Sum (8 page)
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 in a diner, and notice your thirty-five-year-old self visiting that spot, lingering on the air of regret hanging over the empty seat.
Typically the different yous are happy to see each other because they possess the same name and a shared history. But the yous are more critical of yourselves then they are of others, and so each you quickly identifies habits that get under your skin.
It’s a fact of afterlife: don’t be surprised to discover that after decomposition into your different ages, the different yous tend to drift apart.
You discover that the you of eight years old has less in common than expected with the you of thirty-two and the you of sixty-four. The eighteen-year-old you finds more in common with other eighteen-year-olds than with your seventy-three-year-old you. The seventy-three-year-old you doesn’t mind a bit, seeking out meaningful conversations with others of the same generation. Beyond the name, the yous have little else in common.
But don’t lose hope: the shared résumé of life—parents, birthplace, hometown, school years, first kiss—has a magnetic, nostalgic pull, so once in a while the different yous organize a gathering, like a family reunion, bringing together all your ages into a single room. At these reunions, the middle-aged will delightedly pinch the cheeks of the young, and the teenagers will politely listen to the stories and advice of the elderly.
These reunions reveal a group of individuals touchingly searching for a common theme. They appeal to your name as a unifying structure, but they come to realize that the name that existed on Earth, the you that moved serially through these different identities, was like a bundle of sticks from different trees. They come to understand, with awe, the complexity of the compound identity that existed on the Earth. They conclude with a shudder that the Earthly you is utterly lost, unpreserved in the afterlife. You were all these ages, they concede, and you were none.
When soldiers part ways at war’s end, the breakup of the platoon triggers the same emotion as the death of a person—it is the final bloodless death of the war. This same mood haunts actors on the drop of the final curtain: after months of working together, something greater than themselves has just died. After a store closes its doors on its final evening, or a congress wraps its final session, the participants amble away, feeling that they were part of something larger than themselves, something they intuit had a
life
even though they can’t quite put a finger on it.
In this way, death is not only for humans but for everything that existed.
And it turns out that anything which enjoys life enjoys an afterlife. 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.
Although it is difficult for us to imagine how these beings interact, they enjoy a delicious afterlife together, exchanging stories of their adventures. They laugh about good times and often, just like humans, lament the brevity of life. The people who constituted them are not included in their stories. In truth, they have as little understanding of you as you have of them; they generally have no idea you existed.
It may seem mysterious to you that these organizations can live on without the people who composed them. But the underlying principle is simple: the afterlife is made of spirits. 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.
A consequence of this cosmic scheme may surprise you: when you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.
There is not a single God but many. Each rules a separate territory. Despite the best guesses of erstwhile civilizations, the gods do not hold dominion over categories of war, love, and wisdom. Instead, the divisions are much finer-grained. One god has control over objects that are made of chrome. Another over flags. Another over bacteria. The god of telephones, the god of bubble gum, the god of spoons: these are the players in an incalculably large panoply of deific bureaucracy.
There is always disputed territory. It is the interaction within this substantial administration that determines the random walk of the world: everything interesting happens at the borders between domains of power.
So while you may be pleased to know that there is, after all, divine intentionality, you may be disappointed to know that no two gods can agree. There are so many that it is difficult for them to enjoy any consequence except during brief statistical hiccups.
Just as the Greeks surmised, there is bitter competition among the gods. Jealous rivalries abound because the stakes are so low; the gods are not large and powerful and they know it. So they try their best to stand out and to be heard, given the limits of their random talents and the cards they are dealt. They discover themselves tossed into a sea of interaction with strangers, struggling for progress in a network of jealous competition. Many of them embrace a suspicion that something extraordinary could happen if they could collaborate on a meaningful scale, but they find themselves continually stymied by the personalized nature of their goals.
Lately it has become popular to theorize that their incapacity to coordinate is the only reason they have not destroyed us. But the truth is that they are fond of us and work to keep us well protected. When they feel overwhelmed by their own struggles, they sit down and observe a traffic jam. They watch how each human driver aims for his own private piece of the city, isolated from neighbors by layers of glass and steel. Some of the humans reach out to make cell phone contact with a single friend out of the innumerable hordes. And gazing out over the steering wheel, each human feels the intensities of joy and grief as though his were the only real examples in the world.
Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: we are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
Just as there is no afterlife for a computer chip, there is none for us: we are, after all, the same thing. Humans are the small networked units of hardware running a massive and unseen software program, the product of three cosmic Programmers. The Programmers are experts in building flexible computational substrates made of nodes—in this case, humans—that are mobile, self-healing, and possess high bandwidth. With every contact between humans, the network crunches through calculations immeasurably large, reconfiguring its colossal circuitry on the fly, computing for beings on a different spatial scale.
The surprise is that all the computational operations run below the surface of our consciousness. So take careful note the next time your neighbor’s eyelid produces a single, barely perceptible twitch. Normally neither of you would be conscious of it—but your subconscious brain notices. To those hidden parts of your brain, the detected twitch stimulates a cascade of changes: genes unwrap, proteins blossom, synapses rearrange. All this is well below your awareness—you are merely carrying the brainbox with no acquaintance with what happens inside it. This surge of neural activity causes you immediately to release pheromones that are consciously undetectable but have considerable influence on the nervous system of the young woman sitting next to you: moments later, she unwittingly taps her left foot, once. This is picked up by the brain of the tourist sitting across from her, and onward the computation evolves.
In this manner, all across the vast network of humanity, signals are passed at a blinding pace without any of us knowing we are messengers. The unconscious lifting of a finger to scratch under the rim of a hat, the sudden appearance of gooseflesh, the exact timing of a blink—these all carry information and compel the processing to the next stage. The human race is a gargantuan network of signals passed from node to node, a calculation of celestial significance running on the vast grid of the human substrate.
But it turns out that a tiny, unexpected bug has crept into the program, an anomalous algorithm that the Programmers did not intend and have not yet detected: our consciousness. Everything we adore, abhor, covet, can’t bear, take pleasure in, desire, pursue, crave, aspire to, long for—all these run on top of the planetary program, hidden within the thick forests of its code. Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.
The Programmers are as unaware of our conscious lives as we are of their calculations. In theory, they should be able to ascertain a slight drain on the computing resources, even though the calculations would be far too elaborate and tangled for an investigation of the problem. But they have not bothered, because they are thrilled with how things are going. Something has happened here that they do not understand: the computing power of the grid has grown at a blinding pace.
They find this mysterious, for they had engineered the nodes only for zero-growth replacement. Knowing that the humans would eventually wear out, the Programmers had equipped them with a lock-and-key mechanism for self-reproduction when the time came. But they didn’t foresee the anomalous algorithm, or how it would accidentally create a deep loneliness in the nodes, a need for companionship, and ongoing sagas of drama and fulfillment. The resultant lovemaking has vastly amplified the size of the grid, growing it rapidly from thousands to billions of nodes. For reasons beyond the Programmers’ understanding, the nodes go to heroic lengths to keep themselves alive and turning the locks and keys. Of all the Programmers’ planets, ours is the supercomputing golden child, the world that inexplicably provides enough power to light up the galaxy.