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THE CITY

We went on our way to their home.

To reach it, we beamed for almost half an hour straight. A moment before we reached their hometown, Midlake City, I paused to look at it from a distance. It sat at the center of an emerald lake surrounded by marble-pink mountains. Breathtaking. The city was made up of hundreds of buildings built from the same pink stone. They towered thousands of feet high, narrow and round, and each floor was surrounded by a terrace, from which lively green plants extended downward.

There were other buildings too, wider and shorter. Some of those were built from the pink stone, but there were also buildings the color of deep jade. The contrasting colors and singular architecture created an otherworldly harmony.

The lake itself was full of life. With one look I saw hundreds of people swimming, water-skiing, and paragliding. Others surfed the perfect waves like experts, and although the waves formed only in front of one beach, they peaked to several dozen feet. I watched the surfers with envy. Soon I would join them, I promised myself. But after I rested.

There was no apparent bridge reaching over the lake into the city. To reach it you had to beam in.

That didn’t work quite as I expected.

-"What did you feel?"

-"Massive pain. White, blinding light. And I swallowed water."

For a few seconds I was simply paralyzed from the pain. I couldn't move any part of my body, including my lungs and my eyes. I just sank farther down, motionless, into the lake. It was very deep. The water grew bluer; a few silver swordfish gathered around me and looked at me curiously. I sank like a basalt rock, deeper and deeper. The pressure in my ears grew stronger and far off in the distance I saw something that looked like one of those prehistoric sea monsters that are featured on so many neuro shows these days. Its teeth were too long for my liking.

After fifteen seconds of free-falling into the lake, the pain began to pass and with it the paralysis. My lungs started working again—and I instinctively breathed in water. It was a horrible feeling. I coughed, still under water, then stopped breathing and started kicking my arms and legs with wild, powerful motions. Somehow, without aiming, I swam up.

I came out over the waves, coughing and choking. My heart was beating wildly, pumped full of adrenaline, while my brain tried to calm it down. After all, I was not really in danger. What danger could there be in Heaven? Nevertheless, the sensation had been eerily similar to real drowning.

A man on a silver jet ski stopped next to me, causing a big wave.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

As a response, I coughed twice. He reached out a strong hand, grabbed my arm, and pulled me up onto the back of the jet ski. In my heart, I was thanking him, but water kept draining out of my mouth, nose, and ears, so a real thank you would have to wait. While the rest of the water poured from my various orifices, I noticed my rescuer was completely nude. This was standard here, as I had already come to realize. His nakedness, at least, seemed pretty ordinary—nothing exaggerated or inhuman, like cheetah fur. He was relatively short, with long red hair and such ordinary facial features that they looked like they might have been from his previous life.

"I saw you stop in midair and plummet down," he continued. "What happened?"

I still couldn't talk, so I just shrugged and kept returning the liquid I had borrowed back to the lake. In the meantime a few more people gathered around us, some swimmers, some paragliders, and one mermaid with a big golden fin. They started talking amongst themselves excitedly, occasionally addressing a question to me, none of which I knew how to answer.

It turned out that as Jackie and José had beamed into the city normally, I had bumped into some invisible barrier that seemed to be surrounding it. Once it had been triggered, it appeared as a glowing dome over the city. From what I heard around me, this was quite a bizarre occurrence, since no one had been aware of the barrier's existence.

"Wait - the city’s closed? Someone tried to beam in?" someone asked. In response, some people looked at the city and beamed into it, then out, then back in, and then back out.

Those attempts appeared to calm everyone’s nerves. The problem was not the city, but me.

"You have to tell us who you really are," someone declared. It was a muscular-looking man wearing a scuba diving suit and carrying a bloody pitchfork.

The rest of the crowd looked at him with a mix of anger and shock.

-"Why?"

-"Apparently it's unacceptable to ask that. It's forbidden."

-"What? That doesn't make sense. How do you find your relatives up there, if you don't ask?"

-"Although a lot of people keep in touch with each other after they go up to Heaven, a lot decide to cut their ties."

-"That’s the first time I’ve heard about it."

-"That just shows how little you understand. Death is a wonderful opportunity to wipe the slate clean. When you go up, you say good-bye to everything you were downstairs. You leave everything, pick a shiny new body… is there any better way to reinvent yourself? Your image?"

-"Why would someone want to change their… never mind. I get it."

-"So it’s considered rude to demand to know someone’s previous identity. In fact, it's fairly rude to tell about it, too."

