Fingers dripping, urgent flurry of guidance. Water slips through and falls to ground then finds its own way.
Wandering off and cannot be recaptured. In that moment the trickle slipped beside a little watershed where ground fell away to one side.
Flows over a sand ridge then past fractured gibbers where a deeper line flicks it abruptly sideways.
What was anticipated in that first moment sometimes happened sometimes did not, the surge of intellectual strength at its limits of power against the void could never win but might just do enough.
That was the time that could and did limit the error, even though the future events were far out of sight and it was unable to focus working blind at the dark edge of ability and knowledge.
In anticipation 100 million years hence would come one of those sculpted moments that could not afford to fail. All its attention was on what would happen when the first coalesced galaxies caused stars to adhere.
No carbon in the universe yet, but there was a thin line of genius intent amongst chaos that itself was exquisitely concentrated, because just at that moment events of increasingly exponential possibility began to be caused, such as the triple alpha process in the helium furnace inside a newborn star, combined with an impossible but required resonance of the carbon-12 atom, which produced suddenly carbon in massive quantity from helium where it had never existed.
So what the superintellect had been able to see in that first moment, in its trembling minds eye lens, was that even if it would not survive, it could dream of Niles and Amazons and, if it worked out, one more close run thing on the horizon from that moment of creation, where the sharp rock became dislodged one hazy afternoon only because events had been prepared and smoothed along the way.
Had it done enough that the tiny heartbeat fire would start deep within the dislodged rock? Which proceeded to sit up crookedly flip its lid and begin to talk, try to figure then look around for something to pick up.