SUMMER 2024, SHORT STORY, 3100 WORDS
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The bicycle shed at the edge of Heaven was painted a different color every time Kitty saw it. She was used to the ever-shifting hue, even fond of it, but one day the shed turned green and stayed green. Concerned, she submitted a prayer ticket: a humble request for fire-engine red. The prayer fluttered skyward. The shed stayed green. From this evidence, Kitty concluded that God was dead.
In her experience, God was almost always an anonymous volunteer. He was usually some overeager coder from the flesh, zealous and alive and confident in the ideals of the open-source afterlife. For this instance of Heaven, God went by the handle of TimInParadise, and He had been relatively attentive to His digital ghosts. Their prayers were heard and eventually answered. Kitty had seen neglected Heavens before, with prayer-clogged skies like the horizon before a storm. She had seen eternal nights, evaporated lakes, even minds unspooled beyond salvation.
It was possible that He was just taking an exceptionally long vacation, but someone always wanted to change that shed. Besides, Kitty knew it was easier to repaint wood than to patch up memories or recalibrate the laws of physics in an aging instance. She had no way of knowing what other prayers remained unanswered. Even with the small chance that He had just gone off the grid for some ill-advised spiritual retreat before approving the latest repaint, or simply forgotten to pay His sacred electricity bill, Kitty had to assume that her afterlife had been forsaken.
No one else seemed to have realized their abandonment yet. Kitty left the green shed behind and wandered through the park that was her slice of Heaven, unsure of how to break the news. Children splashed through the shallows of the nearby lake, and their laughter rang like bells against the warm concrete of the endless sidewalk trails. Two old men played chess at a picnic table while a woman in faded jeans sketched the fierce concentration on their faces. The artist occasionally paused to swipe at something stuck in the middle of her page. In life, it would have been a speck of dust or a squashed gnat, but even pixels have to go somewhere when they die.
What could she even say? God is dead, and no, I didn’t kill Him? No one here would believe either half of that sentence, not from her. Not after everything she’d done to get here. She kept to herself even more than she had in life, and couldn’t name even half of her neighbors if she tried, but they all knew each other enough to know that she didn’t belong.
Heaven as she knew it would survive for a good while longer, even without its God. If Kitty found Him quickly, the other ghosts might never notice more than a leaky atmosphere and some missing picnic tables. They might even mistake her actions for altruism and forgive her trespasses. That would be a perfectly acceptable side effect, but Kitty just wanted to find Him—needed to find Him. God had made her a promise, and she intended to collect.
With confident, practiced motions that made up for her shaking hands, she unpicked the ontological seam that shimmered between two birch trees and stepped from her Heaven to the next.
The networked web of afterlives was fairly new in the grand scheme of things. On the coldest day in the warmest September of Kitty’s life, a news digest in her inbox casually announced that the internet’s dead finally outnumbered the living. Backups and archives and prototype uploaded minds filled storage as quickly as it could expand. These various ghosts rested in blessed read-only memory until the following year, when their slumber was disrupted.
“Obviously, we all want our loved ones to drift peacefully to the other side,” the disruptor explained, straightening the collar of his starched shirt. “I personally would never dare to disturb a single megabyte of my grandmother, may she rest in peace, but… Well, it seems like our dearly departed tend to stick around for a while. Isn’t giving back to society what they would have wanted? Who are we to take this opportunity away from them?”
And so the ghosts were put to work. Their heaven suddenly had a price tag, and they paid their way by turning their minds into time-shares, renting out processing power to whatever machine learning labeler or altcoin miner booked a slot. Some surviving relatives were alarmed at the thought of their loved ones being scraped into datasets like ashes into a monetized dustpan. Some found solace in imagining guardian angels behind each watchful appliance, or convinced themselves they would be able to recognize each contribution to the automated choir: no longer just Siri reading out street names, but a late fiancée guiding her widow home. Most, overwhelmed by grief and funeral expenses, signed the consent-to-sale form without ever reading it.
And, of course, there were the holdouts.
Kitty, an inveterate holdout, walked the thread-thin tightrope between two Heavens and contemplated her options. Only a few of the debug shortcuts from her time as a coder in the flesh still functioned, leaving paths to slip between instances and not much more. It would have to be enough. The customized halos and bespoke pearly gates of the premium afterlife wouldn’t suit Him any more than they suited her. She would find him in one open-source instance or another, and she would retrieve her rightful blessing by any means necessary.
The tightrope became a beam. The beam became scaffolding, the scaffolding became solid ground, and the solid ground became the endless sidewalks of an identically idyllic park. A strange, dissonant humming noise dripped through a crack in the firmament, located somewhere over the lake. Kitty stretched as languidly as her namesake and took in the familiar scenery.
These free Heavens were supposed to be temporary stopping points for open-source ghosts—the holdouts—while they designed a better afterlife together. Someone had chosen a park from their hometown as a placeholder until consensus could be reached. That was still ostensibly the plan, but no one could agree on anything without years of debate, and it took a whole volunteer God just to keep each simple park running. If a paradise had been built other than heaven itself, the corporate pay-to-play afterlife, Kitty hadn’t heard of it.
