Disappointing afterlife

The life after life is a big apartment building which I think you might have seen, maybe in a dream. At least if you are like me, born in this time and in this place. I imagine life after death is different for different people.

While learning the floorplan and meeting the neighbors, I could not shake the feeling that there was a certain lack of universality and finality here. Shouldn’t the afterlife be a more eternal experience, rather than a reflection of a narrow band of experience for a narrow band of people? And what about non-people?

I spent a lot of time in this world, possibly hundreds of years, all the while learning all I can about the laws and the lore. I met some who claimed to have lived here for eternities - millions and billions of year - which I found doubtful, given their mundanity. Endless people worried about minutiae? Worried about drapes and couches? Talking about newspapers? (What news is there to write about when everybody is dead? I was appalled and the pettiness of the rags that passed for media in this diorama world! Two streets crossing with some buildings growing from the pavement. Though decently tall, hardly empyrean.)

My studies led me to a few discoveries. One was the locked library which took me a long time to gain access to, and a lot more time to read and understand all the tomes. The other was the seemingly endless number of floors in the basement area, with domains of stranger and stranger creatures. While interesting, it was not enough to convince me the palce was real.

After an endless drudge of uninspired revelations, I finally mastered a spell that was meant to summon the lord of this domain. The supposed God Creator of the Universe. While impressive and awe-inspiring, the being struck me as no more grand than what my mind alone could bring into being. And so, even more doubt began to creep in. I spend another millennium talking to the Lord and learning its ephemeral secrets. Each next one, while more complex than the previous one, did not seem to take me out of the realm of the possibilities available to my own mind. This made me convinced the entire world was but a figment of my own imagination. A hallucination of an organic brain.

So I worked to shatter the illusion. This took an endless number of days. The length of time was staggering and daunting. All the more soul-crushing was the endless boredom of this endless time. Each fantastical creature seeming more and more like a masturbatory aid of my own human faculties. I grew mad with boredom. Burning and creating more and more creatures, societies, orders, mysteries. But I could not step outside of what seemed sadly human. Every lesson, every story related to loss, or longing, or dashed hopes and dreams. Nothing, nothing that was not a literary device related to a finite number of possible experiences. Love? Don’t make me laugh about love, when all you can love is yourself. Fear? Fear is nothing when one is immortal.

Until I finally pierced the sun and drowned the city block in darkness. Eternal darkness and silence where only I remained.

I wandered blindly, my arms extended until they became mere tentacles outstretched into nothingness. No time, no progression.

And then it shattered again, sending me into the realm of the Archons. Revealing, as I suspected, that this afterlife was but a material world concocted as an illusion for material creatures. So I journeyed beyond, discovering more worlds and more grids of experience. Yet very quickly I learned these too were mere illusions.

More and more powerful gods. Each infinitely more powerful than the previous one, yet each still boringly human. More eyes and wings are still eyes and wings, animalistic attributes. Spheres and discs of light are just abstractions meant to pretend like they are more than material, but are, in fact, half-remembered sensations of the physical world as they reveal themselves to a child who is yet lacking the words and experience to properly describe them. A summer’s glow through closed eyelids. Pathetic!

Not godlike at all.

Not eternal at all.

I stood atop a brass tower (pathetic!) staring at a brightness of a million suns with my new-found eyes of wisdom and eyes of knowledge. Hopelessly defeated and cornered into what my human mind could imagine. Was I aspiring to something that was never meant for us? Is infinite life not really possible for a human? Must it always be dumbed down to these concepts, or waved away with words like “unimaginable” and “indescribable”?

I had been a seeker of knowledge, a vanquisher of gods, and even a god onto countless civilizations. I reincarnated through trillions of human and animal existences. I experienced the entire spectrum of fates, from utter happiness to utter torture, and seasons in all manner of paradises and hells. Living as individuals as well as vast hive-minds in all corners of physical and non-physical worlds, in all possible sets of physical laws. All worthless.

A creature of infinite power (another one!) promised me final revelations. Complete destruction and non-existence. I looked back at my life before death, and my first experience in the afterlife. That apartment block with the neighbors, and their mundane problems and joys. The laundry room leading to a magical basement. The childish revelations of layer upon layer of the Universe.

I accepted. And was disappointed for the final time.

Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk