They her­alded it as the begin­ning of mankind’s Golden Age, once they worked out what was going on and realised that they could use it. But this gold was tar­nished and fell apart at even the light­est touch. It was to be the short­est age in our his­tory. Opin­ions dif­fer, of course, on exactly when the Golden Age should be con­sid­ered to have started, but regard­less of your pre­ferred date, the length of the age in months could be counted on the fin­gers of one hand. It’s a shame, it really is. It started so well, but it ended so very, very badly. How­ever many tons of blaz­ing rock it was that fin­ished the Cre­ta­ceous had noth­ing on this.

Like most dis­cov­er­ies that were to change the world, it came to those on the fringe before it came to the masses. So it was that the first to encounter the phe­nom­e­non were those who believed most strongly in dreams that soci­ety did not share — the evan­ge­lists and faith heal­ers, the for­tune tellers and occultists, the psy­chics and medi­ums. Slowly but surely, it was dawn­ing on these peo­ple that what they did really and absolutely worked. They began to pro­duce evi­dence, sta­tis­ti­cally and sci­en­tif­i­cally reli­able evi­dence, that they could heal by the power of Jesus or that the dead could speak through them.

They started to talk about their dreams, as well, although we of course dis­missed it as New Age non­sense. Maybe if we’d paid atten­tion this early, we might have worked out what was hap­pen­ing. But no, we just let them bab­ble to them­selves their strange notions that they were dream­ing con­sec­u­tive pieces of one larger dream, and that when they died in their dreams they did not dream anymore.

It must have been a pretty inter­est­ing time to be a sci­en­tist, too, back in the early days of the Golden Age. Sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies were com­ing thick and fast, it was as if almost every the­ory that was put for­ward just hap­pened to be true. On March 3^rd, a chem­i­cal was dis­cov­ered that was an effec­tive treat­ment for HIV. On March 14^th, they found a cure for can­cer. Mid-March also saw great leaps towards the under­stand­ing of “Alpha The­ory”, a refine­ment of so-called M-theory and our best attempt yet at a fun­da­men­tal under­stand­ing of the universe.

The sta­tis­ti­cians went crazy. The chances of these advances all hap­pen­ing so sud­denly were so phe­nom­e­nally low that peo­ple were sure that there must be a com­mon cause. They called what they were research­ing “meta-science” to start with, but it is from these neb­u­lous begin­nings that prob­a­bly the shortest-lived research field ever delved into, Shap­ing sci­ence, was born.

It was at about that time that the gov­ern­ment launched the great Men­tal Health Inquiry. It was becom­ing appar­ent that more and more of those who worked at men­tal health hos­pi­tals, who of course were analysed by a psy­chol­o­gist and pro­nounced sane before being given the job, were them­selves being com­mit­ted. The hos­pi­tals were los­ing their staff faster than they could replace them, and rumours started spread­ing about what might be going on inside their wards.

The gov­ern­ment launched their inquiry, send­ing inves­ti­ga­tors to every men­tal health insti­tu­tion in the coun­try. The few that returned sane and unharmed described vividly what it was like inside — “as if every patient’s delu­sions were real, all at once, fight­ing for supremacy with each other,” one said.

They ordered every men­tal hos­pi­tal to be shut off from the out­side world. Some­how, they con­vinced us that it was a good idea. More than ever, I guess, we believed what the media told us, almost as if what the news­pa­pers said was real and the world we saw around us was just a poor reflection.

There was another gov­ern­ment inquiry not long after­wards, one that was per­haps more impor­tant, but that one never returned its results. It was an inquiry into SSDS, or Sud­den Sleep Death Syn­drome. Barely even recog­nised, much less given a name, a year ago, it is now a fact of life that we live with and die with. This is the end of our Cre­ta­ceous, this is our meteorite.

The lat­est esti­mates of the Earth’s pop­u­la­tion are extremely unre­li­able as there are entire coun­tries with which we have no com­mu­ni­ca­tion, but they put the value at some­where around a mil­lion. Just a mil­lion. Six bil­lion, to a mil­lion, in a month. It’s still falling, too, and it doesn’t look like it’ll stop until SSDS has killed us all.

They told us it was all to do with our dreams, and they gave us pills to stop us dream­ing. Those who took them went mad, and it still didn’t stop them dying. Noth­ing does, noth­ing works. There is no sal­va­tion. God walks the Earth, they say, but He can­not help us. There are peo­ple who say they’ve seen him, and I don’t doubt it. There’s peo­ple who say Elvis is alive, too, and I believe them as well. I saw at least three of him in one of those men­tal asy­lums before they closed them down and killed every­one inside.

It’s come down to that, now. Belief. Shap­ing. It makes what lit­tle remains of our life bet­ter, but it can’t stop the inevitable.

So it came to be that, in the clos­ing year of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, we finally began to under­stand the world. Sci­ence didn’t give us the answer — they aban­doned their pre­cious Alpha The­ory before long. We realised that the uni­verse was us. We tell exis­tence what it is, and exis­tence in turn tells us what we are.

As the pop­u­la­tion fell away, we each began to have more and more con­trol. Not just over soci­ety, but over the world itself, right down to the atoms — or, should I say, the thoughts — that make it up. Because we believed, things came true.

We believed that April was a month of sun­shine and show­ers, and so it was.

We believed that food that was bad for you tasted bet­ter because of it, and so it was. Have you tried a choco­late bar recently?

We believed that Judge­ment Day was com­ing and that God walked the Earth, and so it was.

Chil­dren believed that there were mon­sters under the bed, and so there were. They kill almost as many as SSDS does.

Finally, because it was real, it was sci­ence, we believed in Shap­ing itself. We gave it a name, we gave it power. While the sci­en­tists sat read­ing and writ­ing in lab­o­ra­to­ries, coin­ing phrases like “cas­cade” and “res­o­nance”, while the philoso­phers and psy­chol­o­gists became the mod­ern era’s prophets of Armaged­don, we embraced our new power while we still had a chance.

We cre­ated and we destroyed with a mere touch, a mere word, a mere thought. Our houses became palaces and fortresses, our wal­lets became chests of gold, the mea­gre con­tents of our fridges became ban­quets fit for roy­alty, our filthy towns became gleam­ing sea­side resorts. We had any­thing and every­thing we could ever want. We became magi­cians; we became gods.

It’s just a shame that peo­ple aren’t all nice. For every thou­sand cit­i­zens, happy in their new­found par­adise, there was one bent on destruc­tion, or on con­quest, or on caus­ing ter­ror. But that’s all it took.

Now, the sky burns. It’s like a beau­ti­ful sun­set all day long, and we maybe even would enjoy it if it wasn’t get­ting harder and harder to breathe. The world is a waste­land, now, full of scorched earth and decayed build­ings and radiation.

We tried to fix it, we really did. Tried to put every­thing back to how it was before. But, in the end, it’s all a mat­ter of belief. We can’t stop SSDS. We can’t stop the end com­ing. So, deep in our hearts, we know that we can’t fix every­thing, can’t put every­thing back to how it was.

There are peo­ple, a bare few of the sur­vivors, that say they won’t fall vic­tim to SSDS, because they’ll become gods. Not in the small, self­ish ways in which we built our­selves our pri­vate Edens, but absolutely. Only when the dreams have claimed us all, only when exis­tence finally ends and they are all that’s left, they say, will they be able to rewrite the world from scratch.

They’re crazy, of course. But in this age, the Golden Age, the age of lost par­adises and deadly dreams spread­ing like plagues across the bar­ren world, we need all the sav­iours we can get.