There once was a grand collective construct of pure intelligence and negative mass who witnessed the birth of humanity in the focus of its imagination.

We'll call this intelligence . . . MacDonald.

Now old MacDonald had a galaxy on the eve of the confluence of our space-time. Measured by the constraints of unidirectional time travel, this would be considered a very young galaxy in this universe, but the whole universe itself was just a cheap, refurbished hand-me-down from MacDonald's more grand, more intelligent, and even more negative in mass older brother, whom we'll call MalDoncad.

MacDonald, having been born through the barrier between the fields of quantum physics with gifts of infinite power, was always being teased by MalDoncad for not being born with infinite^(2) power like the rest of the family. But, despite the eternal patronizing, MalDoncad could not help fixing MacDonald's problems, no matter how often they were brought to his reality.

One eon, MalDoncad was playing on what was essentially a guitar of pure hyper-compressed light waves, reconstructing the magnetic field of a nebulous structure he remembered hearing in his college days, when he heard an immature moan from his little brother.

"I can't do this one!" he cried. "Will you beat it for me?"

MalDoncad sighed and called down the wormhole, "Where are you at?"

"All the land is broken up. The atmosphere is getting pretty thick. Most of the water is melted. And they've figured out a baseline recipe for rapid oxidation."

MalDoncad plucked a quark in surprise. "Rapid oxidation?"

"Yeah! They're using it to alter the chemical make up of the lesser beings so they can nourish themselves for longer on fewer kills. That's a good sign right?"

"Who is 'they'? MacDonald, what the hell kind of fabric are you weaving with that thing?"

"Just come look!"

MalDoncad grunted with a sound like a supernova. He set down his light-waves and took one last rip from the lingering bowl of Higgs-Boson particles in his anti-gravity bong, then he dissipated from existence to reconstruct himself in the frequencies of his little brother's reality. "Okay, give me that," he said, snatching the bubble of universe from MacDonald's amygdala. "Why's it so small?"

"I stopped the expansion until I could get a handle on this galaxy. I've been trying to grow the periodic table at the same time, but I've barely been able to fill the sixth atomic shell with all the questions they keep asking."

"Questions!? Questions, MacDonald! How have you-" MalDoncad decided to stop wasting his stardust by screaming and just take a look for himself. He witnessed the progress in our corner of the galaxy since he'd last had to take the controller from MacDonald, and he could barely understand the sequence of events following his last soft-reboot with the meteor against the lizard-bird monsters. He realized MacDonald must have introduced the fungal branch of life way too early, as one of the strains seemed to have accidentally formed a similar chemical structure to a space in the brain of his primate creatures. When the two met by chance, the primate creature's mind hit a ceiling of self-reflection before MacDonald could build a pseudo-source of creation out of hot rocks. The ape asked a question, (not with words, more like a string of loose concepts and a desire to tie those concepts to others it did not realize until now could be defined,) and it sounded something like, "Me? Me? Me? Me? Why? Why? Why? Why? How?"

And here's where MalDoncad saw his brother's critical mistake. Instead of just picking up this stoned primate and flinging him into the black hole at the center of its galaxy, MacDonald saw his universe discovering itself as a likely progression of the toy, a level he hadn't reached yet, and so he tried to calm the beast. He did this in the worse way possible, by cursing it with even more knowledge.

"It's alright my beautiful creature," he said. "My name's MacDonald. I mean no harm."

"Me! Why? Me! Why? How?!" cried the thoughts of the ape.

MalDoncad fast forwarded to the universe's present state. He saw the effect of millions of generations of life when allowed to procreate with their own sense of desires, and he was sickened by it. He found an individual organism that seemed pretty old, comparatively, and asked with a voice it could comprehend, "You there, what's your purpose?"

"Oh lord," answered Noah, "My purpose is only to serve you, to praise you, to live in worship of you."

MalDoncad pulled away from the universe to scowl at his younger brother. "You sick spectrum. Have you been stroking your self-worth with this thing? I didn't realize you were even old enough."

"I thought that's what I was supposed to-"

MalDoncad interrupted, "You and Dad are going to have a fun conversation when he gets home. But don't worry, I know what to do." He came back down to the white-haired organism. "Hey, buddy. How many of you here are under the impression that you've been created for the sole purpose of my watching you praise me?"

Noah stammered, "Every single one of us, my lord. Or at least a good portion of us, I'd say. At least enough that I could bring them here and prove it to you."

MalDoncad saw a golden form standing in the center of where the organisms collected their lives. "What the hell is that?" MalDoncad asked, pointing at the two golden arches.

"Why, it's an image in your likeness, my lord. We've done just as you've asked. Shall I collect some of those worthy followers to prove their devotions to you?"

"No, I've heard enough. Stay there, you're all getting scrubbed."

"Getting what?"

MalDoncad did not answer. He exited the universe and tossed it back to MacDonald and instructed him to, "Take that moon, smash it against the planet, start over from proteins."

"But that's going to take forever! Can't I just take the water and melt it down to wash the sentient ones away? They can't survive in water, and that way I can at least try again from microbes."

"Do whatever you want. Just don't let those things survive or you'll never finish it."

"But what if they come back?" asked MacDonald. "What if I were to make beings so intelligent they could end up comprehending the wider existence outside of their planet."

"Don't be cruel, MacDonald." MalDoncad was already half-dematerialized through the wormhole when he stopped to ask. "And by the way, what's with those golden arches."

"You didn't recognize them?"

"Is that supposed to be me and you?"

MacDonald smiled.

"Even though there's no possible way they could comprehend the likeness?"

MacDonald nodded.

"Huh. That's actually pretty cool." MalDoncad gave his brother an affectionate punch on his dimensional fractals.

"Thanks."

"Still. Get rid of it . . . Or at least hide it in your sock drawer before Dad sees it."