They’re artists of information, and each data point adds a bit more pigment to their accumulating portrait of you. Bach detail is marked with a confidence rating for the source and checked for consistency against the other data points. Millions of facts are gathered, facts so richly structured and interconnected that they constitute a hard shell that retains your shape when you disappear from the middle of it.

From school records, the Re-Creators closely approximate what pieces of knowledge you had at a particular moment in your life. This information is neatly dovetailed with detailed historical records. They re-create what you were likely to have seen around you each day and, by examining your newspaper subscriptions, they model the world events that would have affected you.

From deep within this jungle of data they can deduce the exact dates of your various relationships: when they began, when they ended, and whether they overlapped. The Re-Creators come to understand you from every form you filled out, every word you typed on the Internet, the mail you received from others: why people thank you, who chastises you, what advice your lovers seek, what favors your friends ask. Which mailing lists you’re on. Your tax returns.

In previous generations, when you awoke in the afterlife, it was easy to tell that you were merely a simulation, because your details were so sparse. The feeling of emptiness on most days allowed you to know that you were a cheap reproduction of your former self. But with today’s rich data, the Re-Creators can reconstruct you so seamlessly that your afterlife is essentially a perfect replica of the original. It feels so much like the real thing that in the afterlife you only rarely wonder whether you’ve lived all this before, haunted occasionally by déjà vu, holding a book in your hand and not knowing whether this is the first time or a replay from aeons past.

Prism

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.