Light-years away, the members of the Interdimensional Assembly had all taken their seats. Most of them were lying on cushions and cool furs arranged in the room. Others sat on grass or floated on anti-gravity chairs and played with strands of fluttering hair or veils of clothes - someone here and there wore them - whose flaps hung down to caress the ground.

The transparent and almost invisible dome that delimited the room revealed a very distant horizon, defined on one side by grassy hills covered with flowers of all colors, on the other by the sapphire blue ocean. The view of the coast was bordered by Coral City. In the rays of the morning sun, it shone like an immense pink shell resting on the beach. The numerous spiral towers pricked the firmament with cusps pointing in every direction, aligned in groups like schools of silver fish.

Higher up, the dome showed a dark blue sky and, towards the sea, very white vaporous clouds, distant and still a little low. Looking up from any place inside the dome, one could see a dark circle cover the sun and move together with the observer. Becoming very dark and a little opaque due to the light that passed through it in the direction of the sun's rays, the surface of the dome kept the whole room immersed in a pleasant shade.

Silence reigned inside, although there were many people talking to each other. The acoustic systems made it possible to hear only those speaking from the central area reserved for Executive members.

The President of the Assembly had a twenty-five-year-old face and an athletic physique. He exhibited a radiant smile and spoke full of excitement with an amused look.

«Also today I am here to serve you, beloved brothers! What is the most important thing to deal with this morning?»

«I would say let's start with Earth: since they discovered atomic energy they have been so lively!» said another Executive. His very dark hair contrasted with his pale complexion and on his thin face you could see the shadow of a black beard framing a small mouth with bright red lips. Underneath the long and pronounced eyebrows were two round fish eyes, piercing black, that seemed to constantly search for something to mock.

«Later, Wilol, please!» said the president, revealing the sense of listlessness that the name of that planet gave him. «Why don't we see what progress the amphibious men of Ideruma have made? Have they decided to build cities on dry land?»

«But Kidhe, it's been just over sixty years since we last dealt with them, at most they will have made some sandcastles on the beach...» Wilol's throat was scraped by a laugh. «I really think it's just Earth today,» he intoned, knowing he was needling the president.

In a custom established for over a millennium, the Assembly had evaded, truncated and procrastinated sessions dedicated to Earth more than it had ever done with other planets. The extraordinarily complex, difficult and tangled behavior of its inhabitants made that project capable of causing a sudden drop in enthusiasm in most of its members. The exceptions to this collective feeling were very few. Some math freak like Executive Cronquit, some twisted artistic genius, and only one Executive capable of making humor about it at the expense of his colleagues: Wilol.

Earth itself did not interest him much, but finding the headaches it gave to others hilarious, he added his own to weigh down the load when it came time to deal with it. He found more material for inspiration than he needed: thousands of religions, a myriad of political ideologies and separate cultures. But above all, the great structural puzzle: the simultaneous and autonomous development of dozens of different civilizations that managed to keep themselves divided even within the same continent. Since the dawn of humanity, imaginary lines were able to isolate, as if they were barriers, cells of scientific, economic, social and political development.

Nevertheless, less than two thousand years earlier they had almost succeeded in unifying everything under a single block. The Imperium Plan had seemed like a perfect work of macrobiological engineering. The members of the Assembly had dedicated themselves to it with commitment and passion. Never before - nor since - had they dealt so often and so enthusiastically with Earth, and they had gone so far as to prepare to celebrate a long-cultivated success.

Then something had not gone as planned and cultural advancement had slowed down; communications development was slow in coming; the Assembly had tried everything it could to hold on to what it had so far managed to build. A few centuries later, inevitably, everything had collapsed like a house of cards; the executives had watched in disbelief as the Plan failed. Even Wilol then expressed disappointment, although already after a couple of centuries nothing prevented him from producing some of his best - or worst, depending on your point of view - jokes about it.

The debacle had demoralized the Assembly to such an extent that for over a thousand years the Executives had not wanted to know anything more about Earth. Now, it had been only six centuries since they had resumed, without much desire, working on it. There was a new Plan, the Samādhi Plan, in which young Flavio was the result of careful and difficult guidance that had lasted nearly six hundred years.

