Sum (4 page)

For a while we worried about a separation from God, but our fears were eased when the prophets revealed a new understanding: we are God’s organs, His eyes and fingers, the means by which He explores His world. We all felt better about this deep sense of connection—we are a part of God’s biology.

But it slowly grew clearer that we have less to do with His sensory organs and more to do with His internal organs. The atheists and the theists agreed that it is only through us that He lives. When we abandon him, He dies. 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.

He’s lost control of the small parts that constitute Him. We are dividing and multiplying. God and His doctors have tried to stanch the growth, the tumorous sprouting that makes His breathing difficult and endangers His circulation. But we’re too robust. Throw storms and quakes and pestilence our way, and we scatter, regroup, and plan better. We become resistant and keep dividing.

He has finally reached His peace with this and lies quietly in His bed at the convergence of green antiseptic corridors.

Sometimes He wonders if we’re doing it on purpose. Are His beloved subjects yearning to know His body, to metastasize throughout His greatness by way of His arterial system? He doesn’t suspect that we’re innocent of the journey.

Then He begins to notice something. While He cannot stop us or hurt us, there’s something that can. He watches us turning to the smaller scales to battle our own leukemias, lymphomas, sarcomas, melanomas. He witnesses His subjects anointing themselves in chemotherapy, basking in the glow of radiation therapy. He watches His humans recklessly chewed up by the trillions of cells that constitute them.

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.

We are the product of large beings that camp out on asteroids and call themselves Collectors. The Collectors run billions of experiments on the time scales of universes, subtly tuning the galaxy parameters this way and that, making bangs bigger and lesser, dialing fundamental physical constants a hair’s breadth at a time. They are continually sharpening pencils and squinting into telescopes. When the Collectors have solved a problem that was formerly mysterious to them, they destroy that universe and recycle the materials into their next experiment.

Our life on Earth represents an experiment in which they are trying to figure out what makes people stick together. Why do some relationships work well while others fail? This is completely mysterious to them. When their theoreticians could not see a pattern, they proposed this problem as an interesting question to explore. And so our universe was born.

The Collectors construct lives of parametric experiments: men and women who adhere well but are shot past one another too briefly—brushing by in a library, passing on the step of a city bus, wondering just for a moment.

And the Collectors need to understand what men and women do about the momentum of their individual life plans, when in the rush and glare of the masses they are put together as they move in opposite directions. Can they turn the momentum of choices and plans? The Collectors sharpen their pencils against their asteroids and make careful study.

They research men and women who are not naturally adherent but are held together by circumstance. Those pressed together by obligation. Those who learn to be happy by forcing adhesion. Those who cannot live without adhesion and those who fight it; those who don’t need it and those who sabotage it; those who find adhesion when they least expect it.

When you die, you are brought before a panel of Collectors. 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 Collectors are past deadline and over budget, but they are having a hard time bringing this study to a conclusion. They are mesmerized; the brightest among them cannot quantify it.

As humans we spend our time seeking big, meaningful experiences. So the afterlife may surprise you when your body wears out. We expand back into what we really are—which is, by Earth standards, enormous. We stand ten thousand kilometers tall in each of nine dimensions and live with others like us in a celestial commune. When we reawaken in these, our true bodies, we immediately begin to notice that our gargantuan colleagues suffer a deep sense of angst.

Our job is the maintenance and upholding of the cosmos. Universal collapse is imminent, and we engineer wormholes to act as structural support. We labor relentlessly on the edge of cosmic disaster. If we don’t execute our jobs flawlessly, the universe will re-collapse. Ours is complex, intricate, and important work.

After three centuries of this toil, we have the option to take a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into lower-dimensional creatures. We project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies that we call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth. The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up, and start again. When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse—instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.

Those are good vacations that we take on Earth, replete with our little dramas and fusses. The mental relaxation is unspeakably precious to us. And when we’re forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, 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.

At the outset of the afterlife you find a scroll that informs you, in the scrawl of an ancient scribe, that you now have the opportunity to meet the Creator of the universe—but only if you are among the most courageous. You wonder what magnitude of maker could require such bravery to be in His presence. You imagine a face larger than the orbit of the moon, a voice louder than a hundred blasts of Vesuvius, and you begin to suspect that your limited imagination is inadequate for the numinous experience in store.

You hear a thunderous booming voice in the distance, and your legs begin to shake. You look inward:
Am I brave enough to handle this?

