Sum (9 page)

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.”

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.

It raced back through time in the other direction, and saw that it had left another stroke.

The single quark began to dash back and forth in time, and like the individually meaningless actions of an artist’s pencil, a picture began to emerge.

If it feels to you that we’re connected by a larger whole, you’re mistaken: we’re connected by a smaller particle. Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time. Our little quark sweeps like a frenetic four-dimensional phosphor gun, painting the world: each leaf on every tree, every coral in the oceans, each car tire, every bird carried on the wind, all the hair on all the heads in the world. Everything you have ever seen is a manifestation of the same quark, racing around on a space-time superhighway of its own invention.

It began to write the story of the world with sagas of war, love, and exile. As it spun out stories and allowed the plots to grow organically, the quark became an increasingly talented storyteller. The stories took on subtle dimensions. Its protagonists engaged in moral complexity; its antagonists were charming. The quark reached for inspiration into its own history of loneliness in an empty cosmos: the adolescent with his head on the pillow, the divorcée staring out the coffee shop window, the retiree watching infomercials—these became the prophets of the quark’s text.

But the quark did not dwell upon the loneliness. It found that it couldn’t get enough of the love stories and the sex scenes. From the complex network of love stories spawned new generations of children, and the storyboard of the space-time canvas became increasingly rich in characters. The quark pursued the logical flow of each story with dedication and integrity.

Then, on an afternoon that would come to be known by our physicists as the Day of Decline, the quark suffered an epiphany. It realized it had reached the limits of its energy. Its stories had grown too baroque and rococo to be contained by the maximum speed of its pencil strokes.

That was the first day the world began drifting toward incompleteness. The quark despondently resigned itself to the fact that it could keep the show going only if it saved energy. It realized it could accomplish this by drawing only those entities that were being observed by someone. Under this conservation program, the great meadows and mountains were only drawn when there was someone there to look. There was nothing drawn under the sea surface where submarines did not travel; there were no jungles where explorers did not probe.

These measures of savings were already in place before you were born. But things are about to get worse. Even with these energy management programs, the quark remains overextended. Given the directionless and explosive growth of the human chronicle, our quark’s reserves are nearing depletion.

Soon, against its will, it will submit to the fact that it cannot continue the narrative. The physicists have advised us to prepare ourselves emotionally for the end of our world: trees will have fewer leaves, both men and women will go bald, animals will be drawn with less detail. As the decline continues, you will someday turn a familiar corner to find buildings missing. At some point you may look through the missing walls of your bedroom to find your lover only half drawn.

This is the proffered prediction but, fortunately for us, the physicists have slightly miscalculated. Missing from their equations is the fact that the quark loves us too much to allow this to happen. It cares about its creation and knows it would break our hearts to see through the veneer.

So it has a slightly different plan. It will end the world in sleep. All the quark’s creatures will curl up where they are. Morning commuters in suits will sink softly into slumber behind their steering wheels. Highways, locomotives, and subways will slow to a muted halt. Office workers will make themselves drowsily comfortable on the floors and hallways of their tall buildings. The squares of the world’s capitals will drift into silence. Farmers in their wheat fields will doze off as midflight insects touch down softly like snowflakes. Horses will arrest their gallop and relax into a standing slumber. Black jaguars in trees will lower their chins to their paws on the branches. This is how the world will close, not with a bang but a yawn: sleepy and contented, our own falling eyelids serving as the curtain for the play’s end.

This way, the quark’s beloved creations will be unable to witness what happens next. What happens next is the world’s recession, the unraveling of the planet. As the quark slows, its individual pencil strokes become increasingly sparse until the world resembles a crosshatched woodcut. The sleeping bodies become transparent netting through which the other side can be seen. As the pencil marks grow fewer, the asphalt highways become a sparse lacing of black strokes, with nothing below but the other side of the planet, one Earth-diameter away. The world’s canvas devolves into a thin sketch of outlines. The remaining strokes, one by one, disappear from the latticework, drawing the cosmos toward a more complete blankness.

In the end, spent, the quark slows to a halt at the center of infinite emptiness.

Here it takes its time, catching its breath. It will wait several thousand millennia until it regains the stamina and optimism to try again. So there is no afterlife, but instead a long intermission: all of us exist inside the memory of the particle, like a fertilized egg waiting to unpack.

In the afterlife you receive a clear answer about our purpose on the Earth: our mission is to collect data. We have been seeded on this planet as sophisticated mobile cameras. We are equipped with advanced lenses that produce high-resolution visual images, calculating shape and depth from wavelengths of light. The cameras of the eyes are mounted on bodies that carry them around—bodies that can scale mountains, spelunk caves, cross plains. We are outfitted with ears to pick up air-compression waves and large sensory sheets of skin to collect temperature and texture data. We have been designed with analytic brains that can get this mobile equipment on top of clouds, below the seas, onto the moon. In this way, each observer from every mountaintop contributes a little piece to the vast collection of planetary surface data.

We were planted here by the Cartographers, whose holy books are what we would recognize as maps. Our calling is to cover every inch of the planet’s surface. As we roam, we vacuum data into our sensory organs, and it is for this reason only that we exist.

At the moment of our death we awaken in the debriefing room. Here our lifetime of data collection is downloaded and cross-correlated with the data of those who have passed before us. By this method, the Cartographers integrate billions of viewpoints for a dynamic high-resolution picture of the planet. They long ago realized that the optimal method for achieving a planet-wide map was to drop countless little rugged mobile devices that multiply quickly and carry themselves to all the reaches of the globe. To ensure we spread widely on the surface, they made us restless, longing, lusty, and fecund.

Unlike previous mobile-camera versions, they built us to stand, crane our necks, turn our lenses onto every detail of the planet, become curious, and independently develop new ideas for increased mobility. The brilliance of the design specification was that our pioneering efforts were not prescripted; instead, to conquer the unpredictable variety of landscapes, we were subjected to natural selection to develop dynamic, unforeseen strategies. The Cartographers do not care who lives and dies, as long as there is broad coverage. They are annoyed by worship and genuflection; it slows data collection.

When we awaken in the giant spherical windowless room, it may take a few moments to realize that we are not in a heaven in the clouds; rather, we are deep at the center of the Earth. The Cartographers are much smaller than we are. They live underground and are averse to light. We are the biggest devices they could build: to them we are giants, large enough to jump creeks and scale boulders, an impressive machine ideal for planetary exploration.

The patient Cartographers pushed us out onto a spot on the surface and watched for millennia as we spread like ink over the surface of the planet until every zone took on the color of human coverage, until every region came under the watchful gaze of the compact mobile sensors.

Estimating our progress from their control center, the mobile camera engineers congratulated themselves on a job well done. They waited for humans to spend lifetimes turning their data sensors on patches of ground, the strata of rocks, the distribution of trees.

And yet, despite the initial success, the Cartographers are profoundly frustrated with the results. Despite their planetary coverage and long life spans, the mobile cameras collect very little that is useful for cartography. Instead, the devices turn their ingeniously created compact lenses directly into the gazes of other compact lenses—an ironic way to trivialize the technology. On their sophisticated sensory skin, they simply want to be stroked. The brilliant air-compression sensors are turned toward the whispers of lovers rather than critical planetary data. Despite their robust outdoor design, they have spent their energies building shelters into which they cluster with one another. Despite good spreading on large scales, they clump at small scales. They build communication networks to view pictures of one another remotely when they are apart.

Day after day, with sinking hearts, the Cartographers scroll through endless reels of useless data. The head engineer is fired. He has created an engineering marvel that only takes pictures of itself.