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.

Mirrors

When you think you’ve died, you haven’t actually died. Death is a two-stage process, and where you wake up after your last breath is something of a Purgatory: you don’t feel dead, you don’t look dead, and in fact you are not dead. Yet.

Perhaps you thought the afterlife would be something like a soft white light, or a glistening ocean, or floating in music. But the afterlife more closely resembles the feeling of standing up too quickly: for a confused moment, you forget who you are, where you are, all the personal details of your life. And it only gets stranger from here.