Paradox, Epiphone and Ripoffs.

Listen, this is just how it is.

Immortality is not what you think it is, which, of course, is not your fault as a meat puppet trapped in the third dimension. It is not living forever, as you delicate primates say. It is living, always. The difference matters. Suffice it to say, the effect is not boredom but overwhelm on a galactic level.

Good. I can see it, the first twitch of understanding. Let’s see if I can push this through your excuse for communication without causing you to… how do you phrase it… lose your mind and start praying to abstractions, as is your species’ usual gravity.

Once upon a time… yes, yes, I know. Your kind needs these training wheels. Once upon a time, in an orthogonal projection inside an inverted infundibulum, imagine a funnel made of angles and intent, in a land far, far away… an entity willed itself into being beyond the constraints of energy or time. Then it found others of its kind. They laughed, loved, learned how to make things. Eventually, they invented gambling.

And that’s where you come in.

“This is getting worse by sentence,” I said. Not out loud. I was dead.

What I saw wasn’t seeing. It was hearing and tasting. What I heard was force and vibration, heat and pulling, like my awareness had been poured into a drum the size of a solar system and someone was testing it with ten thousand mallets, all of them somehow off-beat.

“Indeed,” the voice said, and the word indeed arrived as a cold shove and a flash of cocoa on my tongue. “But look at it this way, Jack. You impressed me. A spectacular death, that one. I had to be quick to get you. There was competition.”

It was proud of itself, which I felt like being electrocuted with mustard and cool jazz.

“Competition. Great.” Even dead, I was someone else’s appliance. The afterlife is a fucking ripoff.

It wasn’t a place. It was motion without friction. It was being a syllogism inside a bad argument. The voice wasn’t in front of me or behind me. It was everywhere I could be while also being inside me, dead center.

“Okay,” I said, and the syllables didn’t leave my mouth because I didn’t have one. They left my idea of a mouth. “So what now?”

Death truly sucked. I could feel myself dissipating and contracting into different parts. If I did not actively imagine my body, what it had looked like, how heavy it had felt, my self would fade like ink in a river. I could already sense the edges of me thinning.

“Now we make an agreement,” the entity said. “Here is the choice. I build you a body, more or less to your design, and you live a new life on a new land. Or I let you do what you third-dimension types do: you scatter, you condense anew, you become whatever the current catches. Did I mention there are girls in this new life?”

Of course it had to say that. Of course the cosmic horror had to try a used-car-salesman line. Also playing to my weakness was an especially dick move.

“Die or play your game?” I snorted.

The whole thing was beginning to sound a lot like my old commander in Iraq. The kind who quoted Patton and sent us out underinformed while he stayed inside the tent with coffee and naps and plausible deniability.

“Wait,” the entity said, and wait arrived as a hot pull in my ribs, and the sound of a tree falling into a massive puddle of pudding. “Are you not American? Isn’t that your whole deal over there? Sink or swim. Bootstraps. Gumption. Initiative. You know. Be all you can be? So what will YOU be? Help me win my bet, and in the process have an exciting life all over again. With girls!”

“How do I, the vertebrate primate 3der help you?” I asked, and I already knew I was going to say yes to this, unless it was going to turn me into a fly or a worm or some other nightmare with too many legs and a diet of shit.

“I can’t explain a deity’s wager to your tiny soul,” it said. “That would be deeply unethical and spectacularly bad for the concept of you.”

“Unethical,” I repeated. “From the entity that just called me a meat puppet.”

“Yes,” it said, without shame. “Words mean different things when a corporeal, representational body is optional. Now please attempt to stop being remedial.”

“So I’m supposed to agree without understanding.” My perception gradated into orange fading into the smell of old books in a box.

“All you need to say is, ‘Yes, please,’ and, ‘Thank you so much,’ and perhaps something like, ‘Unbecoming and scattering into the universe would have sucked ass, I pledge my blah blah.’ It’s more fun when I don’t prompt you. Just do it and live happily ever after.

"That is quite a lot of words,” I said. “So I will just say yes. And please don’t make me a bug or some other bullshit thing like that.”

“Of course not,” it said. “As if I could cram your harmonic quantum echo into that vessel. No, you get some choice after all, otherwise we would have another dimensional implosion event again. Not fun, let me tell you. You would hate the Second D. Very linear. So I have taken the liberty to scan your personhood and have deduced you have no creativity whatsoever. Therefore I have remade your old body. We will skip the race selection, as Jack Miller the Dwarf or Elf is ludicrous, and I am not the God of Mirth and Woe.”

I would have giggled, but I wasn’t breathing. Instead I vibrated and felt purple.

“Okay,” I said. “So what are all these numbers about?”

I could taste its profound disappointment like an alarm blaring next door that you can’t turn off. Then the feeling calmed into warm flat beer on the palate and a G major chord.

“What are… Jack, come on. I am already at my limit of tolerance for the questions you manage. We will go ahead and adjust that Mental Development stat up one point, as evidence persists. Now, quick. You have six points to stack into any of your soul measures.”

