Lucy always wondered what happened after death. For the most part, she thought it would all end, that her body would just turn to soil, and that would be that. In her more vulnerable times though, she wondered about an afterlife, about going somewhere better (or worse), and about the idea of a soul.
This wasn’t what she’d been expecting at all.
Her death had been a surprise, and more than a little stupid.
She’d refused to go hang gliding on the basis that it was ridiculously dangerous, and had instead watched her friend doing it from atop the hill. When her friend turned and swooped out of an up-draft, Lucy had been looking at a squirrel in a nearby tree. She didn’t see her friend lose control, and the last thing she knew about it was a vague thump in the back of her head.
That’s when she’d woken up here, been told what had happened, and sat down at a strange looking console. She was in cubicle, and when she stood up to look, the cubicle was one of thousands in a vast warehouse type space.
She sat back down again, not wanting to contemplate how insignificant this made her feel.
On the console were three buttons. One said OK, one was a thumbs down, and the other was a thumbs up. She shrugged, and pressed the OK button.
A short video began playing, explaining what it was she had to do.
So she did it.
Watching her whole life play back in real time was an odd thing indeed. And being asked to vote on each individual moment was even more odd, though it was rather cathartic. Somehow, watching her whole life only seemed to take an hour or two, and when she was finished, she was asked to press OK to accept the changes.
So she pressed OK.
And then life began again.
Only this time, some of the stuff that had happened before didn’t happen again.
She didn’t know it until she’d been through it all though, and found herself back at the console. It all came back to her. Over and over this went, until on about the seventeenth draft, she wasn’t pressing the thumbs down button anymore.
She got to live her life one last time.
