In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.

You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong.

Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers.

Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.

When you die, you feel as though there were some
subtle change, but everything looks approximately
the same. You get up and brush your teeth. You kiss
your spouse and kids and leave for the office. There
is less traffic than normal. The rest of your building
seems less full, as though it’s a holiday. But everyone
in your office is here, and they greet you kindly. You
feel strangely popular. Everyone you run into is
someone you know. At some point, it dawns on you
that this is the afterlife: the world is only made up of
people you’ve met before.

It’s a small fraction of the world populationabout
0.00002 percent-but it seems like plenty to
you.

It turns out that only the people you remember
are here. So the woman with whom you shared a
glance in the elevator mayor may not be included.
Your second-grade teacher is here, with most of the
class. Your parents, your cousins, and your spectrum
of friends through the years. All your old lovers.
Your boss, your grandmothers, and the waitress who
served your food each day at lunch. Those you
dated, those you almost dated, those you longed for.

It is a blissful opportunity to spend quality time
with your one thousand connections, to renew fading
ties, to catch up with those you let slip away.
It is only after several weeks of this that you begin
to feel forlorn.

You wonder what’s different as you saunter
through the vast quiet parks with a friend or two.
No strangers grace the empty park benches. No family
unknown to you throws bread crumbs for the
ducks and makes you smile because of their laughter.
As you step into the street, you note there are no
crowds, no buildings teeming with workers, no distant
cities bustling, no hospitals running 24/7 with
patients dying and staff rushing, no trains howling
into the night with sardined passengers on their way
home. Very few foreigners.

You begin to consider all the things unfamiliar to
you. You’ve never known, you realize, how to vulcanize
rubber to make a tire. And now those factories
stand empty. You’ve never known how to fashion a
silicon chip from beach sand, how to launch rockets
out of the atmosphere, how to pit olives or lay railroad
tracks. And now those industries are shut
down.

The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to
complain about all the people you could be meeting.
But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because
this is precisely what you chose when you were
alive.

We are the product of large beings that camp out on asteroids and call themselves Collectors. The Collectors run billions of experiments on the time scales of universes, subtly tuning the galaxy parameters this way and that, making bangs bigger and lesser, dialing fundamental physical constants a hair’s breadth at a time. They are continually sharpening pencils and squinting into telescopes. When the Collectors have solved a problem that was formerly mysterious to them, they destroy that universe and recycle the materials into their next experiment.

Our life on Earth represents an experiment in which they are trying to figure out what makes people stick together. Why do some relationships work well while others fail? This is completely mysterious to them. When their theoreticians could not see a pattern, they proposed this problem as an interesting question to explore. And so our universe was born.

The Collectors construct lives of parametric experiments: men and women who adhere well but are shot past one another too briefly- brushing by in a library, passing on the step of a city bus, wondering just for a moment.

And the Collectors need to understand what men and women do about the momentum of their individual life plans, when in the rush and glare of the masses they are put together as they move in opposite directions. Can they turn the momentum of choices and plans? The Collectors sharpen their pencils against their asteroids and make careful study.

They research men and women who are not naturally adherent but are held together by circumstance. Those pressed together by obligation. Those who learn to be happy by forcing adhesion. Those who cannot live without adhesion and those who fight it; those who don’t need it and those who sabotage it; those who find adhesion when they least expect it.

When you die, you are brought before a panel of Collectors. They debrief you and struggle to understand your motivations. Why did you decide to break of this relationship? What did you appreciate about that relationship? What was wrong with so-and-so, who seemed to have everything you wanted? After trying and failing to understand you, they send you back to see if another round of experimentation makes it any clearer to them.

It is for this reason only that our universe still exists. The Collectors are past deadline and over budget, but they are having a hard time bringing this study to a conclusion. They are mesmerized; the brightest among them cannot quantify it.

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