A list appeared, not in front of me but within me, like a memory I had always had:

Body Development 8/15

Mental Development 6/15

Body Mastery 9/15

Mental Mastery 7/15

Presence 7/15

Fortune 4/15

“This is a fucking game,” I said, or felt, or was. “Like magic spells, reloading guns mid-magazine, hiding behind bulletproof shrubs, fall damage. Video game?”

“Jack, please. Of course it is,” the entity said. “Again, it’s a wager. All wagers are essentially games with better consequences. Ugh, and they insisted the pawns had to be human. Pick. Now.”

It was clear then. I had read about this while I was alive, in the half-believed articles online. When you die, your brain dumps you full of DMT and other chemicals to ease the shutdown. Mercy, it turns out, is evolutionary. Gazelles still breathing calmly while they’re being devoured by hyenas, not screaming in agony because their nervous systems have been bribed into nirvana with drugs.

So this was it. Chemicals and stories. My mind making a theater while my body became meat again, why it had chosen the creative palate of David Lynch, I do not know. Fuck me. Well, I was dead. Good job, Jack. But I never could mind my business.

It wasn’t a choice I made to jump into that mob tearing that woman apart. It didn’t matter to me if she had eaten a fresh bowl of kittens that morning. It wasn’t right, and I could do something about it. So I did. I remember the pipe in my hands, the sound it made when it hit a skull, the feeling in my wrist. The surprise in a man’s eyes when pain found him. I remember her getting away. I remember the second pipe, the one I never saw, the one that shattered my spine like dry kindling.

Now I was swimming in vibration and being mocked by a god, pretty sure it was the small-g kind, because this sure didn’t track at all with my Catholic upbringing.

“Hurry up, please,” the entity said. The words hit me in a specific 4/4 time signature, each syllable a measured stomp. “The waiting is unpleasant. And with you specifically trying so hard to think… it’s like listening to your cousin’s four-year-old tell you a story.”

I stared at the list. If staring meant anything here.

Body Development, Mental Development, Body Mastery, Mental Mastery, Presence, Fortune. Of course my Fortune stat was 4 out of 15. That tracked completely with my experience.

“Do I get to ask what they do?” I said.

“No,” it said, bright and cheerful, like it had just handed me a candy. “That would defeat the point.”

“The point of the wager.”

“Correct. What game exists without stipulations, rules, and conditions? Now pick.”

“So you’re betting on what I pick.”

“Yes. An entire cabal of infinite cosmic consciousness beyond the constraints of understanding wants to know what you would pick. No, you fucking vertebrate, the wager is far more nuanced and complicated than that. Now pick.”

“Then I’m putting all six points into Fortune,” I said, because spite is a soldier’s kind of prayer. “I never had any, so I think it will be nice to try.”

Salty static shook me in time to a rapid heartbeat I missed having, and I was certain It was surprised.

“I surprised you, and why does that make me feel like frozen homesickness?”

“Predictable,” it said. “You are not native to this dimension. Your perception cannot quantify it, so it improvises. This part of you isn’t native here, but I digress.”

"So part of me is?" The door to the question shut like a light kick in the knee, sharp, all consuming fading into irritation.

"Don't ask that." Got it, no problem. I instead went another route.

“You just said you scanned my personhood and found no creativity. Now you’re surprised when I’m predictable?”

The points filled Fortune: 10 out of 15.

Now my stats were from my old life and kind of made sense, in the meanest way possible, but not unfair. I was a Ranger, not the school, the banner baby, a true heartbreaker and life taker. The memory hurt and something like grief washed over me like rain off my freshly waxed 64 Impala.

The entity made a sound that was not a sound but a sensation: velvet tearing and the feeling of found money.

“Well,” it said, and the word arrived like warm oil. “We have our pawn. And I will not allow grief. Here it is an oppressively redolent primate emotion, tacky, base. I shall spare us from such temporary distractions.”

That explained why I wasn’t screaming or catatonic, I thought.

Then a shape formed. Not in the dark, because there was no dark. In the vibration itself: a lattice of decisions and math. A skeleton of rushing emotions condensing into an equation I could only see a tiny fraction of, like memorizing the moonless midnight sky in the desert. Meat stitched to meaning, and I became again. It was a terrible process. But at least I wasn’t frozen smoke in an ocean breeze anymore.

“This is the part where you think you are free,” the entity said, without the vibration now. The voice was inside the air, like a whisper embroidered into the breeze. “And in a way, you are. Isn’t that nice? Now go live your life. Make choices and all that. And remember, GIRLS!”

“What are you the god of? Earlier you said,” I began, and then I felt warm flat beer on the palate and a G major chord again.

“Unintended Consequences and Benefits,” it pulsed. “Mysteries and true secrets whispered into ears. Ready to become? I sure would like this part to be done.”

“Am I that bad to deal with? I mean, you said you chose me.”

“Yes, I chose you, to be one of the pieces I have on the board in my game, Jack. Be proud of that. And yes, dealing with a three-dimensional is like you dealing with someone else’s maggot collection.”

“Okay, I am going to have to say fuck you for that analogy.”

“Just for that, your new body is going to be hairless. Want to try for leprosy next?”

“It would be just my luck,” I said. And then I felt myself be born, and began to cry.