Meeting your maker is nothing like this. But one day...
Angela of Shephard, age 25 and beautiful, a princess in King Arthur’s Court. Pursued by a quarter of the Round Table, she’s the choicest catch in Camelot. Knights, castles, and royal pennants waving in the cause of chivalry. But when it comes time to visit the privy...
“What a load of crap!” said Angela Shephard.
A South Sea Islander, Angela Shephard, 25, clad in a red bikini, strolls along the unspoiled beach. The sun is shining. The sand feels warm and pure. And for lunch...
“Ugh!” said Angela Shephard. “I hate fish!”
Angela Shephard, ambitious executive, addressing corporate meeting. She’ll shake them up! Dressed in gray flannel suits, the all white male board laughs in her face.
“Oh, well,” said Angela Shephard. “It was worth a try.”
Angela Shephard, long straight hair and ‘love beads,’ smoking dope, drinking tequila and making eyes at a hippie folk singer. This is cool! Suddenly she bolts and vomits out the nearest window.
“Those were not the days,” said Angela Shephard.
At last, the gigantic spaceship taking humanity to the stars is ready to lift off. With a winning smile, Command Pilot Angela Shephard calms her anxious crew. But when the fusion engines roar to life, her face pales with fear. A mile off the earth, she’ s totally terrified.
“No way!” said Angela Shephard.
Angela Shephard composes herself. She can do this. Isn’t this what she always wanted, what everyone who ever lived ever wanted, especially men?
Reception will be instantaneous to ten billion people in more than a hundred languages. The introduction plays... “United Peoples of Earth, our Supreme Ruler, Angela Shephard...”
“My fellow Earthlings,” she begins...
“Oh, please!” said Angela Shephard.
Angela Shephard, 25, awakens alone for breakfast. She feeds her cat, then has her coffee on the porch overlooking the ocean. Life doesn’t get any better than this, she thinks, but there’s something missing. Always has been, but what? A man? Half the single men in town and a few husbands are after her. Something else, what?
Angela drives her five-year old car to a small Pacific Coast high school. She’s the most popular teacher, but why does she feel like she doesn’t belong?
The Super Bowl is this weekend as if she cared. But she can’t help it; she tells her first period class who will win and by what score. How does she know?
Her prediction is the buzz of the school. She turns down party invitations and watches the game at home alone. When the final gun sounds, she is right down to the last point!
“Damn!” said Angela Shephard.
Thunder shakes the sky. Jagged twists of lightning turn night into an eerie dawn again and again. Angela is terrified. What’s wrong with the world?
The sun brings a fresh new day. Angela is still afraid. Why is it she knows so much? In class, one look at the map and she sees catastrophes coming for country after country. Floods, earthquakes, wars! How does she know this stuff? Why? Closer to home, she tells her class that the state governor will soon be indicted in a sex scandal. But she has no connections in politics, how could she...?
“Me and my big ideas,” said Angela Shephard.
The story breaks that afternoon and the sky turns orange, then red. Angela gets in her car just as the media arrives at her house. She races away, faster and faster. Six vans chase after her. Two helicopters join in. What’s happening? She can’t believe her eyes. Houses and trees and fields and mountains on both sides of the road are... disappearing. It’s as if they are made of snowflakes and are blowing away in the wind.
Faster, faster, her car begins to break up into pixels and bytes. The steering wheel dissolves in her hands. The red sky goes whirlpool. Her car is gone, but she is speeding at a gaping maw on the horizon. In a flash she is through to...where?
Angela Shephard was alive in a big white room. A hospital? A laboratory? A morgue? She went to the door, but as she tried the knob, her hand passed through it.
“What am I?” she cried. “What’s happened to me?”
Had she died and become a ghost? She walked through the door into a hallway and kept going. At the end was another door. Without feeling anything, she went through it.
The old woman lay on the bed surrounded by an array of machines. Tubes ran into her nose and out of her chest. She seemed calm and concentrated on the tech board in front of her, stroking it with her fingers. Angela stared. Whose wrinkled, bloated face could that be? And the eyes, those eyes! No, it couldn’t be!
“Hello,” was all Angela could say.
“I’m so sorry, dear,” said the old woman, her voice somehow familiar. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. I got adventurous and upped the program a bit over parameters. I was hoping to get away with it, for your sake and mine.”
“Are you... God?” asked Angela.
“Heavens no!” said the old woman. “But I am your creator.”
“How?”
“DNA coding via matrix,” said the old woman. “I souped up the given ingredients. You know me, always pushing the envelope. Made you prettier than I ever was.”
“I’m what?”
“Now, don’t get upset,” said the old woman, the tubes in her nose jiggling as she spoke. “I tried my best and then some to find you, and me, the perfect afterlife. Again and again I put you in a world where I hoped you’d fit in as I never had.”
“Who are you?” asked Angela.
“I am... you,” said the old woman. “I’m Angela Shephard.”
“No, no, no. I’m Angela Shephard,” she insisted.
“Of course you are,” said the old woman. “You’ve got my spirit alive in you. Except for flesh and blood, you’re more human than I ever was.”
“Why? Why did you do this to me and yourself?”
