Quantum
Here in the afterlife, everything exists in all possible states at once, even states that are mutually exclusive. This comes as a shock after your Earthly life, where making one choice causes the other choices to disappear. When you become a lover to one, you cannot become a lover to others; when you choose one door, others are lost to you.
In the afterlife you can enjoy all possibilities at once, living multiple lives in parallel. You find yourself simultaneously eating and not eating. You are bowling and not bowling at the same time. You are horseback riding and nowhere near a horse.
A velvety blue angel gently descends to see how you are coming along with this afterlife.
“This is all too confusing for a poor human brain,” you confess to the angel.
The angel rubs his chin. “Maybe we can ease you into this with something simpler, like a day job,” he offers.
You are immediately dropped into a work life of simultaneous contradictions. You are concurrently practicing several careers at once, all the careers you had considered when you were younger. You simultaneously count down your rocket ship launch and defend a criminal client in front of a jury. In the same moments, you scrub your hands for a gallbladder surgery and navigate an eighteen-wheeler down a New Mexico interstate. Gone are the constraints of location and time.
“This,” you tell the angel, “is too much work.”
“Perhaps we could warm you up with a simpler situation,” he considers. “How would you like to be in a closed room, one-on-one with your lover?”
And then you are here. You are simultaneously engaged in her conversation and thinking about something else; she both gives herself to you and does not give herself to you; you find her objectionable and you deeply love her; she worships you and wonders what she might have missed with someone else.
“Thank you,” you tell the angel. “This I’m used to.”
Conservation
What we have deduced about the Big Bang is almost exactly wrong. Instead of a Big Bang, the genesis of the universe consisted of the uneventful, accidental, hushed production of a single quark.
For thousands of millennia, nothing occurred. The solitary particle floated in silence. Eventually it considered moving. Like all elementary particles, it realized that its direction of travel in time was arbitrary. So it shot forward in time and, looking back, it realized that it had left a single pencil stroke across the canvas of space-time.
It raced back through time in the other direction, and saw that it had left another stroke.
The single quark began to dash back and forth in time, and like the individually meaningless actions of an artist’s pencil, a picture began to emerge.
If it feels to you that we’re connected by a larger whole, you’re mistaken: we’re connected by a smaller particle. Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time. Our little quark sweeps like a frenetic four-dimensional phosphor gun, painting the world: each leaf on every tree, every coral in the oceans, each car tire, every bird carried on the wind, all the hair on all the heads in the world. Everything you have ever seen is a manifestation of the same quark, racing around on a space-time superhighway of its own invention.
It began to write the story of the world with sagas of war, love, and exile. As it spun out stories and allowed the plots to grow organically, the quark became an increasingly talented storyteller. The stories took on subtle dimensions. Its protagonists engaged in moral complexity; its antagonists were charming. The quark reached for inspiration into its own history of loneliness in an empty cosmos: the adolescent with his head on the pillow, the divorcée staring out the coffee shop window, the retiree watching infomercials—these became the prophets of the quark’s text.
But the quark did not dwell upon the loneliness. It found that it couldn’t get enough of the love stories and the sex scenes. From the complex network of love stories spawned new generations of children, and the storyboard of the space-time canvas became increasingly rich in characters. The quark pursued the logical flow of each story with dedication and integrity.
Then, on an afternoon that would come to be known by our physicists as the Day of Decline, the quark suffered an epiphany. It realized it had reached the limits of its energy. Its stories had grown too baroque and rococo to be contained by the maximum speed of its pencil strokes.
That was the first day the world began drifting toward incompleteness. The quark despondently resigned itself to the fact that it could keep the show going only if it saved energy. It realized it could accomplish this by drawing only those entities that were being observed by someone. Under this conservation program, the great meadows and mountains were only drawn when there was someone there to look. There was nothing drawn under the sea surface where submarines did not travel; there were no jungles where explorers did not probe.
These measures of savings were already in place before you were born. But things are about to get worse. Even with these energy management programs, the quark remains overextended. Given the directionless and explosive growth of the human chronicle, our quark’s reserves are nearing depletion.
Soon, against its will, it will submit to the fact that it cannot continue the narrative. The physicists have advised us to prepare ourselves emotionally for the end of our world: trees will have fewer leaves, both men and women will go bald, animals will be drawn with less detail. As the decline continues, you will someday turn a familiar corner to find buildings missing. At some point you may look through the missing walls of your bedroom to find your lover only half drawn.
This is the proffered prediction but, fortunately for us, the physicists have slightly miscalculated. Missing from their equations is the fact that the quark loves us too much to allow this to happen. It cares about its creation and knows it would break our hearts to see through the veneer.
