The Afterlife

Waking in the starlit darkness, Dee discovered that she had regained the use of her lungs and limbs, and that she had believed in the afterlife all along.
      She spun the globe, stopped it, zoomed in on herself. She examined her life’s tube—emerging in Baltimore, coiling tightly in apartments in Philadelphia and Chicago and two houses several streets apart in Portland, jumping several times across the Pacific and about a dozen over the Atlantic, thickening out the paths between work and home in thousands of redundant iterations. From far away, it was a thin, knotty wire, like a headphones cable left in someone’s pocket.

      Corresponding briefly with her parent code, Dee called up an infinite database, her own. It hummed and spread as she touched it, pulled it apart with her fingers, froze columns and cleared reckoning space for herself. Her first calculation was also the first calculation of 92,304 people before her.
AVG/DAY CIGARETTES: 7.85013
      She reset the start date to her 16th birthday.
AVG/DAY CIGARETTES: 18.27992
      She was curious:
AVG/DAY NOT(MARLBORO) CIGARETTES: 0.30014
      It didn’t take her long to discover the COMPAT set of statistics, wherein she found that the one partner who would have optimized her life experience would in fact be born in 2522, in what is currently Norway. She rated her boyfriend’s percentile:
COMPAT francis_dee002_1980 grossman_phil008_1977: 78.44762
      Inspired, she reversed the names:
COMPAT grossman_phil008_1977 francis_dee002_1980: 87.25838
      She meditated on that.
COMPAT francis_dee002_1980 timberlake_justin001_1981: 78.23995
COMPAT francis_dee002_1980 khan_genghis_1162: 21.04353
COMPAT francis_dee002_1980 smith_john001_3000: 99.89712
      The commands were intuitive to her—not because of anything she’d done in her life, but just because they were there, in her head.
AVG/DAY HRS_READING: 0.23550
AVG/DAY HRS_READING(TRASHY_ROMANCE): 0.01718
AVG/DAY HRS_READING(TECHNICAL_MANUALS): 0.01385
AVG/DAY HRS_READING(shakespeare_william001_1564): 0.00001
PCT_BY_DIST TRANSPORT(CAR): 48.35591
PCT_BY_TIME TRANSPORT(CAR): 22.23920
TOT ORGASMS: 45.00000
TOT MONEY_SPENT: $276,081.44
TOT MONEY_SPENT(BEER): $2,776.30
TOT SOCKS: 487.00000
AVG WEARS(SOCK): 22.83538
TOT GESTURES(PETTING_CAT): 8,342.00000
TOT GESTURES(PETTING_DOG): 790.00000
TOT WORDS_SAID: 9,607,401.00000
TOT WORDS_SAID(thanks): 10,030.00000
TOT WORDS_SAID(please): 4,526.00000
TOT WORDS_SAID(fuck): 10,888.00000
TOT WORDS_SAID(like): 18,447.00000

      After innumerable statistics—there was of course no limit—Dee returned to the globe, set it in motion, adjusted the date in the corner, and reviewed her own birth: the sticky emergence of a new subroutine.
      She stepped back and hovered over Baltimore, drifted to a ship in the ocean, and followed it for days.
      She reset the date and watched the eruption of Vesuvius.
      She surveyed the making of her twelve favorite films, although the term “favorite” had come to mean something different.
      She found a teenage garage band buried in the limitless residential tracts south of Long Beach and attended all four of their rehearsals, before they broke up.
      She visited dozens of refugee camps, on different continents, in different centuries.
      She was there watching in the dark in his bedroom as President Bush slept fitfully, one night chosen at random.
      She returned to Portland at the moment of her death and floated through the months to follow, her boyfriend gradually moving on, her parents failing to do so.

      Through it all she was without emotion, except perhaps for gratitude—that it all had been recorded, that someone had saved all of it, and was letting her watch, now, alone and content.