There was very little in the oceans that the creature had not encountered before, and nothing that it had so far not tried, successfully, to eat. But on this particular occasion its attention was caught by a small bright glowing mass, a clump of atoms that vaguely resembled a cluster of blue fish eggs. The creature, always hungry and open to trying new foodstuffs, wolfed the blue mass down and proceeded on its none-too-merry way, already on the lookout for even more tasty and interesting things to eat.

It had been swimming for a mile or so when it began to consider what all of this hunting and eating was about, really. I mean, it swam so it could eat, and it ate so it could keep swimming, and that was the sum of its existence, as far as it could tell. It wasn’t much of a life when you thought about it, which it hadn’t until only moments before, and there had to be more to it all than that. What would happen, it wondered, if it sent other creatures out to hunt on its behalf while it put its fins up and made plans for the future, among which were the enslavement of the planet’s population—hey, we’re on a planet?—followed by the building of spaceships and the further enslavement of lots of other planets’ populations, upon which it could then feed to its belly’s content? That sounded great! Oh, and apparently the star—star?—around which its planet was orbiting was dying, so the sooner it got started on this whole business of building spaceships, whatever they were, the better.

Before it could get to work on the fine print of its grand design, a larger, even toothier, and even hungrier monster bit it in half, and the creature’s brain had barely time enough to think, Oh, well, that’s just great, that is, before its divided body was chomped to mincemeat and began the great journey through the digestive tract of another.

Whereupon that large, hungry creature began to wonder about the nature of good and evil, and how evil seemed much more fun, all things considered, and so this continued for a time until there was an unfamiliar popping sound in the ocean’s depths, and into existence popped a wobbly being with one eye. It was wearing a very fetching top hat tied with a piece of elastic beneath what passed for its chin, just to ensure that its hat didn’t float away, as it was very fond of that hat.

The massive ocean monster, all teeth and gills and eyes and horns and scales, looked at the new arrival, opened its jaws, and prepared to chew, but before it could start chomping, the little hat-wearer shot into its mouth and down its gullet. The monster gave a kind of fishy shrug and swam on, distracted from the peculiar appearance of its latest meal by all of this evil stuff, which sounded just fascinating.

Deep inside the monster’s gut, the gelatinous mass, whose name was Crudford, Esq., began searching through half-digested flesh and bone. It stank something awful in there, but Crudford, cheerful and contented by nature, didn’t mind. In fact, he even whistled a happy tune just to pass the time. Eventually, somewhere in the newly consumed remains of a giant segmented eel, he found what he had been looking for: a small group of atoms that glowed a bright blue. Crudford lifted his hat, the elastic stretching as he did so, and retrieved from the top of his head a glass bottle. The bottle was sealed with a cork, and the blue atoms in the monster’s belly found a kind of reflection in a similar, but larger, cluster already contained inside. Crudford removed the cork and carefully added the new atoms to the old before resealing the bottle and placing it safely under his hat. His jellied features split into a deep smile, and he patted his hat happily.