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.

Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless.

And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

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.

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.

He says, “It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence.”

“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.

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.

Prism God resolved at the outset that He wanted every human to participate in the afterlife. But the plans weren’t thought out to completion, and immediately He began to run up against some confusion about age. How old should each person be in the afterlife? Should this grandmother exist here at her age of death, or should she be allowed to live as a young woman, recognizable to her first lover but not to her granddaughter? He decided it was unfair to keep people the age they were at the end of their lives, when much of their beauty and alacrity had been worn down. Allowing everyone to live as a young adult proved an unviable solution because the afterlife quickly degenerated into unbounded sexual pursuits. And at middle ages they talked only about their children and mortgages, making conversations in the afterlife tedious. God finally landed on an ingenious solution while watching light diffract through a prism. So when you arrive here, you are split into your multiple selves at all possible ages. The you that existed as a single identity is now all ages at once. These pieces of you no longer get older but remain ageless into perpetuity. The yous have transcended time. This takes some getting used to. The different beams of you might run into each other at the grocery store, like separate people do in Earth life. Your seventy-six-year-old self may revisit his favorite creek and run into your eleven-year-old self. Your twenty-eight-year-old self may break up with a lover i...

Platoons and plays and stores and congresses do not end—they simply move on to a different dimension. They are things that were created and existed for a time, and therefore by the cosmic rules they continue to exist in a different realm.

After all, you do not bring your kidney and liver and heart to the afterlife with you—instead, you gain independence from the pieces that make you up.

Subjunctive In the afterlife you are judged not against other people, but against yourself. Specifically, you are judged against what you could have been. So the afterworld is much like the present world, but it now includes all the yous that could have been. In an elevator you might meet more successful versions of yourself, perhaps the you that chose to leave your hometown three years earlier, or the you who happened to board an airplane next to a company president who then hired you. As you meet these yous, you experience a pride of the sort you feel for a successful cousin: although the accomplishments don’t directly belong to you, it somehow feels close. But soon you fall victim to intimidation. These yous are not really you, they are better than you. They made smarter choices, worked harder, invested the extra effort into pushing on closed doors. These doors eventually broke open for them and allowed their lives to splash out in colorful new directions. Such success cannot be explained away by a better genetic hand; instead, they played your cards better. In their parallel lives, they made better decisions, avoided moral lapses, did not give up on love so easily. They worked harder than you did to correct their mistakes and apologized more often. Eventually you cannot stand hanging around these better yous. You discover you’ve never felt more competitive with anyone in your life. You try to mingle with the lesser yous, but it doesn’t assuage the sting. In truth, you ...