"Sum" Summaries

SUM- After you die, you relive your life, but with like events all grouped together: 30 straight years of sleep, 1 year of reading, and so on.

EGALITAIRE- God lets everyone into Heaven, instead of sending some people to Hell. This just makes everyone miserable.

CIRCLE OF FRIENDS- You relive your life in a world made up of only the people you met in life.

DESCENT OF SPECIES- You are allowed to choose who to be in your next life; you choose a horse.

GIANTESS- God is cosmically huge and unable to comprehend the concerns of humans.

MARY- God’s favorite book is Frankenstein, which resonates with him because he is a creator who has lost control of creation.

THE CAST: After you die, you are sent back to the world to play bit parts in other people’s dreams.

METAMORPHOSIS: You never truly die until the last time your name is spoken.

MISSING: God is actually a bickering married couple who fight and make up.

SPIRALS: God is a population of dim-witted creatures who created humans in order to better understand life.

SCALES: We are a cancer in the body of a dying God.

ADHESION: We were created to understand relationships and love. The experiment is inconclusive.

ANGST: What we call life is a vacation from our real existence as cosmic beings responsible for holding the universe together.

OZ: God is imperfect, it takes bravery to confront the reality of the man behind the curtain.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS: In the future, people pay top dollar for the promise of a virtually created afterlife. When instead they end up in the real Paradise, they are bitterly disappointed.

MIRRORS: After death, you are permitted to finally permitted to see yourself as you truly are. The shock kills you a second time.

PERPETUITY: The virtuous are allowed to truly die. Sinners are trapped in a perpetual suburbia.

THE UNNATURAL: You choose to remake the world without death. It leads to a living Hell.

DISTANCE: God used to live among humans, but he was driven away to Heaven when they turned against him.

REINS: Heaven has been outsourced to an inefficient beauraucracy.

MICROBE: God is the size of a bacterium. He made microbes in his own image. Humans are on a different scale, and he is unconcerned with their lives.

ABSENCE: God has vanished. Heaven has become a battleground as souls fight over the reasons for the disappearance.

WILL-O-THE-WISP: After death, you continue to monitor life on Earth as it progresses.

INCENTIVE: Only half of the people in the world are real, the other half are actors.

DEATH SWITCH: The only afterlife will be the computer programs we set up to continue our affairs after we die.

ENCORE: After death, a simulation of yourself is created from the leftover evidence of your life.

PRISM: In death, you are split into all the different ages and versions of yourself.

INEFFABLE: It’s not just people who live after death, it’s organizations, stores, congresses, plays.

PANTHEON: There are hundreds of Gods, who watch people from Heaven to relieve tension.

IMPULSE: Humans are part of a massive computer program. Consciousness is an unintended side effect.

QUANTUM: In Heaven, all different possibilities exist at the same time.

CONSERVATION: All creation is the art project of a single sentient quark.

NARCISSUS: We are artifical creations designed to map the Earth. Our creators are disappointed that we spend so much time paying attention to each other.

SEED: God created us by accident.

GRAVEYARD OF THE GODS: The afterlife contains every god that humans have ever invented.

APOSTASY: When the dead arrive in Heaven, they are all so attached to their own beliefs that they don’t believe what God tells them.

BLUEPRINTS: After death, you gain understanding of the deep math that controls everything in life.

SUBJUNCTIVE: In the afterlife, you meet all the possible versions of yourself that could have been.

SEARCH: After death, you dissolve into all your constituent atoms, but maintain your consciousness.

REVERSAL: After death, you live your life again backwards.

Go back to Envisioning the Afterlife