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tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.

 
    Oz
    At the outset of the afterlife you find a scroll that informs you, in the scrawl of an ancient scribe, that you now have the opportunity to meet the Creator of the universe—but only if you are among the most courageous. You wonder what magnitude of maker could require such bravery to be in His presence. You imagine a face larger than the orbit of the moon, a voice louder than a hundred blasts of Vesuvius, and you begin to suspect that your limited imagination is inadequate for the numinous experience in store.
    You hear a thunderous booming voice in the distance, and your legs begin to shake. You look inward: Am I brave enough to handle this?
    A great journey awaits. Along the way you face fears and conquer them, identify streams of self-doubt and ford them, discern the peaks of your arrogance and descend them, spot the clouds of self-pity that hang over you and hike out from under them. By the time the road ends, you emerge with renewed confidence—ready, you believe, to meet your maker, to face the face, to perceive a glimpse of the mastermind who crafted the masterpiece.
    You approach the door of a great castle. Even now, the booming voice hanging over the landscape causes you to question: Am I among the most brave? Do I possess what is required? You throw your weight against the door, enter a grand foyer, and follow a hallway to a grand room.
    And there you see the face. Indeed, it is larger than the moon’s orbit. It is a sight beyond the pens of lyric poets. It is the ocean in its terrifying power and rhythmic grace. It is a face that looks like your father and like your mother; it commands the knowledge of a thousand scholars, the empathy of a thousand lovers, the mystery of a thousand strangers.
    It is a face that makes the journey worthwhile. It is a face worthy of the master of the universe.
    You quiver and shake, hypnotized, you in your cotton-mouthed ecstasy.
    The volcanic voice booms forth, blowing back your hair. “Are you brave?”
    “Yes,” you stammer. “That’s why I’m here.”
    The valleys of the lips curl a little, as though to laugh.
    Then you hear an electrical buzzing sound. The face grows wavy with horizontal scanning lines and disappears in a flash of phosphors.
    Nothing remains in the great space but a small yellow curtain where the face used to be. The curtain pulls back. A wrinkled hand pushes up glasses on the face of a wrinkled little man. He is gout-ridden, has a resting tremor, and a vialful of colorful pills. He is stooped. He is swaybacked and balding. You look at each other.
    He says, “It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence.”

 
    Great Expectations
    As the happy result of a free-market capitalist society, we are finally able to determine our own hereafter. It has become privatized and computerized. For a reasonable price, you can download your consciousness into a computer to live forever in a virtual world. In this way, you can rage against the dying of the light by choosing an afterlife that is fast, furious, and spicy—the crystallization of your fantasies. You can predefine your lovers, maximize your sexual allure, zoom around electric pumping cities in your choice of a dozen Porsches. You get firmer muscles, a perfect complexion, and a flat washboard belly. Innumerable virgins cheerfully await your arrival. Cell phones and jet packs are standard issue. Sizzling cocktail parties run around the clock.
    It is no surprise that everyone is lining up for this avant-garde afterlife. Instead of slipping into worm fodder, it is far better to choose the moment of your own death and elect the finest of all possible hereafters. The only ones not signing up are a few religious folks who claim they’re waiting for their Heaven, imagining they will discover themselves in an afterlife of biblical description. The Company, having long ago