The boy was the key element in the whole project: he was to become a planetary leader, first in science, then in culture, and finally in the political and social spheres. His genetic material had been programmed almost in its entirety. Through meticulous care in conception and implementation, the Assembly had created the out-of-the-ordinary individual that the Samādhi Plan needed.

Many had marveled that such a genetic feat had succeeded. The Assembly had wanted to do it in less than thirty generations and to more than a few they had seemed too few. There had been those who thought it highly improbable and those who were still amazed at the apparent success of the maneuver. None of these, however, were Executives.

Around Flavio Mancini had been skilfully constructed, with no small amount of effort, a cultural, economic and emotional environment cared for down to the smallest detail. Roughness, poverty and marginalization were the building blocks of that environment. The job had been done so well that for another twenty years they would not have to worry about correcting anything but minor routine fluctuations. The Samādhi Plan, now started and primed, would continue on its own, however much Flavio felt like a total wretch.

It could be said that the whole project was implemented too quickly, in too short a time. Such a radical change was difficult to impose on a whole humanity with only a dozen assembly days scattered over just five hundred and seventy years.

On the fourth of those days, Wilol came forward with an out-of-the-ordinary idea, too original not to raise doubts. If the same idea had come from someone like Riklev, no one would have batted an eye.

Everyone trusted the intelligence that Riklev kept under his flowing brown hair; everyone knew how far his ideas, however strange, were safe and effective solutions, as brilliant as his blue eyes and as sharp as his neatly trimmed goatee. What's more, on numerous occasions, his sporadic pearls of genius had been an anchor capable of saving the Assembly's projects from titanic shipwrecks.

It was Riklev who conceived the new Samādhi Plan. When he opened his mouth five hundred and seventy years earlier to present his idea, a wave of relief, reassuring and analgesic, had swept through the Assembly. It was everyone's hope that day that Riklev would show off his slender figure topped by long straight hair and say something.

As for Wilol, there was unanimity in considering that a strange idea coming from his mind should have been scrutinized very carefully before trusting it. But his very role as Executive attested to a merit worthy of the utmost consideration. So, during the fourth of the days that the Assembly had devoted to the Samādhi Plan, everyone listened to him, perhaps not very attentively, but they listened.

«Stop everyone, I have a wonderful idea!» he had suddenly said.

Kidhe had looked at him with his pupils huddled between his tight eyelids.

«Come on, we don't need any more ideas to complicate things. We just have to implement the plan that Riklev and Cronquit have already outlined. Look here» he had said pointing to some graphs in a hologram suspended in mid-air, «with the next step we have to reduce the power of organized religion and avoid a slowdown in progress.»

«That is to say, to avoid failing just like it happened with the previous plan?»

«Thank you for reminding us, Wilol...»

«Come on! Just give me a moment. With what I have in mind we fix scientific development, secularization, industry... lice! Everything!»

Kidhe had closed his eyes to try to visualize his happy place. He hadn't succeeded.

«Okay! Okay!» after suspending the Assembly's activities, the President called its attention back to Wilol's intervention. He then gave him an amiable smile: «You have a handful of minutes, but if I realize it's a waste of time...»

Before speaking, Wilol had moistened his lips, making them even more brilliant.

«I think I've found a kind of cultural diversion that suits our needs. My idea is to start a current of thought on Earth in which it is asserted that life arose by chance, through reactions of chemical elements that somehow spontaneously assembled into increasingly complex structures until they generated the simplest forms of life. If we convince Earthlings that the process of evolutionary adaptation alone, aided by random mutations and natural selection, is capable of giving rise to all species, they would deduce that all life originated from a common ancestor. An ancestor formed spontaneously.»

«Spontaneously?» Kidhe had repeated in an incredulous murmur. With outrage climbing up his face, he had sought solidarity in Sleeld's gaze, the Earth's overseer.

This had lazily scratched his unkempt beard and with a bewildered expression turned to Wilol.

«And how would this absurdity serve us?»

Sleeld's voice had come out with a tone so fragile as to contrast with his imposing constitution. On his tanned face, his very blond eyebrows had arched, sharp and clear.

Wilol had shaken his head with a grimace and wrinkled nose.

