And the Collectors need to understand what men and women do about the momentum of their individual life plans, when in the rush and glare of the masses they are put together as they move in opposite directions. Can they turn the momentum of choices and plans? The Collectors sharpen their pencils against their asteroids and make careful study.
They research men and women who are not naturally adherent but are held together by circumstance. Those pressed together by obligation. Those who learn to be happy by forcing adhesion. Those who cannot live without adhesion and those who fight it; those who don’t need it and those who sabotage it; those who find adhesion when they least expect it.
When you die, you are brought before a panel of Collectors. They debrief you and struggle to understand your motivations. Why did you decide to break off this relationship? What did you appreciate about that relationship? What was wrong with so-and-so, who seemed to have everything you wanted? After trying and failing to understand you, they send you back to see if another round of experimentation makes it any clearer to them.
It is for this reason only that our universe still exists. The Collectors are past deadline and over budget, but they are having a hard time bringing this study to a conclusion. They are mesmerized; the brightest among them cannot quantify it.
Angst
As humans we spend our time seeking big, meaningful experiences. So the afterlife may surprise you when your body wears out. We expand back into what we really are—which is, by Earth standards, enormous. We stand ten thousand kilometers tall in each of nine dimensions and live with others like us in a celestial commune. When we reawaken in these, our true bodies, we immediately begin to notice that our gargantuan colleagues suffer a deep sense of angst.
Our job is the maintenance and upholding of the cosmos. Universal collapse is imminent, and we engineer wormholes to act as structural support. We labor relentlessly on the edge of cosmic disaster. If we don’t execute our jobs flawlessly, the universe will re-collapse. Ours is complex, intricate, and important work.
After three centuries of this toil, we have the option to take a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into lower-dimensional creatures. We project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies that we call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth. The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up, and start again. When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse—instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.
Those are good vacations that we take on Earth, replete with our little dramas and fusses. The mental relaxation is unspeakably precious to us. And when we’re forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of the solar winds, tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.
Oz
At the outset of the afterlife you find a scroll that informs you, in the scrawl of an ancient scribe, that you now have the opportunity to meet the Creator of the universe—but only if you are among the most courageous. You wonder what magnitude of maker could require such bravery to be in His presence. You imagine a face larger than the orbit of the moon, a voice louder than a hundred blasts of Vesuvius, and you begin to suspect that your limited imagination is inadequate for the numinous experience in store.
You hear a thunderous booming voice in the distance, and your legs begin to shake. You look inward: Am I brave enough to handle this?
A great journey awaits. Along the way you face fears and conquer them, identify streams of self-doubt and ford them, discern the peaks of your arrogance and descend them, spot the clouds of self-pity that hang over you and hike out from under them. By the time the road ends, you emerge with renewed confidence—ready, you believe, to meet your maker, to face the face, to perceive a glimpse of the mastermind who crafted the masterpiece.
You approach the door of a great castle. Even now, the booming voice hanging over the landscape causes you to question: Am I among the most brave? Do I possess what is required? You throw your weight against the door, enter a grand foyer, and follow a hallway to a grand room.
And there you see the face. Indeed, it is larger than the moon’s orbit. It is a sight beyond the pens of lyric poets. It is the ocean in its terrifying power and rhythmic grace. It is a face that looks like your father and like your mother; it commands the knowledge of a thousand scholars, the empathy of a thousand lovers, the mystery of a thousand strangers.
It is a face that makes the journey worthwhile. It is a face worthy of the master of the universe.
You quiver and shake, hypnotized, you in your cotton-mouthed ecstasy.
The volcanic voice booms forth, blowing back your hair. “Are you brave?”
“Yes,” you stammer. “That’s why I’m here.”
The valleys of the lips curl a little, as though to laugh.
Then you hear an electrical buzzing sound. The face grows wavy with horizontal scanning lines and disappears in a flash of phosphors.
Nothing remains in the great space but a small yellow curtain where the face used to be. The curtain pulls back. A wrinkled hand pushes up glasses on the face of a wrinkled little man. He is gout-ridden, has a resting tremor, and a vialful of colorful pills. He is stooped. He is swaybacked and balding. You look at each other.
He says, “It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence.”
Great Expectations
As the happy result of a free-market capitalist society, we are finally able to determine our own hereafter. It has become privatized and computerized. For a reasonable price, you can download your consciousness into a computer to live forever in a virtual world. In this way, you can rage against the dying of the light by choosing an afterlife that is fast, furious, and spicy—the crystallization of your fantasies. You can predefine your lovers, maximize your sexual allure, zoom around electric pumping cities in your choice of a dozen Porsches. You get firmer muscles, a perfect complexion, and a flat washboard belly. Innumerable virgins cheerfully await your arrival. Cell phones and jet packs are standard issue. Sizzling cocktail parties run around the clock.