"What right do you have to demand that of him?" a blue-haired windsurfer raged at the man with the pitchfork. He answered hatefully, she yelled back at him, and then more people jumped into the argument. From what I could work out, they were once siblings, heirs to billions from a big energy company, and they had carried their unfinished business upstairs. At some point she slapped him and he tried to stab her with the pitchfork. The others jumped in and separated them, and it looked like they had almost completely forgotten about me, until a bold Buddhist monk with an orange robe and a yellow face pointed at me and spoke loudly but calmly.

"It's really important and relevant information. We need to know what triggered this."

The whole group quietened down and looked at me. Pitchfork man shot a smug glance at his sister.

"I don’t know who I am," I answered simply.

Grumbles of disappointment came from the crowd and then new arguments and yelling began. Most of this was directed toward me, not to mention unpleasant hints in my direction from the pitchfork man.

"But I really don't know who I am!" I tried to explain to the monk. He wouldn't listen. Instead, he started preaching in a calm voice about how I was endangering the people here with my silly secrecy and how all life in Heaven was ruined because secrecy was even allowed.

"In the real Heaven, only pure people are meant to be there," he declared. "Not politicians and tycoons."

A gentle-looking woman tried to defend me. "Maybe he lost his memory in the fall? Or perhaps it’s from the lightning…"

"No," I blurted without thinking. "It’s from when I arrived here. I came up here with no memory."

That bit of information created a new enthusiastic cacophony. As I already knew, this was unheard of.

"How can someone come up here with no memory, it's digitally impossible!"

"Such rubbish!"

"I guess he does have something to hide!"

"He had it coming!"

Those were only some of the comments I heard. A number of people abandoned me and went back about their business. My savior started to look impatient.

"Listen, are you okay? Have you recuperated?"

"I think so."

"Then, if you don't mind, maybe -"

At that moment the Johnsons beamed to us.

-"Wait. This whole time, they were inside the city?"

-"Yes. And because they came back, I really started to like them. They didn't have to come back, you see."

-"Good folks."

-"Yes. Much to their regret."

"Black!" José addressed me. Jackie pounced on my savior and gave him a heartwarming embrace. "What happened to you? Where did you disappear to?"

"You know him?" asked the savior.

"Yes, he’s with us. What happened?"

"He couldn't beam in. He smacked into this dome over the city. Hey, you guys were one of the first ones here - did you know such a thing existed?"

José looked back to the city. He didn't see anything unusual.

"There’s no such thing."

"It's new to us, too," Jackie confirmed. She turned to me. "Are you okay?"

"I almost drowned."

She smiled and tried to say something, but I didn't let her. "Yes, I know I can't drown here, but that was how it felt!"

My savior looked at Jackie, a questioning look in his eyes.

"Is he really new here?"

She shrugged. "He didn't even know how to beam before we found him."

"Wow. Where did you find him?"

"At El-Paso," she said. José gave her a piercing look, like he was trying to tell her something. She hesitated for a second and then continued. "He had just left the entrance and climbed the trees there."

My savior smiled understandingly. "Well, we all do that at first... it's the pineapples." He extended his hand. "Dave. Dave Sharky."

His hand looked very small, but his handshake was firm and steady. "Nice to meet you. And thank you for helping me. I have no name," I apologized.

"We call him Black," José supplied.

"Black is nice. Welcome to Heaven."

"Good to be here. I think."

I yawned again. I started to feel the fatigue José had mentioned earlier. Without a doubt, I needed some rest.

"It's safe to say," Sharky said with a hint of skepticism, "that ninety-nine percent of humanity would trade places with you. Don't worry. If you're here, there must be someone taking care of you."

José smacked his forehead.

"How did I not think about this earlier!" said José. "To come up to Heaven, you have to have someone downstairs! A son, a grandson, a wife, a lawyer. And it's not cheap to come up here."

"Yes, they must be looking for me!" I almost jumped off the jet ski. "So how can I find them?"

"Oh, you just have to get into the city, then the system will recognize you auto… oh."

Awkward silence.

Eventually José went back to his train of thought. "You can't go in, so the system can't identify you."

"I think it’s the other way around," I corrected him. "Because the system doesn’t recognize me, I can’t enter the city.

All three nodded.

"Perhaps we could try to get into the city without beaming?"

José had brilliant ideas sometimes.

-"So you tried?"

-"Of course we tried."

-"Did you succeed?"