«What do you even know!» he had dismissed him before answering the President.

In a crescendo of euphoria, he had begun to tell how in investigating that hypothesis the Earthlings would have accelerated their biological research, delving deeper into geology, zoology and botany. Rapid progress would have been made in chemical sciences and then also in genetic sciences.

The red herring would have been obvious only after medicine, technology and industry had developed. The whole thing would have proposed an alternative to theological ideas and fostered a secular philosophy independent of creationist religions.

«So we bring deist religions into line and in a couple of centuries at most the life expectancy of Earthlings could even pass seventy years! Those are conditions we need, right?»

In concluding, Wilol had looked around with an invading smile, convinced that he would find a plebiscite of support in the members of the Assembly. Among those who had followed his speech to the end, however, most were looking at him with wide eyes and furrowed brow.

Riklev, on the other hand, under his smooth brown hair, had his eyelids half-closed and his fingertips joined in front of his goatee. With a shy manner he had then raised his brilliant blue eyes, ready to express his opinion. For a moment, Wilol's dumb smile had seemed to rub off on him.

«Well, maybe we should try it... I think it might work.»

No one had minded the extremely unsure voice in which the words had come from his lips. They were all used to hearing him speak like that, especially when he had thought carefully about what he was saying.

Those words had been enough to convince the Assembly, which immediately set about working out the details of the idea. After asking the computer for a list of candidates, the Executives had begun searching for the Earthling to inspire.

«Hey, look at this kid here...» Wilol had called attention.

Sleeld and Kidhe had examined the candidate with him.

«Son of Enlightenment writer, intolerant with academia, destined to fail medical studies, fail pastor studies... likes to keep dead animals, obsessive collector, subject of the largest merchant naval empire... he's perfect!»

«What do you say, Sleeld?» Kidhe had asked. The Earth Intervention Officer had nodded sleepily.

«All right then, as long as we hurry,» the president lingered over the reading of the candidate's name until he was sure he understood its pronunciation. «Let there be Darwinism...»

The scientific development that Earth had experienced since that time was unprecedented on any of the planets known to the Assembly. The reports submitted periodically by Executive Sleeld were greeted each time with a kind of tribal enthusiasm by all its members. The power of deist religions had come to a sudden halt and the inhabitants of Earth had soon begun to probe the structure of matter. Within just over a hundred years they had mastered the atom.

But then there had been unforeseen consequences. Despite having the means to understand, earthlings continued to believe the story invented by Wilol, not realizing it was a red herring. Not that it was a big deal but when reports about Earth lazily exposed by Sleeld arrived, the Executives felt the urge to bury their heads in their hands. The hilarious look of the rest of the Assembly burned on the faces of the brilliant authors.

Wilol, for his part, had tried to hold back laughter, at least the first few times. When he then stopped caring about even those, the other Executives had taken to casting incredulous glances at him, suspecting that he had foreseen everything from the beginning, only to mock them and the entire Earth population.

The extraordinary effectiveness of the measure showed a peculiar elegance of concept. It had accelerated the evolution of the human intellect by convincing it that it had itself evolved from a rock. Not all at once, of course. First it had taken convincing him that he had descended from a subhuman primate, then that primate descended from another mammal, that mammal from a reptile, and that reptile from an amphibian. The amphibian was great-great-grandchild of a fish great-great-grandchild of a bacterium great-great-grandchild of a broth which, that one, no doubt descended from rock.

Now, since that fourth day of Assembly devoted to the Earth after the period called the Middle Ages, nearly two centuries had passed. The Communist bloc had crumbled and pseudo-unified Europe had made its debut into the world of true monetary powers, those that cannot call themselves such without having enjoyed one of the worst economic crises in history. It had been a few years since the beginning of the new millennium in the earth's calendar, a date that by empathy was also symbolic for the Assembly.

If all went well, the problem of unifying those isolated cells of development would have been solved before mid-century. Then Earth would have been able to make contact with civilizations on other planets, continue its crises on an interplanetary scale and, moreover, without the assistance of the Assembly.  But for now, Executive members had to consider how to guide that planet of warmongers so that everything would go well. Or, at least, not as badly as it probably would.