The Afterlife

[Greg]

This isn't a fanfic, but it's a short story I wrote a few weeks ago. Tell me what you guys think if you have the patience to read through it!


The Afterlife

by Greg McClanahan



I died in the most wonderful dream I've ever had.
It was a slow death; I was drowning. It felt so real. I wouldn't be surprised if my breathing had actually slowed. I was deprived of oxygen, resisting the urge to swallow a lungful of water. But I couldn't hold out forever – eventually I did.
This is it, I thought as my vision began to darken. I had a moment, in this dream, to think about drying from the position of someone who's moments away from the certainty of death. A dream is the only place where someone can experience this moment and live to tell about it.
I was an atheist. But, like most atheists, I longed to be proved wrong. So as my mind filled with terror and my lungs filled with water, there was a small part of me that felt a tinge of excitement. If there was an afterlife, I thought, I would know of it within moments.
When my lungs spasmed to a halt, my mind began to shut down. I don't think I'd ever had a dream where my cognition acknowledged that this would happen upon death. My thoughts became jumbled, then silenced.
And I awoke. Not in real life, but in the dream. I couldn't see my lifeless body; I couldn't even see at all. But my brain began to function. Somehow, in death, my consciousness was alive.
It was the most thrilling moment of my life. So thrilling, in fact, that I awoke for real this time. I had experienced my consciousness functioning after death! It's every human being's wildest desire. I was sad to have awoken, much like I was sad to have awoken from dreams in which I'd won the lottery. But I cherished that instant in time where my greatest desire came true, even if it was only in a dream.
Not even death could erase my existence in this universe.

* * *

I died several years later. The details of my life are not important. I was a human being, just like you, living in the same world you do.
It was a slow death, like the one in the dream. I was filled with the same excitement of possibly having my mind awaken within moments. And it did. But not in a way I could have ever imagined.
This is not the story of heaven or hell, or of awakening in another life to find that our lives in Earth were merely a dream.
This is the story of how consciousness can die forever, and still live on.

* * *

When I awoke after my death, I immediately vomited. I opened my eyes, but no light entered. I collapsed to the ground. As soon as my arms hit the dirt, pain shot through my entire body. I wasn't just naked – I had no skin.
Oh God, I'm in hell.
I vomited again, and I realized by now that my intestines were passing through my throat. Most of it was getting caught. Air entered my nose and burned my sinuses. I questioned if the atmosphere had any oxygen. My spine began to spasm, and as I writhed on the ground, I realized that I had no legs. I began rolling in a pool of my own blood and crumbling flesh before my mind began to darken again. I welcomed the relief.

* * *

I awoke again. This time I was lying on my back. My body felt more intact, and there was no urge to vomit. I opened my eyes to the sight of a dark purple sky with orange clouds, as if a sunset had taken over the heavens.
I looked down at my body to find myself clothed and with all my appendages intact. Whether or not they were the clothes I was wearing during my life on Earth, I could not remember. I smiled, and took a deep breath of the fresh, fragrant air.
“I did it!” a small girl said as she erupted with laughter. I looked to my left and met her grinning face. All around her was a sparkling blueish glow. Adults were all around her, and I realized that I was surrounded by them.
Everyone began clapping and cheering. “He looks just like one of us!” one of them shouted.
“What?” I asked, confused, but filled with a faint sense of happiness.
“He even speaks our language!” one of them gasped.
“She truly has been blessed with God's gift of creation!” another chided in.
“What are you guys--” I began. But a sharp, stabbing pain entered my chest and interrupted my words. I grimaced, and rolled on the ground.
A disappointed “awww” came from the audience.
“Well, that one lasted longer than the last few, I suppose.”
My mind began its decline back into darkness.

* * *

I awoke in pain, but not as excruciating as the first time.
“Shit, I messed up again,” a gruff voice mumbled.
“Well, get rid of this one and try again,” another sighed.
Darkness.

* * *

My eyes opened to the sight of a woman applying bandages to my forehead.
“David, are you all right?” she asked.
I was lying on a bed. The room had a cold, metallic look to it.
My body was sore, but I felt like I could move.
“My name's not David, it's--” my words were interrupted by the entire room violently shaking. The woman fell to the ground. I grabbed the side of the bed to keep from falling off.
An earthquake?
“Shit!” the woman shouted as she scrambled to her feet. “David, do you know where you are?”
“My name's not... No, I don't,” I said.
The room shook again. The woman grabbed onto the bed to keep herself from falling down again.
“David, you're on board the starship Light Moon. Remember? You were on the planet's surface attempting to complete your mission when we came under attack. We teleported you back, but the enemy is disrupting our electronic systems. A lot of your neural connections were scrambled. What can you tell me about what you remember?”
I opened my mouth to say that I had no idea what was going on.
But before a single word could exit my mouth, the room shook so violently that I rolled off the bed and onto the floor. There was barely an instant in which I could recognize that the room had been engulfed in flames before my body was vaporized.