A great journey awaits. Along the way you face fears and conquer them, identify streams of self-doubt and ford them, discern the peaks of your arrogance and descend them, spot the clouds of self-pity that hang over you and hike out from under them. By the time the road ends, you emerge with renewed confidence—ready, you believe, to meet your maker, to face the face, to perceive a glimpse of the mastermind who crafted the masterpiece.

You approach the door of a great castle. Even now, the booming voice hanging over the landscape causes you to question:
Am I among the most brave?
Do I possess what is required?
You throw your weight against the door, enter a grand foyer, and follow a hallway to a grand room.

And there you see the face. Indeed, it is larger than the moon’s orbit. It is a sight beyond the pens of lyric poets. It is the ocean in its terrifying power and rhythmic grace. It is a face that looks like your father and like your mother; it commands the knowledge of a thousand scholars, the empathy of a thousand lovers, the mystery of a thousand strangers.

It is a face that makes the journey worthwhile. It is a face worthy of the master of the universe.

You quiver and shake, hypnotized, you in your cotton-mouthed ecstasy.

The volcanic voice booms forth, blowing back your hair. “Are you brave?”

“Yes,” you stammer. “That’s why I’m here.”

The valleys of the lips curl a little, as though to laugh.

Then you hear an electrical buzzing sound. The face grows wavy with horizontal scanning lines and disappears in a flash of phosphors.

Nothing remains in the great space but a small yellow curtain where the face used to be. The curtain pulls back. A wrinkled hand pushes up glasses on the face of a wrinkled little man. He is gout-ridden, has a resting tremor, and a vialful of colorful pills. He is stooped. He is swaybacked and balding. You look at each other.

He says, “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. It has become privatized and computerized. For a reasonable price, you can download your consciousness into a computer to live forever in a virtual world. In this way, you can rage against the dying of the light by choosing an afterlife that is fast, furious, and spicy—the crystallization of your fantasies. You can predefine your lovers, maximize your sexual allure, zoom around electric pumping cities in your choice of a dozen Porsches. You get firmer muscles, a perfect complexion, and a flat washboard belly. Innumerable virgins cheerfully await your arrival. Cell phones and jet packs are standard issue. Sizzling cocktail parties run around the clock.

It is no surprise that everyone is lining up for this avant-garde afterlife. Instead of slipping into worm fodder, it is far better to choose the moment of your own death and elect the finest of all possible hereafters. The only ones not signing up are a few religious folks who claim they’re waiting for their Heaven, imagining they will discover themselves in an afterlife of biblical description. The Company, having long ago outgrown the concept of God, attempts to explain to these people that their fantasies have cursed their available realities. The religious counter that God’s greatest gift to them is the ability to look beyond what their eyes can see and have faith in something grander. That’s not a gift, that’s a trap, the Company retorts. It’s like having a wonderful lover available but desiring an unattainable movie star instead. The religious don’t sign up and eventually slip off into a neutral death in a lonely hospital bed.

For the rest of us, the transition into the virtual hereafter is painless: when your prescheduled moment arrives, you come in to the office and recline in the red dental chair. The Company nurse assures you that you will feel as though you’ve closed your eyes in their office and without delay opened them again in your glorious virtual afterworld. A technician presses a button and you become pulverized by a laser beam. A copy of the three-dimensional structure of your brain is re-created in zeros and ones on a cluster of hyperthreading processors.

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. However, it is generally agreed that nothing can go wrong with the download: all of our physical theories predict that reconstructing an exact replica of the brain will reproduce exactly the feeling of being that person. So everyone presumes that it works.

Sadly, it does
not
work. Its failure is not due to bad engineers or unscrupulous businessmen, but instead stems from a misunderstanding of the cosmic scheme. Your essence cannot be downloaded because your essence (which the Company did not believe existed as a separate entity) gets spirited off to Heaven. Despite your excitement about your chosen afterlife, it turns out that God exists after all and has gone through great trouble and expense to construct an afterlife for us. So you awaken on soft clouds, encircled by harp-strumming angels, finding yourself swathed in a white toga.

The problem is that this isn’t what you wanted. You’ve just paid good money for an afterlife of fast cars and charisma and drinking and lovemaking. This Heaven, by comparison, seems hopelessly inadequate and stale. You’re wearing an ill-fitting white sheet instead of an antigravity jet pack. Endless white columns are the replacement for pumping electric cityscapes. There’s manna and milk at the buffet instead of sushi and sake. The harp music is maddeningly slow. And you’re still as unattractive as ever. There’s nothing to do here. The overweight people to your left are playing bridge.

All this recent disappointment has put God in an awkward position. He nowadays spends much of His time trying to comfort His subjects scattered across the cloudscapes. “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.