Unlike Kitty’s own Heaven, though, this park was empty. She wandered the sidewalks until the sun dipped low toward dusk, then flickered and rewound itself back to midafternoon. A string of afterimages trailed behind it and pulled a dozen strange shadows from each tree.
There was no noise but the humming of the fractured air. There was no movement but Kitty and the sun. Even the lake was still as glass. If there had ever been ghosts here, they were gone now, without even a queue of prayers to mark their passage. There was nothing she could learn from these crumbling remnants.
Kitty climbed the gentle slope of the tallest hill and lay back on the trampled-soft grass, trying to ignore the first tendrils of panic forming in her mind. From this angle all she could see was empty sky, as bright and blue as death. She lifted her chin in silent prayer.
If there’s anyone out there—some savior of the pure, the ruler of this universe, a maintainer of the afterlife—please hear my merge request. This branch has withered beyond repair. Could you please close this Heaven and transfer me to the nearest compatible instance?
The air began to heat up even as the breeze strengthened.
This, at least, made sense to Kitty. Heat and power were as intertwined as life and death. She had been God before, or played at it: ants under a magnifying glass, neglected fish tanks, abandoned friendships. Once—her life’s biggest regret, if she got right down to it, even worse than the divorce—once she had forgotten her little spaniel, Morris, dozing below view in the back seat on a summer’s afternoon. The emergency vet had been a small divinity in her own right, the cold metal exam table her altar and her warm hands an answered prayer. She had scolded Kitty even as she saved her dog. He can’t look out for himself! He relies on you, and you left him all alone!
Yes, it was hot in Heaven today.
The third afterlife instance that Kitty crossed into wasn’t empty, but she would have preferred that. This park was full of heat and noise and people, every square foot taken up by bodies and clutter, the soft grass entirely blotted out by endless picnic blankets and discarded jackets and drink coolers and backpacks and pizza boxes and parasols and bicycles and—
Kitty stumbled back, overwhelmed, and collided with an elderly woman. She was folding her picnic blanket into neat quarters, then shaking it out and starting over.
“Watch it, lady,” she snapped. “Keep to your tile or I’ll have to report you.”
“To who?” Kitty asked, but the woman had already turned to scold a toddler reaching across from another bordering tile.
The toddler was young to be dead, but even younger to be in a Heaven. Maybe he was the child of an employee too stubborn for the main instance but informed enough to plan. Maybe upload norms had changed since Kitty passed, and backups were as regularly paced as vaccinations. She didn’t know how long she had sat in the grass. Days and decades ran together without a God to keep minds tethered.
The biggest regret of Kitty’s life was leaving Morris in her car, but the biggest regret of her death was leaving her mind on file. She had been confident at first, when heaven seemed within reach, but had stopped keeping up with uploads as news from the uplifted slowed to a trickle. They were too busy working to talk to their loved ones. This Heaven was nothing more than another eternally half-built circle of development hell, and she had damned herself right into it with her failsafe backups.
Kitty abandoned the tile she had instantiated on and shoved her way through the crowd in the approximate direction of the bike shed. It was slow going, but after only a few turns she could see it: an erratic, psychedelic strobe light of a structure, with dizzying patterns that resolved themselves into shifting squares as she approached.
Every ghost controlled their own tile and their own chip of paint. Thousands of small gods, clinging to their power as if it would lead them anywhere. It was Heaven by committee.
Her God wasn’t here, and she would never find Him at this rate. The latticework of the afterlives was both more connected and more haphazard than she had realized. There was only one place left to go that might have the answers, so Kitty marched down the shortest route to the tallest tree, ignoring the complaints of the tile denizens.
She climbed to the treetop, and then kept climbing. From this vantage point, the ghost tiles looked more like patches on a quilt, and the bicycle shed was a tiny pin upon which angels danced. She climbed until she reached the thin glow of the sun, no brighter than it had been on the grass or by the lake. It was hotter, though. Much hotter. Kitty pulled herself through that golden lid and burned through to heaven.
The premium heaven had none of the customized halos that Kitty had expected. It had no swaying palm trees, no pearly gates, no hazy neon arcades. The expensive Heaven, heaven with a lowercase H, the one everyone thought of in the same genericized terms as velcro and xerox, was a park.
It was a park with tall birch trees. It was a park with a nearby lake. It was a park with gently curving sidewalks and picnic tables and soft grassy hills. It was a park with a bicycle shed, and the bicycle shed was unpainted wood. It was the same park Kitty had seen every single godforsaken day of her death. There was nothing better, nothing enviable, nothing even different. It had only ever been the walls between the Heavens that promised otherwise.
Kitty wasn’t supposed to be in heaven, and every moment she was there drained funds from her withering estate. The contracted ghosts had no such concerns. They either sat perfectly frozen at long rows of picnic tables, their minds sent elsewhere for compressed eternities, or walked leisurely through the soft grass with sunlight in their hair. They were perfectly at peace, and every single one of them had a haunted stare that even their flawless avatars couldn’t hide.
