Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

by David Eagleman

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...