For a fleeting moment, Michael's existence was nothing but agony.
It felt as if his flesh had evaporated in a single instant. Excruciating pain flooded his insides, as though his organs were being peeled away from the inside out. His eyes—if he still had eyes—felt like they were melting in their sockets.
And then even that pain vanished.
His consciousness slipped into a pitch-black abyss.
He had never truly dwelt on the old question: Is there life after death? It had always been filed under metaphysics and pseudoscience—a category he considered beneath serious thought. But now, with nothing left but awareness, the question slammed into him with brutal force.
He tried to move.
Nothing.
No limbs, no fingers, no eyelids to blink, no chest to rise and fall. His body, as far as he could tell, no longer existed.
He wasn't lying in darkness. Lying implied a surface. Darkness implied eyes and a visual field. He had neither. No heartbeat to mark time, no lungs to burn for air, no nerves to report cold or heat.
He just was.
It was a state of pure, substrate-independent existence. And to a man who had built his entire life on materialism, it was an insult.
He had spent years working with the Standard Model, building his career on the assumption that reality was fields and particles, nothing more. He knew the rules: consciousness was a complex arrangement of fermions interacting via bosons. A spark in the meat. Remove the meat, and the spark went out.
That was cessation. That was death. Zero.
Yet here he was—a remainder in an equation that should have balanced.
Panic crept in, not as fear of hellfire or divine judgment, but as a deeper, more humiliating realization: his worldview was… inefficient. Inelegant. Wrong in a way that offended his sense of intellectual hygiene.
If I'm dead, he thought, why am I still computing?
He thought of his colleagues back at CERN. The ones he privately called The Diatribe—loud, smug, certain. The kind of atheists who turned disbelief into a crusade, evangelizing the "truth" of nothingness to anyone who would listen. They sneered at the religious not just for being wrong, but for being comforted.
He had always despised them. Not because he thought a deity existed—he didn't know, and he hadn't cared—but because their crusade had no utility.
Why strip away a grandmother's hope? Why take the belief that lowered cortisol, provided ritual, and reinforced social bonds, and grind it into dust in the name of "truth"? It was scientifically sound to let the masses believe, even if the elite knew it was fiction.
Efficient, he had thought. Instrumentally rational.
But now… they were definitely wrong. About at least one thing.
There was not nothing.
The realization hit him like a punch. The "unknown unknown" he had always assumed was empty had just bitten him on the throat. The Diatribe had preached nothingness as if it were an experimentally verified constant, not a philosophical preference.
He remembered their obstinate debates, the way they wanted to "enlighten" the public by denying any possibility of a god. He remembered reading studies that said otherwise—not about theology, but about outcomes.
There had been that study by Koenig from Duke, for instance: religious involvement correlated with better mental health, lower rates of depression, a stronger sense of purpose. Basic belief in a god, or at least participation in religious structures, was associated with lower cardiovascular risk and greater life satisfaction. He had stored the findings as trivia at the time, another datapoint in favor of "don't break what stabilizes the herd."
Even if they had been right about the metaphysics, tearing those benefits away from people had always seemed selfish to him.
He'd never picked a side. He identified with neither crusading atheism nor creationism. Atheists had the advantage of coherence and elite backing—media, academia, a unified narrative that made them look triumphant. Creationists, by contrast, were fragmented and disorganized, their arguments diluted across dozens of competing religions. Christians were the loudest, so they absorbed most of the criticism, but their internal contradictions didn't help.
In the void, the memory of all that discourse felt like distant noise.
For the first time in his life, he found himself asking the question properly: What if the Christians were right?
The prevalent image of hellfire, eternal torment for unbelievers, floated through his mind. He'd read the Bible, along with plenty of other religious texts, and as far as he remembered, "eternal conscious suffering in fire" wasn't as straightforward as popular imagination made it out to be. The closest concept he recalled was eternal death—a permanent cessation, not an everlasting torture chamber.
If death was merely the end of life, then "eternal death" just meant staying dead forever. No pain. No awareness. Just zero.
An eternal torment, on the other hand, was unbearable even to contemplate.
His thoughts spun faster.
If this isn't zero, what is it? Some kind of waiting room? A misfire?
He became aware of a kind of… weightlessness. Not physical, exactly. More like his awareness had unmoored and was drifting, pulled very gently toward something distant and bright. He could not see it—there were no eyes—but there was a sense of orientation: a "there" as opposed to "here."
He felt drawn to it, an almost magnetic pull. But no matter how much he tried to will himself forward, he didn't move. Something held him back, an invisible resistance with no surface to push against.
He tried to scream, but screaming required lungs and a throat and air. He had none. The effort produced nothing.
For the first time, he framed it in words: Limbo.
Trapped between the realm of the living and something else.
A deep sadness flowed into him, pervasive and total. It wasn't the dull emptiness he knew from his life; it was heavier, more absolute. The sense of being unmoored and unfinished, like an equation missing its final term.
Part of him wanted to rush toward the light, to see what lay beyond. Another part was paralyzed. What if there was nothing past it? What if this half-state was already more than he was "supposed" to get?
He tried to calm himself, to do what he always did when panic threatened: reduce, model, analyze. Focus on breathing, he told himself automatically—only to remember he didn't have lungs.
His thoughts became a chaotic jumble irrespective of his attempts at control.
He recalled von Neumann.