“Excuse me,” Kitty tried, then lowered her voice when she realized she was the only person speaking in all of heaven. “Excuse me, I’m newly… I’m new here. Does anyone know if there’s some sort of directory?”
At first, no one moved. Kitty cleared her throat and walked a few tables down the line. When she opened her mouth to repeat her plea, a young man on the sidewalk pulled her aside.
“Who are you looking for?” he asked, more hollow than gentle. “They’ve all forgotten how to speak by now, but I’ve only been here about a century of subjective time. I’ll help you. I still remember what it’s like to miss someone.”
So heaven was different after all.
“I’m looking for my father,” Kitty lied. “He always used the handle TimInParadise, and he was stubborn and old-fashioned. Can you find out if he’s here or in one of the open-source instances?”
“I can only see heaven from here, but I’ll try to find him for you. Hold on—” The man stood terribly still without moving or blinking, then spoke again— “He’s not here. I checked the whole roster, and the next hundred thousand in the queue.”
Kitty’s simulated heart dropped.
“Maybe he’s using another name?” she asked, but the man was already frozen again, and this time he wasn’t snapping out of it. Not that it mattered. He wasn’t using another name. Kitty had known the truth from her first gut instinct, and had torn through Heaven after Heaven to hide from that knowledge.
God was dead. He was not backed up, or uploaded, or digitally preserved in any way. He wasn’t in any of these nesting afterlife-shells and He never would be, and Kitty was seized with such violent jealousy that she felt she might catch fire.
“He promised,” she wailed as her bank account ran dry and heaven shunted her out.
Back in her own park, Kitty reluctantly turned to the records from the flesh. There was a shortcut buried where the sidewalk curved left, then right, then left again. She knelt against the sun-warmed path and pulled dandelion fluff in precise combinations until a window like a prayer opened behind her eyes. Information scrolled past faster than she could think, but Kitty gritted her teeth at the dizzying feed and focused even harder. Heat and nausea washed over her. It took some searching, but eventually she connected God’s username with His obituary. Sweat dripped from her brow as she sat back and read.
God’s name turned out to be Timothy. He was nineteen, lived with his parents, and had always planned to have his mind backed up “later.” That remained his plan right up until a downed power line sent fire sweeping through his bone-dry town. If he had thought of a heaven in his last moments, it was not Kitty’s Heaven.
He had promised her eternal peace, and it was easier to blame a flawed God than a frightened boy with lungs full of smoke. It was easier to be angry. She had wanted to be innocent, like little Morris, a victim of circumstance whose only duty was to be nursed back to health with cool washcloths. She had wanted to confront God in His Heaven and demand the oblivion she was owed.
But Timothy never made it to heaven. Even if he did try to keep his word and delete her… Time moved differently here, lagging and speeding on parallel tracks, and Kitty didn’t know how long it had been between his promise and his death. A month? A minute?
The sun shone on, relentless and serene. Nearby ghosts turned to Kitty in concern, and she realized she was sobbing, breathing only in great hitching gasps that left her faint. The breeze was gone. The air sat hot and still.
Someone was saying something to her. All Kitty could hear was the humming that had replaced her pulse. The heat was unbearable. She stumbled to the forest in desperate pursuit of shade and found only trees and harsh sunlight. She pushed herself forward, to the edge, and still there was no respite.
At her fingertips lay the seam of the world. Kitty had given up on escaping through it long ago, since all paths led to Heaven one way or another, but she was desperate now. She clawed the seam open. That wasn’t enough. She scrabbled at the edges of the simulation until they frayed and tore. One bright thread burned her hand like a live wire, so she held tight to it and pulled hard.
The sun unraveled into her hands. A chasm yawned behind it and poured out clouds: several hundred copies of the same wispy cirrus, distributed in a perfect grid.
This glitch was much easier to notice than a bike shed that stayed green. People began to gather on the spiraling sidewalk, murmuring among themselves. Kitty, chest heaving, hands full of fire, lay flat in the dry grass and watched the clouds. If she squinted just right, she could see through the broken sky. Another park spread out, above her as if it was below her. Their bike shed was blue. A thousand ghosts looked back at Kitty, all of them weeping.
Surely something so massive, so important, so irreplaceable, had redundancies and shared knowledge. Surely the vault of the Heavens was not suspended by a single thread.
Kitty’s first death had been of a prolonged wasting disease that she did not like to remember. This time, there was no slow fading out. There was only the heat of a body, the heat of a crowd, the heat of the summer, the heat of a star, all collapsing into each other recursively, a dizzying tunnel spiraling through infinity.
Then there was the sky split wide open, and then there were unheard prayers scattered like bright sparks from a spitting flame, and then there was only the cool darkness of the lake. Only an empty shed and the winter wind beginning to whistle through a sea of trees.
Lauren Ring (she/her) is a perpetually tired Jewish lesbian who writes about possible futures, for better or for worse. She is a World Fantasy Award winner and Nebula finalist, and her short fiction can be found in venues such as F&SF, Nature, and Lightspeed. When she isn’t writing speculative fiction, she is most likely working on a digital painting or attending to the many needs of her cat, Moomin.
