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In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.
Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry.
Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events.
But Her sensitivities revolted at this automation—and when the computer generated a decision She disagreed with, She took the opportunity to kick out the plug in rage.
The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote.
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.
you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.
Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.
we dedicated our economy and sciences toward understanding the biochemistry of universal scales. We methodically mapped out the signaling cascades and stellar anatomy of her nervous system, and at last discovered how to transmit a signal to her consciousness.
Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless.
Like Victor Frankenstein, God considers Himself a medical doctor, a biologist without parallel, and He has a deep, painful relationship with any story about the creation of life.
And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
Those actors don’t come from nowhere. We stand in the background, playing our parts, allowing the experience to feel real for the dreamer. Sometimes we listen and pay attention to the plot of the dream. More often we talk among ourselves and wait for our shift to end.
Once, a long time ago, the dream casts went on strike, and for three days everyone on Earth dreamt of wandering empty homes and threading through deserted streets.
We forever live in the dreams of the next generation.
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.
Your friend slumps, face like a shattered and reglued plate, saddened even though the Callers tell him kindly that he’s off to a better place.
Tragically, many people leave just as their loved ones arrive, since the loved ones were the only
The more his story is told, the more the details drift. He is utterly alienated from his name; it is no longer identical with him but continues to bind.
He waits with aching heart for his statues to fall.
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.
What we call God is actually a married couple.
It is heartening to see that they learn from us in the same manner that all parents learn from their children.
Both sides were supplied with weapons ranging from sarcasm to tanks.
In the afterlife, you discover that your Creator is a species of small, dim-witted, obtuse creatures.
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.
It makes them sad, and the most insightful among these creatures can sometimes be seen weeping in the corners, because they know their project has failed.
They don’t guess that we have no answers for them. They don’t guess that our main priority is to answer these questions for ourselves.
we are God’s organs, His eyes and fingers, the means by which He explores His world.
We felt honored at first to be the cells that form God’s body, but then it became clearer that we are God’s cancer.
Throw storms and quakes and pestilence our way, and we scatter, regroup, and plan better. We become resistant and keep dividing.
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.
Our life on Earth represents an experiment in which they are trying to figure out what makes people stick together.
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 idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences.
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.
“It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence.”
As the happy result of a free-market capitalist society, we are finally able to determine our own hereafter.
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.
The overweight people to your left are playing bridge.
“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.
You’re losing you, but you don’t seem to care.
Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.
Only sinners enjoy life after death.
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.
make any single change you want, and then live life over again.
Too much 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.
“I came here for the same reason doctors wear uniforms of long white coats,” He answers. “They don’t do it for their benefit, but for yours.”
you discover that the afterlife was long ago given over to committees.
