Fiction: He Believed Himself A God by Christopher K. Munroe

He believed himself a god, there in his little bed.

They told him he was not when they brought him into his small, well lit room and tied him down, but they didn’t know a damned thing. Belief is what godhood was all about—for what is godhood without faith—and he believed, firmly and truly, that he was a god.

And the time, he decided as he lay there, had come for him to prove it.

He first stretched his consciousness out in all directions, feeling every mind in the city, then the country, then the world, seeing and hearing and touching and tasting everything they did, everywhere.

He knew it all, he could feel it, nothing was hidden from him. Nothing could be. He understood everyone because he was everyone, so there was no need to hide.

It felt good to live inside these little people’s lives, to share in experiences both grand and mundane, but eventually he found he wanted more. And he would have it.

He could do anything in this world that he’d created; he touched every life and, if he chose, he could end it. The weather would change at his command, and, if he wished it, the very earth and sky would tear asunder. Ragnarok itself was within his command, Armageddon but a whim.

But he was a just and benevolent god, and instead of burning his world and all the people in it he stretched out his consciousness still farther, setting out to explore the universe. In seconds, he saw more than any human mind could comprehend, taking it all in, seeing galaxies expand and contract, suns ignite, age, then fade to dying embers in what seemed like a blink of an eye, and in doing so he grew to understand things mankind had wondered since first it looked to the sky and questioned what was out there.

He knew how the universe began, because it was he who had created the universe.

He knew how the universe would end, because it was he who would be the one to end it.

This knowledge made him glad.

He was everywhere, he was everything, omnipotent and all knowing, and it satisfied him endlessly. He’d conquered all limitation, he was at last unbound, beyond morality, neither good nor evil, beyond fear, for nothing could frighten him, beyond doubt, because he simply was all. Nothing in the universe could oppose him.

Somewhere, in the back of his mind, a small, terrified voice screamed. It knew he was simply a man in a bed, tied in by restraints, drooling and muttering and shitting himself, drugged and helpless in a hospital, deluding himself with a lunatic fantasy. But when he conquered this voice too, there was nothing left in his creation that would stand against him.

Nothing could dare.

He smiled, there in his little bed, and believed himself a god.