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.

Quantum

Here in the afterlife, everything exists in all possible states at once, even states that are mutually exclusive. This comes as a shock after your Earthly life, where making one choice causes the other choices to disappear. When you become a lover to one, you cannot become a lover to others; when you choose one door, others are lost to you.

In the afterlife you can enjoy all possibilities at once, living multiple lives in parallel. You find yourself simultaneously eating and not eating. You are bowling and not bowling at the same time. You are horseback riding and nowhere near a horse.

A velvety blue angel gently descends to see how you are coming along with this afterlife.

“This is all too confusing for a poor human brain,” you confess to the angel.

The angel rubs his chin. “Maybe we can ease you into this with something simpler, like a day job,” he offers.

You are immediately dropped into a work life of simultaneous contradictions. You are concurrently practicing several careers at once, all the careers you had considered when you were younger. You simultaneously count down your rocket ship launch and defend a criminal client in front of a jury. In the same moments, you scrub your hands for a gallbladder surgery and navigate an eighteen-wheeler down a New Mexico interstate. Gone are the constraints of location and time.

“This,” you tell the angel, “is too much work.”

“Perhaps we could warm you up with a simpler situation,” he considers. “How would you like to be in a closed room, one-on-one with your lover?”

And then you are here. You are simultaneously engaged in her conversation and thinking about something else; she both gives herself to you and does not give herself to you; you find her objectionable and you deeply love her; she worships you and wonders what she might have missed with someone else.

“Thank you,” you tell the angel. “This I’m used to.”

Conservation

What we have deduced about the Big Bang is almost exactly wrong. Instead of a Big Bang, the genesis of the universe consisted of the uneventful, accidental, hushed production of a single quark.

For thousands of millennia, nothing occurred. The solitary particle floated in silence. Eventually it considered moving. Like all elementary particles, it realized that its direction of travel in time was arbitrary. So it shot forward in time and, looking back, it realized that it had left a single pencil stroke across the canvas of space-time.