Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

by David Eagleman

Everyone is a brother to all, and for the first time an idea has been realized that never came to fruition on Earth: true equality.

So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell.

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.

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.

At some point in the development of their society, these creatures began to wonder: Why are we here? What is the purpose of our existence? These turned out to be very difficult questions to answer. So difficult, in fact, that rather than attacking the questions directly, they decided it might be easier to build supercomputing machines devoted to finding the answers. So they invested the labor of tens of generations to engineer these. We are their machines.

that one of His best gifts—the ability to have faith in an unseen hereafter—has backfired.

It feels so much like the real thing that in the afterlife you only rarely wonder whether you’ve lived all this before, haunted occasionally by déjà vu, holding a book in your hand and not knowing whether this is the first time or a replay from aeons past.

He realizes that everyone is knocking over dominoes willy-nilly: no one knows where it leads.