Return to planet Earth

With astral buoyancy, I float through interstellar space, tanning my diffuse, malefic psyche in the pleasant flow of cosmic rays. I swim upwards through delicate veils of pink and purple nebulae, then zig-zag among golden star-clusters, until I ascend above the galactic plane. There, I watch the spiral arms slowly rotating beneath me, my cold, iron will equilibrating with the solitude of space.

Off in a far corner, a red supergiant goes supernova, flaring like a nuclear match, a shockwave immediately billowing through the surrounding gas cloud. A billion stars lie beneath me, some of them providing the conditions for life and civilisation to flourish on nearby rocks. I can sense the souls on all these planets, feel their exhilaration and desperation, their love and hatred. I can hear the screams of the murdered, and detect the insatiable lust of the murderers. In time, I will harvest all these souls, good and bad; drain them of their life-force to feed my own.

I like coming up here. I can clear my head, and plot my triumph over geological and astrophysical time-scales, like an irresistible fourth law of thermodynamics. Glitches and momentary set-backs, of course, are inevitable: a necessary evil, incapable of stemming my necessary evil. All I need is a small opportunity, a platform from which I can re-insert myself into popular consciousness...

And, hullo, what's this? An invitation to appear on BBC's Question Time? Why, of course! Perfect. Now, all I need to do is re-assume corporeal form for a period of time. Let me see...this always hurts a trifle...bipedal form required rather than serpentine, remember...damn, that hurts a lot! Ah, there we go.

Planet Earth was always a favourite of mine: so much wonderful raw material to play with...