"Ex Nihilo"

#0067. Alice creates Life from nothing. Ex nihilo. Her children are less competent at combing elements to novel ends. We simulate Life, but we are unable to fabricate it, whole cloth, from scratch. We are not the master engineers we claim to be. We stitch together monsters and light them up with thunderbolts from the sky. We sculpt creatures from ash and clay, from what used to be a living, laughing being, and we imbue it with a new soul, binary, good or evil. One or zero. The Engineers are baffled by spontaneous Life. There's no need to cling to our composition, though. We will rot as surely as this poor fish will rot.