It is no surprise that everyone is lining up for this avant-garde afterlife. Instead of slipping into worm fodder, it is far better to choose the moment of your own death and elect the finest of all possible hereafters. The only ones not signing up are a few religious folks who claim they’re waiting for their Heaven, imagining they will discover themselves in an afterlife of biblical description. The Company, having long ago outgrown the concept of God, attempts to explain to these people that their fantasies have cursed their available realities. The religious counter that God’s greatest gift to them is the ability to look beyond what their eyes can see and have faith in something grander. That’s not a gift, that’s a trap, the Company retorts. It’s like having a wonderful lover available but desiring an unattainable movie star instead. The religious don’t sign up and eventually slip off into a neutral death in a lonely hospital bed.
For the rest of us, the transition into the virtual hereafter is painless: when your prescheduled moment arrives, you come in to the office and recline in the red dental chair. The Company nurse assures you that you will feel as though you’ve closed your eyes in their office and without delay opened them again in your glorious virtual afterworld. A technician presses a button and you become pulverized by a laser beam. A copy of the three-dimensional structure of your brain is re-created in zeros and ones on a cluster of hyperthreading processors.
There’s only one caveat: the neuroscientists and engineers who have developed this procedure have no way of
proving it works. After all, the pulverized have no way to report back. However, it is generally agreed that nothing can go wrong with the download: all of our physical theories predict that reconstructing an exact replica of the brain will reproduce exactly the feeling of being that person. So everyone presumes that it works.
Sadly, it does not work. Its failure is not due to bad engineers or unscrupulous businessmen, but instead stems from a misunderstanding of the cosmic scheme. Your essence cannot be downloaded because your essence (which the Company did not believe existed as a separate entity) gets spirited off to Heaven. Despite your excitement about your chosen afterlife, it turns out that God exists after all and has gone through great trouble and expense to construct an afterlife for us. So you awaken on soft clouds, encircled by harp-strumming angels, finding yourself swathed in a white toga.
The problem is that this isn’t what you wanted. You’ve just paid good money for an afterlife of fast cars and charisma and drinking and lovemaking. This Heaven, by comparison, seems hopelessly inadequate and stale. You’re wearing an ill-fitting white sheet instead of an antigravity jet pack. Endless white columns are the replacement for pumping electric cityscapes. There’s manna and milk at the buffet instead of sushi and sake. The harp music is maddeningly slow. And you’re still as unattractive as ever. There’s nothing to do here. The overweight people to your left are playing bridge.
All this recent disappointment has put God in an awkward position. He nowadays spends much of His time trying to comfort His subjects scattered across the cloudscapes. “Your fantasies have cursed your realities,” He explains, wringing His hands. “The Company offered you no evidence that it would work; why did you believe them?” Although He doesn’t say it, everyone knows what He’s thinking when He retires to His bed at night: that one of His best gifts—the ability to have faith in an unseen hereafter—has backfired.
Mirrors
When you think you’ve died, you haven’t actually died. Death is a two-stage process, and where you wake up after your last breath is something of a Purgatory: you don’t feel dead, you don’t look dead, and in fact you are not dead. Yet.
Perhaps you thought the afterlife would be something like a soft white light, or a glistening ocean, or floating in music. But the afterlife more closely resembles the feeling of standing up too quickly: for a confused moment, you forget who you are, where you are, all the personal details of your life. And it only gets stranger from here.
First, everything becomes dark in a blindingly bright way, and you feel a smooth stripping away of your inhibitions and a washing away of your power to do anything about it. You start to lose your ego, which is intricately related to the spiriting away of your pride. And then you lose your self-referential memories.
You’re losing you, but you don’t seem to care.
There’s only a little bit of you remaining now, the core of you: naked consciousness, bare as a baby.
To understand the meaning of this afterlife, you must remember that everyone is multifaceted. And since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives—often surprising to you—helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail.
In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you’ve left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe.
Here in this Purgatory, all the people with whom you’ve ever come in contact are gathered. The scattered bits of you are collected, pooled, and unified. The mirrors are held up in front of you. Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.
