Steve found his room in a building several blocks away from the cafeteria. The room was on the fifth floor of a building that looked functional. The door outside of the room had his name embossed on it. He opened the door and went inside.
To call the room “spartan” would be overstating it. There was a single bed, a desk and a chair. He tested the bed and was not surprised to find that it felt heavenly. The desk had a lamp. In the single drawer was a few sheets of paper and a stylus. He tried the stylus, it made a black line on the paper. He thought about a different color ink and drew a red line. He put down the stylus.
The view out of the single window was of another building. Navy-blue blackout curtains could be pulled across the window. There was a flush lighting fixture in the ceiling, controlled by a switch by the door.
Then Steve noticed what wasn’t there. No mirror, no sink, no bathroom, no outlets, no telephone and no lock on the door. The last made sense, what was there to steal and who would steal it?
He heard a slight ding and turned to look. There was another piece of paper on the desk. It read “Report to Intake Training, Room 348.”
OK, he thought. Now to find it. He went down the stairs, still marveling that he could do that unaided. Across the street there was a sign that indicated he should go to the right to find the Intake Training Center. At each corner, there was a sign.
Steve walked along. The streets were not very wide, he had not seen a single vehicle of any kind. There were people walking along it, a goodly number, but he had no idea what was the population density of Heaven. It was quiet, almost too quiet. There was no mechanical sounds whatsoever. No animal sounds. It was like walking in the biggest church ever. He looked up. There were no clouds. The sky was sort of a diffused bluish. He turned his gaze back towards the ground. There were no shadows. It really felt otherworldly. Or afterworldly.
He found the Intake Training Center. Clearly, nobody here gave a thought to aesthetics. It was the most boring building he’d ever seen. It had all of the charm of a packing crate. Room 348 was on the third floor as the French figure it. For Steve, it was the fourth floor. The room was small. In it was a chair and a waiting angel. “Be seated,” the angel said.
Steve did so. “This is individual training,” he asked.
The angel laughed. “Not hardly. Look around you.” The side and real walls vanished, Steve saw rows and rows of people sitting in chairs, people of all descriptions, all wearing simple white robes. The walls then reappeared. “I’m talking to everyone, but as far as you’ll perceive, I am talking to you. Heavenly multitasking. If you have a question, ask.”
“How long are the sessions?”
“As long as you can take it. I’ll know when to stop. I’ll also know what you want to ask, but at this point in your existence here, the convention is to wait for you to ask it. Unless I see the need otherwise. Ready?”
Steve nodded.
“First off, let’s discuss lying. That’s a human trait. Everybody on Earth lies to some extent. Don’t do it here. Your fellow residents, for want of a better word, may be fooled, but management isn’t. We keep track. Do enough bad things and you get sent down for a time to reflect. Maybe you’re allowed back, Maybe not. You’ll find that most of the other sins and Commandment violations aren’t possible here. Lying and taking The Boss’s name in vain are possible. They’re not looked upon kindly.
“Now, miracles. There will be things that seem miraculous to you, at first. They’re the way things work here. So, they’re not considered miracles to us. In the universe you left, there are perceived and unperceived miracles. Unperceived miracles are when we need to correct or modify reality. Perceived miracles are to remind people of the Majesty of The Boss. We don’t do as many of them as we did during the Wars with the Old Gods.”
“They were real? Odin, Zeus, Apollo, Neptune? They existed?”
“Yes, but not in the way that you think. Human society was too primitive to deal with the concept of just one god. You needed a lot of gods to explain how the world worked. But as human society matured, the old gods became redundant. Zeus wasn’t throwing thunderbolts, Aries wasn’t fomenting wars. But the beings who played those roles didn’t like losing power, even if all power came from The Boss. People needed convincing.”
“The fifty plagues, the Parting of the Red Sea were really miracles?”
“Indeed. We had some debate about the Slaying of the First-Born, but The Boss thought it was necessary and Thy Will Be Done.”
That brought another point to Steve’s mind: “Is The Boss male?”
The angel shrugged. “The Boss is above such distinctions. The Boss appears to people as they believed in life. Your society believed in Him as a man, so that is how He would appear to you. If you had sincerely believed that The Boss was a woman, that is how She would appear. If you were Hindi, The Boss would appear as a man with four arms and blue skin. If anyone sincerely was a Lovecraftian, It would appear as a giant creature with a head like an octopus.”
“What are ‘unperceived miracles’?
“Things that we need to do in order to maintain a rational Universe. You’ll learn a lot of them later on. A good example is neutrinos. Everything would have worked fine without them, but humans theorized about them and the Review Committee agreed that it was easier to have them, so we created them.
“Oh yes, before you ask. The Review Committee examines sentient theology and science and decides whether or not to make those ideas and concepts reality. For example, the Big Bang. A steady-state Universe would have been too hard to maintain once human instruments got better. And it was kind of in line with the Creation Myth, so it was put into effect by Divine Edict when Creation was begun.”
“And how will the Universe end? Will it keep expanding forever or will there be a Big Crunch?”
The angel shrugged. “It hasn’t been decided.”
“What are dark matter and dark energy?”
At this, the angel looked embarrassed. “We didn’t make enough stuff for the Universe to work the way it does. As of now, they are essentially an ongoing miracle, or, if you prefer, a Divine fudge-factor. We’re working on it, but whatever it will be, it has to be consistent with what came before.”
What about ‘the standard model of physics’?”
“That’ll work until it doesn’t. You physicists examine smaller and smaller particles by a childish method of smashing them up to see what they’re made of. It’d be like trying to discover how an engine works by hitting it with bigger and bigger hammers. What they find has to make rational sense. The Universe worked well when the various elements were the smallest things that existed. But if we can’t sustain the standard model, then we have to be ready to replace it with something that works better.
“It’s the same for cosmology. As humans make more powerful telescopes, some of the theories begin to fall apart. We’re working on what will be revealed when really powerful telescopes are deployed on the far side of theMoon.
“All right. Now, everyone up here has a job. Everyone’s job is important to the functioning of Heaven and of Creation. You’ll be assigned to a position that the staff feels is best suited to your abilities and your record on Earth. If somebody has a spotty record, as your friend Al, they have to prove their reliability. When you’ve finished here, however long it takes, you’ll receive your assignment. With me so far?”
“I do have a question. What eventually happens to us, to souls?”
“Everyone wants to know that,” the angel said. “Some move on to work as angels. Not many, our ranks were pretty full before humans began walking the African savannah.”
“Wait a second. The savannah, not the Garden of Eden?”
The angel smiled. “You know better. We needed a story, a legend. Something that would be understandable to primitive pastoralists, a few generations away from being hunter-gatherers, people with no written language, with no concept of evolution.
“The operating principle is nothing is forever, other than The Boss and maybe his counterpart down below. It’s like your concept of black holes. Eventually, souls fade away. Or evaporate. You won’t find too many souls from homo erectus. Generally, a few millenia or so, and souls get tired. They go when they’re ready and the Boss knows when.”
The angel looked at Steve. “You’re tired, so go rest. Come back when you’re ready,” he said.
Steve nodded. He got up, left the room and went back to his quarters. When he walked into his room, it appeared to be dark out, even though it was light as he walked down the street. He was too tired to even remark on that.
His head was asleep when his head hit the pillow.
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