I vanished once before — when I was first given my place in Heaven. Despite my babbling fear, the young man who processed me was totally unsympathetic to my plight. At the time I wanted to file a complaint, for I was used to false sympathy back on Earth and this guy didn’t appear to even try. Little did I know how I would come to intimately understand his lack of sympathy for the dead. Everyone dies. It’s not a big deal.
My score was 2.5/5 due to some foolishness I participated in just before my death, and because I never learned to love anybody. Back in the day, lacking love took a full point off your score. The Council on Inter-Dimensional Immigration removed the “learned to love” clause 122 years ago, claiming that not enough people managed to meet that requirement, and the social hierarchy “risked certain collapse” if they didn’t change it. However, my superiors thought that adjusting people’s scores retroactively would create too much confusion, so I was stuck with my score of 2.5, and my job in the Final Judgment Sector.
I died inside a stone windmill on November 1838, during a battle two miles east of Prescott, Ont.. I had just turned 47.
It was nothing heroic, or even all that interesting. I simply choked on a chicken bone that I had been chewing. I was injured a day earlier by a bullet from the British, there was very little to keep me amused, and, due to the siege, I was unable to leave. All of our food had been eaten and our re-enforcements failed to arrive. So, to stave off hunger and boredom, I gnawed on scraps of food the others had discarded. While thinking about why I had been easily brought to passionate anger by Mr. William Lyon Mackenzie, a fellow rebel was startled by some cannon fire and dropped his rifle onto my foot. Jolting from the pain, the bone slipped down my throat. Two minutes later, I became one of the dead.
One day I got to process Mr. Mackenzie. I knew it was him without even reading my notes. I mean, who could forget such a cold, square face? But, despite his appearance, he seemed like a decent and principled fellow, so I took the opportunity to ask him a question that had bothered me since I died.
“Sir, how was it you managed to convince me to rebel against the Crown?”
“Either because the British bureaucracy made your farm worthless, or you hated that they favored Anglicans.”
As it happened, both those things had bothered me, yet after years of self examination, I’ve come to understand that the real reason I joined was due to delusions of grandeur. I’d always wanted to be a founding father of something important, and the “Republic of Canada” seemed like a good enough thing to be a father of.
Incidentally, 14 years after my grandchildren sold the family farm for pennies, the value of the land skyrocketed as it become part of Toronto. Today, a large apartment complex sits where my farm once was. Inside, the average resident gets their rocks off about twice a week. I counted, myself.
Anyway, things turned out a little different when I vanished from purgatory for the second time. Sitting in the chair before I vanished, I dreamed about Gina and increasing the suckage of black holes. What I should have been thinking about though, was the sticker on my control panel which read, “Warning: Keep 5 Feet from Conveyor Belt when Dissolving Bodies!” But due to my excitement, the warning was out of sight and out of mind.
At the time, my plan was to meet world renowned hacker Clara Reed in tier five of heaven and have her help me get into the timeless dimension between physical and non-physical reality, where Nova John, the guy who controls black holes, works. But for better or worse, I had made a critical error.
On the bright side, my newly acquired Omega Sight helped me understand what was going on during my seemingly magical act of vanishing.
When the panhandler I traded places with pushed the big red button, I noticed what must have been trillions of tiny lights popping up all around me. Zooming in with my God-like sight, to a scale smaller than a Higgs boson, which incidentally isn’t anything special — particles come in infinitely small and infinitely large scales — I noticed these little pixies tearing one particle of my being away from the other. Each pixie grabbed a sub-Higgs boson sized piece of me and flew off.
Follow-up research explained that these “pixies” are actually inter-dimensional parasites that feed off fading parts of their host’s identity. They’ve been with me since I existed, and their sole purpose is to transport a being from one plane of existence into another once a specially programmed button has triggered them. Once such a buttons is hit, chemicals inside of them activate their desire to transport through dimensions. This causes them to create powerful fields of energy around their bodies, which appear as light. Since pixies feed off of their host, they each take a piece of their host with them to ensure they have something to live off of in the next dimension. Every living thing has these pixies, and the crazy thing is, even pixies have smaller pixies that feed off of them.
In hindsight, my error was kind of obvious. Since I am already a non-physical being, pressing the big red button caused the pixies to move me somewhere totally different.
Having been broken into trillions of tiny pieces and appearing to vanish, the pixies dashed away from each other at the speed of thought, then in an unknowable length of time — possibly five minutes — they reversed direction and headed straight back towards each other.
A trillion tiny pieces of me, each held by a tiny inter-dimensional parasite, collided.