The thought came, oddly sharp against the blur. John von Neumann, the greatest calculator in history, the mind that had helped build the atom bomb and the foundations of modern computing. On his deathbed, von Neumann, by conservative accounts, had asked for a Catholic priest and hedged his bets.
Von Neumann hadn't laughed at the end. He hadn't trusted pure logic to carry him across that horizon. He'd panicked, just a little, because he recognized something terrifying: logic has a boundary. Beyond that boundary, intelligence offers no protection.
And I'm past the boundary, Michael realized. I'm running without hardware. There's nothing to prove, nothing to measure—only this.
His consciousness trembled, threatening to fragment in the impossible silence. He still didn't believe in a personal God. The word meant too many incompatible things. But he understood, viscerally now, that his mind was not designed to withstand an infinite, unstructured void.
Something had to give.
Then everything shifted.
The not-darkness around him peeled back, replaced by a sudden, overwhelming radiance. There was no sense of distance; the light was everywhere, an all-consuming presence that rushed in from every direction at once.
He felt an unseen force lifting him, drawing him into that brilliance. Fear should have followed, but instead a wave of serenity washed over him. The fear and confusion that had been gnawing at him moments ago dissolved, burned away by warmth.
Love. Acceptance. The words felt embarrassingly sentimental, but they were the closest approximations his mind could conjure.
He emerged—if that was the word—from the emptiness, and the light enveloped him completely. No pain, no dread, no loneliness. Just a pure, clean bliss he had no framework for.
For an instant, he felt as if he were part of something greater than himself, something vast and infinite; a structure whose outline he could not begin to parse. He knew, dimly, that he had left his physical body behind, but the knowledge carried no weight.
His thoughts drifted, unmoored from time and space. They wandered through every afterlife model he had ever idly filed away: reincarnation into another body; eternal paradise as a kind of high-dimensional theme park; merging into a cosmic consciousness; or an infinite void where awareness simply… stretched forever.
Each possibility stirred a different emotion—curiosity, fear, awe, a thin thread of hope.
Am I just memories? he wondered. A pattern that thinks it's "Michael"? Or is there some persistent core that survives even when the substrate is ripped away?
The questions echoed, amplified by the silence.
Slowly, the blinding light faded. Not to nothing, but to a softer dark that no longer felt hostile. He couldn't sense anything externally, but he began to feel a presence—intangible, unlocalized, as if something just beyond his awareness was shepherding him through the black.
The questions didn't stop, but the edge of panic dulled. Moment by moment, a strange peace seeped in. The darkness felt less like a void and more like a cocoon: a place of suspension, reflection, and waiting.
Whatever awaited him beyond this state, he felt himself inching toward acceptance. Not agreement—never that—but readiness.
In the midst of that slow, uneasy calm, another shift began.
He didn't notice it at first. Warmth, faint and diffuse, wrapped around him. The sense of being unmoored faded, replaced by a new kind of containment. The darkness pressed closer, not empty this time but thick and enclosing, like being submerged in a dense, warm fluid.
Then came the pressure.
It built rapidly, crushing in from all sides, as if he were being forced through a narrow passage. The warmth around him squeezed and surged. For the first time since the explosion, he felt something like inside and outside again.
Cold slammed into him.
Icy air hit his skin—skin—and his first breath tore into his lungs like broken glass. He shuddered, an involuntary convulsion, as sound erupted around him in distant, muffled bursts.
He tried to inhale again, and this time the air came in a ragged, wet gasp.
He cried.
A raw, shrill wail tore out of him, high and helpless and utterly unlike the controlled tones he had used his whole life. It echoed—not in the void, but in a room, bouncing off walls, merging with other sounds: voices, movement, the rustle of fabric.
Warm hands—many of them, or one pair moving quickly—lifted him. Skin met skin. The contact seared him with a new kind of heat: not the all-encompassing radiance of the light, but something smaller, focused, human.
His body felt wrong. Heavy. Uncoordinated. Limbs he could not command flailed uselessly; fingers curled and uncurled without precision. His eyes refused to open properly, eyelids fluttering against a brightness that stabbed at him.
He cried harder.
The urge to weep came like a reflex, overpowering and absolute, a torrent of emotion with no clear object—sorrow, terror, confusion, all jammed together and squeezed through a throat too small to hold them.
Why am I this… loud? a part of him thought, disoriented. The sheer intensity of his feelings shocked him. He was used to emotional flatness, to anger that burned clean and then went cold. This was different: wild, unfiltered, drowning him.
The hands holding him shifted, cradling his fragile body, wrapping him in warmth. Cloth brushed his skin. A heartbeat pulsed somewhere close by, steady and strong. A voice—soft, distant, incomprehensible—murmured something above him.
Gradually, the storm of his crying began to ebb. Air moved in and out of his lungs in shorter, steadier bursts. His body adjusted, in its own clumsy way, to the new assault of sensations: cold air, warm skin, pressure, sound, brightness.
The commotion around him faded into a blur. The rhythm of his own breathing slowed. Exhaustion flooded in, heavy and irresistible.
Darkness returned—but not the same darkness as before. This was closer, softer, wrapped tight around a body that finally, undeniably existed.
It felt, in a way he had never allowed himself before, like being held.
And in that held darkness, Michael's awareness flickered, narrowed, and finally slipped under, surrendering to the first sleep of his new life.