Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

by David Eagleman

The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.

you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

And that is the curse of this room: since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

However, they overlooked a problem: to build a machine smarter than you, it has to be more complex than you—and the ability to understand the machine begins to slip away.

And God suddenly bolts up in His bed with a revelation: everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.

You could permanently blow the cover, but the Directors are confident that you won’t; they know you will sink to any depth of infidelity to preserve the lie for your eventual return to it.

In this way, death switches have established themselves as a cosmic joke on mortality. Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.

A consequence of this cosmic scheme may surprise you: when you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.

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.”