and Faye started combing the archives of the Angel Premium On-Demand service. 

Another Sunday done, another Lution Lecture endured. Grandest Father would be proud. Maybe. She wasn’t sure.

A few minutes before the timer on the oven went, the TV interrupted Variables of Selection – Aled Jones would be upset. 

‘Heaven has been found. St. Paul II is about to broadcast live images from the Andromeda Galaxy.’ 

The Darwin-Wedgwood family crammed around the screen, as did everyone across the globe. 

The news report displayed a grainy image. 

They all gasped. The world stopped.

It didn’t make any sense, did it? To Dottie, it strangely did. 

A gigantic throne made of flickering stars loomed. Sat upon it, was a fossilised skeleton. A calcified statue of an ancient being. 

By its feet, there was something.

The probe’s camera zoomed in. 

The words were faint but etched in the decaying wood. 

HMS Beagle.

God was real but long gone, Charles Darwin was found.

The world was on its own. 

 By Louis Urbanowski – Inspired by the prompt: ‘What if Darwin never discovered evolution?’