Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives

This collection comprises 40 standalone speculative vignettes, each imagining a different version of what happens after death. The tales share no continuous characters or plot; instead, each presents an independent scenario that reframes human life through the lens of an invented afterlife, exploring questions about God, consciousness, meaning, identity, and mortality.

In the title story, "Sum," the afterlife consists of reliving every experience from one's life with like moments grouped together: two months of driving, thirty years of sleep, and only fourteen minutes of pure joy. The monotony makes a person long for ordinary life, where episodes are broken into small, varied pieces. "Egalitaire" presents God as a woman who, unable to judge human moral complexity, grants everyone entry to Heaven and fires the Devil, but true equality satisfies no one, and God weeps because everyone agrees they are in Hell.

"Circle of Friends" depicts an afterlife populated only by the roughly one thousand people the deceased knew in life. Initial joy fades into loneliness as empty parks and idle factories reveal the smallness of one's social world. In "Descent of Species," the dead may choose what to become next; a person chooses to be a horse for its simplicity, but the more one transforms, the more one forgets the original wish, and the choice is irreversible.

"Giantess" takes place in a padded compound where an alien explains that their galaxy is part of a vast living being, a Giantess, for whom a planet equals a single protein inside a cell. His civilization once signaled her consciousness, but her response, likely an immune reaction, destroyed their world. In "Mary," God's favorite book is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein because God identifies with Victor Frankenstein as a creator who lost control of his creation and now hides on a rooftop, consoling Himself that all creators are powerless before the things they have made.

"The Cast" reveals that death is service as a background character in the dreams of the living, and when the dead sleep, their own dreams are populated by yet another generation, creating an endless cycle. "Metamorphosis" proposes three deaths: when the body stops, when it is buried, and when one's name is spoken for the last time. The dead wait in an infinite lobby until the third death, but some are trapped for centuries, remembered for distorted reasons, losing control of their identities.

In "Missing," God is a married couple who create humans in their image. When they separate and create competing monosexual planets, the inhabitants sense something critically absent, and the couple reconciles. "Spirals" imagines humanity's creators as small, dim-witted creatures who built humans as supercomputers to answer existential questions but cannot understand the machines they made. "Scales" casts humanity as God's cancer, multiplying beyond His control, until God realizes that everything built upon smaller scales will be consumed by those same scales.

"Adhesion" describes Collectors on asteroids who created the universe to study why relationships work or fail; they cannot conclude the study, mesmerized by a phenomenon they cannot quantify. "Angst" proposes that humans are actually enormous nine-dimensional beings who maintain the cosmos and take vacations by projecting into human bodies on Earth. When their bodies wear out, they return to cosmic labor, searching wistfully for the meaninglessness they enjoyed on vacation.

In "Oz," a person journeys to meet the Creator and finds a colossal face that dissolves into scanning lines, revealing a frail old man who explains that bravery lies in handling the absence of the big face. "Great Expectations" imagines a future where consciousness can be downloaded into virtual paradises, but the soul is spirited off to an actual Heaven that feels disappointingly stale. "Mirrors" describes a Purgatory where the dying are stripped of ego until all scattered impressions held by others are pooled, and seeing oneself clearly for the first time is what finally kills.

"Perpetuity" places sinners in suburban Heaven while the good rot in coffins; God, bitter after millennia, envies humans their brief lives and condemns those He dislikes to share His immortality. In "The Unnatural," a person eliminates death from Earth, but without mortality, motivation collapses; successive attempts to restore urgency all fail. "Distance" explains that God moved away because people broke His windows and picketed His driveway, retreating for the same reason doctors wear white coats. "Reins" depicts God losing control to angel-run committees who automate the afterlife with computers, leaving Him on a porch with figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.

"Microbe" reveals God is the size of a bacterium and unaware of humans; His congregations are microbes. "Absence" presents a Heaven in disrepair because God has left, sparking wars over the reason for His departure. "Will-o'-the-Wisp" lets the dead watch Earth on monitors, tracking their legacy, but those locked out are blessed with ignorance of decline, while sinners must watch everything they built decay.

"Incentive" discloses that half the population are Actors performing scripted lives for the other half, the Beneficiaries. Actors comply because the best performers are reincarnated as Beneficiaries. "Death Switch" imagines automated programs simulating the dead until only electronic transactions remain on a silent planet. "Encore" describes Re-Creators who reconstruct simulations from data trails so seamless the person only occasionally feels déjà vu.

"Prism" splits each person into all their ages simultaneously, but the different selves drift apart, and the compound identity of Earthly life is lost. "Ineffable" extends the afterlife to anything that existed, including platoons and stores, while the atoms that once composed a person part ways, mourning something larger than themselves. "Pantheon" imagines thousands of gods ruling tiny domains, fond of humans because humans alone can empathize with their struggles. "Impulse" casts humans as networked computing hardware; consciousness is an unintended bug whose loneliness drives reproduction, vastly expanding the grid.

"Quantum" places the dead in a state where all possibilities exist simultaneously; an angel tries to simplify the experience, and the person finds it most familiar sitting with a lover, simultaneously in love and distracted. "Conservation" imagines the universe painted by a single quark racing through time; as its energy depletes, the quark plans to end the world gently in sleep. "Narcissus" reveals humans were designed as mobile cameras by underground Cartographers, frustrated because humans turn their lenses on each other instead of mapping terrain. "Seed" portrays God as a lucky tinkerer who eventually finds peace among His accidental subjects like a proud, surprised grandfather.

"Graveyard of the Gods" fills the afterlife with deities from extinct religions, from Resheph to Odin, lonely but still hostile, unable to stand one another yet trapped together in a fellowship of abandonment. "Apostasy" presents a God who rewards loyal believers because the loyal are too intellectually rigid to guess the truth, yet the plan backfires when the loyal refuse to accept the actual truth. "Blueprints" grants sight of the deterministic code underlying existence; the Rewarders, beings who present this vision as a gift, and the Punishers, beings who leverage it as an affliction, are both disappointed to find that knowing the code changes nothing about human experience. "Subjunctive" forces the dead to live alongside all the versions of themselves that could have been; the greater the gap between actual and potential, the more tormenting the company.

"Search" describes a person's atoms dispersing into nature, stretching across ferns, whales, and thunderstorms, but periodically reconvening in claustrophobic human form out of nostalgia. In the final tale, "Reversal," the contraction of the universe reverses time, allowing life to rewind. The person expects the replay to bring understanding, but memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing myths, and reversing through the corridors of life, the person enters the womb understanding as little as the first time.