My body is tired, so tired, but my mind cannot rest. It is like a great drum is pulsing inside my head, beating out a heart-rhythm, so that flashes of light web my vision with each thud.

Last night I did not sleep. All night my body sat, unmoving, before the life-maker, while I was transported to another world. A world where the sentiments of my life do not exist, nor the thoughts of my being. A world that does not exist but when I choose to create it; a world where the people may be as I choose them, the happenings of life as I predict. And I was not I for this time; not I but any of the people I could see, part of their thoughts; their feelings; one with them. I felt joyous when they laughed, I felt distraught when they lost a loved one, and my physical body left behind reflected the emotions, laughing and crying and displaying the facial expressions as I experienced them so that one who had been regarding would nigh believe I was distracted.

It is a wonder, a creation far beyond one the greatest wise men could ever think up. So this is what the future is like – not flying messengers and thought readers but technology to remove oneself from one’s life when it becomes overly tiresome and transport oneself into any other life.

These lives may be only a day long or fifty years in length; however when I return only two hours have passed for my physical body. They are anywhere, and anytime, spanning the range of time and space, breaking the laws of physics. Some of them are from times long gone, some of them from times to come, some indeed from no time, or many times all combined. And the places – I have been to many places on this Earth, and to places that are impossible to reach, like the Moon or the Sun. I have been to places that don’t exist, to planets outside of our solar system. I have been to the Garden of Eden at the dawn of the world, I have seen the splitting of the Red Sea, I have watched the Earth as it exploded at the end of time. I have consorted with speaking, manlike animals and flown with no wings, I have done magic beyond what is believed magic, and I have walked inside buildings in places where no building is built.

When I return to my body when the life ends I retain some aspects of the temporary life I have just lived. I may speak in the accents of one of those in the other life, I may carry the face of one in my heart, I may pass my days in wondering what they are doing now. But it does not last, with nothing to recall and make them clearer, and they fade out after a while.

And each man has a life-maker to himself in his house, a big one for all the family to share and a little one for each person. It is like a paradise – Man is able to choose his life as he wishes, create impossible things, rule the world. Man has become a god, and God has ceased to exist. But there is no war. There is no fighting in a world where all desires can be fulfilled at whim, created in a chosen life.

Things are not as we have known them to be and to stay as God created them; each man may choose what he would be and appear to others not as himself; each man may speak and aspire as he wishes without fear of retribution; there is no distinction between man, woman and beast. All are considered equal and have equal rights.

Truly mankind has become a race of gods.