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.”

Great Expectations

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.