So it has a slightly different plan. It will end the world in sleep. All the quark’s creatures will curl up where they are. Morning commuters in suits will sink softly into slumber behind their steering wheels. Highways, locomotives, and subways will slow to a muted halt. Office workers will make themselves drowsily comfortable on the floors and hallways of their tall buildings. The squares of the world’s capitals will drift into silence. Farmers in their wheat fields will doze off as midflight insects touch down softly like snowflakes. Horses will arrest their gallop and relax into a standing slumber. Black jaguars in trees will lower their chins to their paws on the branches. This is how the world will close, not with a bang but a yawn: sleepy and contented, our own falling eyelids serving as the curtain for the play’s end.
This way, the quark’s beloved creations will be unable to witness what happens next. What happens next is the world’s recession, the unraveling of the planet. As the quark slows, its individual pencil strokes become increasingly sparse until the world resembles a crosshatched woodcut. The sleeping bodies become transparent netting through which the other side can be seen. As the pencil marks grow fewer, the asphalt highways become a sparse lacing of black strokes, with nothing below but the other side of the planet, one Earth-diameter away. The world’s canvas devolves into a thin sketch of outlines. The remaining strokes, one by one, disappear from the latticework, drawing the cosmos toward a more complete blankness.
In the end, spent, the quark slows to a halt at the center of infinite emptiness.
Here it takes its time, catching its breath. It will wait several thousand millennia until it regains the stamina and optimism to try again. So there is no afterlife, but instead a long intermission: all of us exist inside the memory of the particle, like a fertilized egg waiting to unpack.
Narcissus
In the afterlife you receive a clear answer about our purpose on the Earth: our mission is to collect data. We have been seeded on this planet as sophisticated mobile cameras. We are equipped with advanced lenses that produce high-resolution visual images, calculating shape and depth from wavelengths of light. The camer
as of the eyes are mounted on bodies that carry them around—bodies that can scale mountains, spelunk caves, cross plains. We are outfitted with ears to pick up air-compression waves and large sensory sheets of skin to collect temperature and texture data. We have been designed with analytic brains that can get this mobile equipment on top of clouds, below the seas, onto the moon. In this way, each observer from every mountaintop contributes a little piece to the vast collection of planetary surface data.
We were planted here by the Cartographers, whose holy books are what we would recognize as maps. Our calling is to cover every inch of the planet’s surface. As we roam, we vacuum data into our sensory organs, and it is for this reason only that we exist.
At the moment of our death we awaken in the debriefing room. Here our lifetime of data collection is downloaded and cross-correlated with the data of those who have passed before us. By this method, the Cartographers integrate billions of viewpoints for a dynamic high-resolution picture of the planet. They long ago realized that the optimal method for achieving a planet-wide map was to drop countless little rugged mobile devices that multiply quickly and carry themselves to all the reaches of the globe. To ensure we spread widely on the surface, they made us restless, longing, lusty, and fecund.
Unlike previous mobile-camera versions, they built us to stand, crane our necks, turn our lenses onto every detail of the planet, become curious, and independently develop new ideas for increased mobility. The brilliance of the design specification was that our pioneering efforts were not prescripted; instead, to conquer the unpredictable variety of landscapes, we were subjected to natural selection to develop dynamic, unforeseen strategies. The Cartographers do not care who lives and dies, as long as there is broad coverage. They are annoyed by worship and genuflection; it slows data collection.
When we awaken in the giant spherical windowless room, it may take a few moments to realize that we are not in a heaven in the clouds; rather, we are deep at the center of the Earth. The Cartographers are much smaller than we are. They live underground and are averse to light. We are the biggest devices they could build: to them we are giants, large enough to jump creeks and scale boulders, an impressive machine ideal for planetary exploration.
The patient Cartographers pushed us out onto a spot on the surface and watched for millennia as we spread like ink over the surface of the planet until every zone took on the color of human coverage, until every region came under the watchful gaze of the compact mobile sensors.
Estimating our progress from their control center, the mobile camera engineers congratulated themselves on a job well done. They waited for humans to spend lifetimes turning their data sensors on patches of ground, the strata of rocks, the distribution of trees.
And yet, despite the initial success, the Cartographers are profoundly frustrated with the results. Despite their planetary coverage and long life spans, the mobile cameras collect very little that is useful for cartography. Instead, the devices turn their ingeniously created compact lenses directly into the gazes of other compact lenses—an ironic way to trivialize the technology. On their sophisticated sensory skin, they simply want to be stroked. The brilliant air-compression sensors are turned toward the whispers of lovers rather than critical planetary data. Despite their robust outdoor design, they have spent their energies building shelters into which they cluster with one another. Despite good spreading on large scales, they clump at small scales. They build communication networks to view pictures of one another remotely when they are apart.
Day after day, with sinking hearts, the Cartographers scroll through endless reels of useless data. The head engineer is fired. He has created an engineering marvel that only takes pictures of itself.