Perpetuity
If you wake up and find yourself in this suburb, you’ll know you were a sinner. Not that the accommodations aren’t nice; there are televisions here with many stations to choose from. You have neighbors on all sides of you, with whom you interact occasionally. There are shelves brimming with books that tell good but implausible adventure stories. The children here are sent to school, and the adults go to work. Careers are easy and the groceries are cheap.
You learn that this is called Heaven. We live close to God here. The only mysterious part is that all the good people you knew—the samaritans, the saints, the generous, the altruists, the selfless, the philanthropists—are not here. You inquire whether they have been sent on to a better place, a super-Heaven, but discover that these good people are rotting in coffins, the foodstuff of maggots. Only sinners enjoy life after death.
There have been many theories about why God would arrange things this way. Everyone has a hypothesis, and it’s the customary topic of discussion at barbecue cookouts. Why are we the ones rewarded with an afterlife? It seems clear that God doesn’t much like the inhabitants here; He rarely visits us. But He wants to make sure He keeps us alive.
The woman at the coffee shop insists He is keeping the bad ones around like the Romans kept gladiators: at some point we will fight to the death for His amusement. Your neighbor across the street theorizes that we are being stockpiled to wage war against another God in a neighboring universe, and only the sinful make useful soldiers.
But they’re both wrong. In truth, God lives a life very much like ours—we were created not only in His image but in His social situation as well. God spends most of His time in pursuit of happiness. He reads books, strives for self-improvement, seeks activities to stave off boredom, tries to keep in touch with fading friendships, wonders if there’s something else He should be doing with His time. Over the millennia, God has grown bitter. Nothing continues to satisfy. Time drowns Him. He envies man his brief twinkling of a life, and those He dislikes are condemned to suffer immortality with Him.
The Unnatural
When you arrive in the afterlife, the Technicians inform you of the great opportunity awaiting you: make any single change you want, and then live life over again. Their pamphlet suggests that you might choose to make yourself two inches taller, or give everyone on the Earth a better sense of humor, or make birds talk. You then get to rerun that choice on the Earth to see what happens. They inform you proudly that this is a unique experiential education program.
Having just attended your own funeral, you may be tempted to propose a clever choice: you want to be the one who eradicates death altogether from our planet.
Just be forewarned: if you propose this, a kind Technician may pull you aside to let you know that you have tried this path before in your previous reruns of life, and it inevitably led to frustration.
Are you telling me this because it will put you out of a job? you ask.
No, the Technician replies.
Is this because death is incurable? you ask.
No, the Technician says.
In that case I would like to have my wish fulfilled.
Suit yourself, replies the Technician.
So in your new life you grow into a famous medical visionary. You argue that there is no such thing as a natural death and raise millions to fund your research. You program computers to calculate all possible mutations of viruses before they happen and design prophylactic treatments against them. You compute the exact effects of every medication on the normal cycles of the body. Your aggressive anti-death program is a success: after the final breath of an incurably ill elderly woman, you are able to announce that hers represented the last natural death. Great celebrations ensue. People begin to live forever, healing just as they would when they were young, free at last from the overhanging cloud of mortality. You are greatly admired.
But eventually, just as the Technician warned, your success begins to lose its shine. People come to discover that the end of death is the death of motivation. Too m
uch life, it turns out, is the opiate of the masses. There is a noticeable decline in accomplishment. People take more naps. There’s no great rush.
In an attempt to salvage their once-dynamic lives, people begin to set suicide dates for themselves. It is a welcome echo of the old days of finite life spans, but superior because of the opportunity to say goodbye and complete your estate planning. That works well for a while, rekindling the incentive to live strongly. But eventually people begin to take the system with less than the appropriate seriousness, and if some large new development occurs, such as a new relationship, they simply postpone the suicide date. Whole cadres of procrastinators grow. When they reschedule a new date, others ridicule them by calling it a death threat. There develops enormous social pressure to follow through with the suicides. At long last, after many abuses of the system, it is legislated that there is no changing a preset death date.
But eventually it comes to be appreciated that not just the finitude of life but also the surprise timing of death is critical to motivation. So people begin to set ranges for their death dates. In this new framework, their friends throw surprise parties for them—like birthday parties—except they jump out from behind the couch and kill them. Since you never know when your friends are going to schedule your party, it reinstills the carpe diem attitude of former years. Unfortunately, people begin to abuse the surpriseparty system to extinguish their enemies under the protection of necrolegislation.
In the end, great masses of rioters break into your medical complex, kick the plugs out of the computers, and once again have a great celebration to mark the end of the last unnatural life, and you end up back in the Technicians’ waiting room.