“Because I could,” said the old woman with a toothy smile. “ At first there were only a few simple worlds to enter, as crude as the old Pong games. Competition being what it is, the offered environments grew by leaps and bounds as others jumped into the market. Pretty soon everybody was leaving their DNA encryptions to be phased into Afterlife... Put it in their wills guaranteeing themselves spots in worlds still in Research and Development.”
“Immortality inside a machine?”
“But it seems I went a tad over program.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was never satisfied with who I was. Never got what I really wanted. I wasn’t going to bequeath you my flaws and failures for all eternity.”
“How did I get here? How am I?”
“My fault,” admitted the old woman, having trouble getting her words out. “I added a few info files to give you an edge in the program I’d chosen. Afterlife got wise. Their security’ s getting damn relentless. They tracked you down and kicked you out.”
“I was expelled for cheating?” said Angela. “But I didn’t do anything.”
“And you wouldn’t have without some help from me. That’s what life is all about. Doing things. I never did. I wanted you to.”
“Didn’t you have any children?”
“Three. My son’s Afterlifing in World War Two. He never did get the chance or the guts to fight for something he believed in. Bet he’ s a real hero now. My twin daughters are saving up to get the Deluxe Future Worlds. Such is life and beyond in the Twenty-Second Century!””
“More like the Middle Ages,” said Angela, the programmed history teacher. “Living one’s life solely to prepare for the afterlife.”
“Don’t mock your creator!” retorted the old woman, her thin, frail body shaking as she spoke. “You have no idea what Afterlife means... Humanity no longer fears death. The risks we can take, the sacrifices we can make, knowing the life of our dreams awaits us after we leave here.”
“A self-created heaven?”
“And elsewhere,” said the old woman. “Capital punishment is no longer a necessary deterrent. When a life sentence is up, the convicted’s DNA is sent to a hellishly programmed place.”
“My God!” said Angela. “And the Devil, too.”
“You weren’t supposed to find out,” said the old woman. “It’s the unknowing that makes Afterlife real. I wanted too much and got caught.”
“You can send me back? Make me unknow? Isn’t that who you want to be, an ignorant ghost of yourself playing in make believe?”
“I wouldn’t understand either,” admitted the old woman. “That’s how we got into this mess.”
“But if I’m you, or who you always hoped you’d be, you can’t leave me like this,” pleaded Angela. “What I am now is no life, Afterlife or otherwise.”
“Don’t be bitter,” the old woman said, her tubes rumbling as she spoke. “That’s the me you were never supposed to become.”
“Who have I become? Your recreated self sent to live an unreal life in an imaginary world.”
“Better than I’ve got here, wouldn’t you say?”
“What you’ve got is real. Who you made me isn’t.”
“Look at me!” ordered the old woman. “Would you have done any differently?”
“I’m sorry,” said Angela. “Can you blame me for only thinking of myself?”
“How could I? After all, you are me.”
“Will I always be?” asked Angela.
Suddenly, a bell rang and lights flashed and half the room’s machines began to whir.
“Oh, no!” cried the old woman. “Not... not now!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Technology has done all it could,” gasped the old woman. “My time is up.”
“Oh, no. Why do I always wait till the last minute to do everything?”
“It’s somewhere in our DNA. I’ve got to reprogram before it’s too late.”
“But, what’ll happen to me?”
“We’re both going to die,” groaned the old woman, writhing in pain. “And neither of us will, not ever.”
“What are you doing?” asked Angela as her creator stroked the tech board.
“I’ve only got one option left,” said the old woman. “It’s not guaranteed, but I don’t have any other choice for either of us.”
“There’s another world I can go, another time I can live for both of us?”
“The final option. No one I used to know ever chose it. Nobody does, I hear. Too much left to chance.”
“Sounds almost like real life,” said Angela sarcastically. “How much more of that do you want?”
“I... I don’t have any more left,” cried the old woman, her body trembling as she finalized adjustments. “Neither do you. I’m sorry.”
“No, wait. You can’t...!”
Angela looked down at herself. Like the blowing snowflakes she had seen before, her body was vanishing via an irrepressible wind. Her feet were already gone... her knees, her thighs...
“Please, I don’t want to die!” she cried.
“We won’t!” said the old woman. “Trust the technology. Angela Shephard will live forever.”
“How? When? As who?” asked Angela. “What will happen to who I....”
The last of the pixels glistened briefly in the air as they disappeared. The old woman felt very alone. It would not be for long. As preset, half the room’s machines ceased functioning; the other half began anew.
Angela Shephard is alive. She doesn’t know where. She doesn’t know how. She doesn’t know anything. But she can feel. Wetness and warmth all around her. Can she see? There is nothing but darkness. She hears, but doesn’t know what the strange beating sounds are.
She is afraid, but she doesn’t know why. From wherever she is she must escape. To where? Something begins pushing her. And then pulling. She’s sliding through a moist, living tunnel.
Angela Shephard is free. The light is so bright she cannot see. Not yet. Sounds flood her new world, but she doesn’t know what they are.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Shephard. It’s a girl!”
Copyright © 2003 by Kevin Ahearn