Seed
Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He’s not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He’s not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.
He is as impressed by the gorgeous biological results as the rest of us, and He often spends slow afternoons drifting through jungle canopies or along the sea floor, reveling in the unexpected beauty.
When our species stumbled into sentience, we became awed by His lightning-bolt experiments with electricity, His racing cyclones, His explosive fun with volcanoes. These effects generated more awe and perplexity among the beautiful new species than He had expected. He didn’t want to accept credit for something He did not deserve, but acclaim was tendered without request. He began to find humans irresistible with their unrestricted love. We quickly became His chosen species.
Like us, He is awestruck when He ponders the perfect symphonies of internal organs, the global weather systems, the curious menagerie of marine species. He doesn’t really know how it all works. He’s an explorer, curious and smart, seeking the answers. But with enough of our adoration, the temptation overcame: we assumed the creation was planned, and He no longer corrected the mistake.
Recently He has run into an unforeseen problem: our species is growing smarter. While we were once easy to awe, dragging knuckles and gaping at fire, we have replaced confusion with equations. Tricks we used to fall for have been deduced. Physical laws predict the right answers; the intellectual territories we once gave away now convene under the banner of better explanations. We command theories of physics so strange and complex that God gets blood pressure spikes trying to understand them.
This puts God in a tricky situation. Ancient books relate how God unleashed all His wonders on Egypt. He feels a little defensive now, because He doesn’t have any more wonders to unleash, and He’s increasingly concerned that we would see the strings if He tried. He’s in the position of an amateur magician who performs for small children and suddenly has to play to skeptical adults. All this is reflected in the steady decline of attempted miracles in the past millennia. He is too noble to rely on bluffing, and the thought of being caught and revealed as an amateur embarrasses Him. This is why God has increasingly kept a professional distance from His favorite species. As He grew more withdrawn, saints and martyrs filled the vacuum as His marketing team. He’s ashamed now that He didn’t put a stop to them earlier; instead, he slipped into seclusion as they generated endless chronicles.
But this story has a happy ending. He has recently faced His limitations, and this has brought Him closer to us. Studying our details from His heavenly outpost, He began to understand that His subjects are entirely capable of empathizing with His position. Everywhere He looks He sees positions of strange credit: parents who seed a child’s life but have limited control over it; politicians who briefly steer the ship of state into the dimly lit future; enthusiastic lovers who marry without knowing where the commitment will lead. He studies the accidental co-locations that initiate friendships, inventions, pregnancies, business deals, and car accidents. He realizes that everyone is knocking over dominoes willy-nilly: no one knows where it leads.
In the afterlife, in the warm company of His accidental subjects, God now settles in comfortably, like a grandfather who looks down the long holiday table at his progeny, feeling proud, somehow responsible, and a little surprised.
Graveyard of the Gods
Because the afterlife is a form of justice, we may think that it cannot include animals, who are not held responsible for their actions. Thankfully we would be wrong. It would have been a lonely afterlife without animals, and we have discovered the pleasant truth that the hereafter is full of dogs, mosquitoes, kangaroos, and every other creature. After you arrive and look around for a while, it becomes obvious that anything that once existed enjoys a co
ntinued existence.
You begin to realize that the gift of immortality applies to things we created, as well. The afterlife is full of cell phones, mugs, porcelain knickknacks, business cards, candlesticks, dartboards. Things that were destroyed—cannibalized naval ships, retired computers, demolished cabinetry—all return in full form to enjoy and furnish the hereafter. Contrary to the admonition that we cannot take it with us, anything we create becomes part of our afterlife. If it was created, it survives.
Surprisingly, this rule applies to creations not only material but also mental. So along with the creations that join us in the afterlife are the gods we created. Lonely in a coffee shop you might meet Resheph, the Semitic god of plague and war. The head of a gazelle grows from his forehead; he gazes wistfully out the window at passersby. In the grocery store aisle you may bump into the Babylonian death god Nergal, the Greek Apollo, or the Vedic Rudra. In the shopping mall you’ll spot gods of flames and moons, goddesses of sexual acts and fertility, gods of fallen warhorses and runaway slaves. Despite their incognito clothing, they are typically detected by their gargantuan size and such characteristics as lion heads, multiple arms, or reptilian tails.
They are lonely, in large part because they’ve lost their audiences. They used to cure disease, act as intermediaries between the living and dead, and dole out crops and protection and revenge for the loyal. Now no one knows their names. They never asked to be born, yet they find themselves ensnared here for eternity. Only rarely is there a local resurgence of belief in an old god, a small clumping of fans, but such bursts are always short-lived. The gods recognize that they are stuck here with their dealt hand of cards: a vengeful personality, fire for eyes, dysfunctional kin, and eternity on their hands.