* * *

My fuzzy consciousness awoke to the sensation of pain throughout my body. I screamed, and tried to writhe, but my bones were all broken. My lungs spasmed as darkness relieved my mind of the suffering.

* * *

Tearing, everywhere. The vacuum of space ripped the blood from my lungs and eye sockets. The pain faded within seconds.

* * *

Pain didn't greet my rebirth this time. There was a bright white light all around me. I understood everything.
I knew how and why I had died and been reborn each time. A warm glow of knowledge was everywhere, as if it had been there all along. I felt like I was God.
Think about sleep for a moment. Every night, your consciousness shuts down. Sure, you dream, and your neurons continue to fire. But I'm not talking about biology. I'm talking about who you are – your consciousness. It stops existing, every single night.
But what does it matter? You awake the next morning with the same personality, the same body, the same memories. Your consciousness has been reborn, and yet, to you, the transition is seamless. You might as well have died and been re-created.
Just like what's been happening with me.
But re-creation is messy. We live in an infinite universe that spans for an infinite amount of years. Somewhere, sometime in the future, something – whether intentional by a living creature or the result of pure chance – will create a being with a consciousness so close to yours that you will feel as though you've awaken after your death, which could have happened trillions of years ago in a distant galaxy.
It's only a matter of time before something else creates a creature with the memory of both living and having been created before. And you will be reborn. Each rebirth takes exponentially longer given the improbability of creating something with more specific memories, but time is irrelevant in a universe that lasts forever.
I knew this because my consciousness had been created inside a computer program.
I wish I could have stayed there forever. In a way, I did. It seemed like an instant lasted an eternity. Such is the result of being able to make so many calculations each second.
It's too bad that the system was eventually reset, and my consciousness continued its journey forward – through heaven, through hell, through the infinite possibilities of life.

[Greg]

My epiphany provided little comfort when I awoke next. My eyes met the gaze of a demon's face, inches from my own. He snarled, then laughed. It was hard to tell which was worse. My entire body ached. Trying to move revealed that I was tied down.
His face morphed into that of a human, then disappeared entirely. It came back in full force as a different demon than it had been before.
I looked around. There was fire everywhere. I suddenly became aware of the unbearable heat. My body was drenched with sweat within seconds, then began to burn.
The demon laughed. Its shrill voice cut through my body.
“What's wrong?” the voice boomed.
“Please, stop,” I begged with a barely audible wheeze.
“Everything's wrong! That's what!” the demon shrieked into my ears.
His face faded from red to blue. Fire turned to ice as the temperature lowered below freezing levels. I began to shiver, and my body ached from the cold.
“Please, no more,” I whimpered.
I coughed several times and was not surprised to taste chunks of blood in my mouth immediately afterward.
“This is what happened to your first test subject?” a voice demanded.
Hell quickly transformed into a hospital room. Several men and a woman were standing around and examining sheets of paper.
“You assured me that this thing was ready for human testing!” one of them shouted.
“What have you done to my husband?” the woman sobbed. “He's been hallucinating for the past hour.”
I felt a hand clamp around one of mine, then a hand caressed my cheek.
“Ben, I never would have agreed to let you do this if I would've known this would happen,” she cried.
“I'm not--” I began, but stopped myself short. I didn't have the strength to explain who I was. Whoever Ben had been, his brain had been somehow scrambled to coincidentally recreate my consciousness. I doubted that the woman would have been comforted to know that something had just happened that only happens once every several trillion years in the entire universe.
I coughed again, then laboriously inhaled a breath of air.
“Ben, can I get you anything? Please, just let me know, anything!” the woman sobbed hysterically.
There was only one request I could imagine.
“I want to die,” I whispered.
“Please, no!” the woman screamed. “They said there's a chance...”
“No,” I said as I turned to face her. I could tell that I was still hallucinating by the distortion of her face, which was constantly being warped and stretched in various directions. “I want to die forever.”
I squeezed her hand and closed my eyes.
She would someday know what I meant.

End

[Angelus]

thats quite a good story, nice one greg!

[Andrew]

Now there's some interesting philosophy I have yet to study. A nice blending of Epicurean philosophy mingled with Christian philosophy. Very well written.