"I've never seen anything like this," Jackie said angrily after a few tries. All three - José, Jackie, and Dave - were in the safe zone, an arm’s length away from me. But I was outside, and frustrated.

I leaned against the barrier again. Its texture was a little like glass. It was impenetrable, cold, and transparent. Only when I touched it did it come to life with a little show of fireworks. The feeling when I attempted to push through was tingling and thorny, like petting staticky cat fur on a particularly dry day. But penetrate it? I couldn't.

I tried to push myself in a few times, and one not so clever time I tried again to beam in. It hurt just like the last time, only this time I wasn't taken by surprise. Of course, I didn't have a chance to drown before the Johnsons pulled me up onto Dave's jet ski. They told me the city's defensive dome had completely lit up again.

I looked at the city streets from the outside. They were practically empty.

"What am I missing, not going into the city?"

"Not much," said Jackie. "We mostly come here to sleep."

José disagreed with her. "But that's exactly the point, my eucalyptus honey—sleep!"

They both had a serious look on their face. I didn't understand why.

"I can sleep outside too," I said. I couldn't remember if I had been a camping sort of person in my past, but how hard could it be in Heaven? It wasn’t like hungry crocodiles roamed around here or that it was too cold to fall asleep. But then the real problem suddenly dawned on me. "Why exactly do you have to sleep here?"

-"Why?"

-"Because living means gathering information. Because downstairs, your eyes are open sixteen hours a day and your ears hear twenty-four hours a day. The nose smells. The mouth tastes. Each cell of your skin absorbs information from your surroundings, reporting temperature, pressure, and so on. Not to mention hunger receptors or bladder pressure. It’s a lot of information to process, remember, and keep."

-"But we don’t remember everything. The mind doesn't keep irrelevant information."

-"In Heaven, everything is kept."

-"Heaven is based on quantum computerization. There's no limit to the amount of information you can keep."

-"But there is a limit to the speed at which you can draw from it. Because you're absorbing information, endlessly. Who cares what the pineapple at El Paso tasted like? Or how many leaves you saw on the tree there? Or any tree! But it's information, regardless. And it is kept."

-"So irrelevant information needs to be erased."

-"Exactly! And don't forget that there are hundreds of thousands of people in Heaven."

-"Millions, now."

-"So - millions. Each one of them accumulates information at an alarming rate. To keep functioning, there must be a way to unload, process, analyze, and compress it."

"So, basically, I have to sleep?" I asked José.

"Technically, yes. We all get tired every now and then and go home to unload."

"And if you don't come back home?"

Jackie and José exchanged glances.

"That’s never happened to us," Jackie said carefully. "It’s also never happened to anyone we know of. Do you remember anyone giving up on sleep, Dave?"

"No," he said. "When you get tired, you go sleep for a few hours and that's it."

"What about people who go on adventures?" I tried. "The ones in Tolkien's books?"

"They have a place to sleep too. Listen, you don't have to go to sleep every day. But once every few days is recommended."

"So I’ll ask you again: What if I don't?"

Silence.

"There’s no reason for that to happen," Jackie finally said. "Let's go see the mayor."

"There’s a mayor here?"

"Yeah, he's cute. We'll bring him here."

-"I've heard about the mayors in Heaven. They're…"

-"Exactly. And this one in particular took a long time to get there. In the meantime, what really worried me was the whole Newborn thing."

-"Hah. Rightly so."

-"Yes. But what scared me most about it was the censorship. I didn't like the fact that there were people who wanted to kill me, despite me already being dead, but I liked that they were trying to hide it from me even less."

I looked around. People were partying and laughing, jumping up in the air and diving underwater, not to mention the other things they did, both privately and publicly. The air was sweet, the fruits divine, the sky amazing, and in the background an enormous rainbow decorated the sky. By all appearances everything was perfect. But something in the air reminded me of the neuro feeds from Rome just before its destruction, New York before World War III, and Paris before the dirty bomb.

After ten minutes José and Jackie beamed back, accompanied by an angry, middle-aged man. He had gray hair, a gray suit, a gray folding chair, and a gray briefcase. He didn't waste time on manners and immediately sat on the folding chair and opened the briefcase. Inside was a gray screen on which he started tapping his finger.

"Name?" he asked, without even looking at me.

"Black." And after a split second, "Royal Black."

The mayor lifted a questioning gaze to me.

"Was that your name downstairs?"

"I don't remember."

"Seriously now?"

"I am serious. I truly don’t remember."

The mayor looked at me, surprised, then looked at the Johnsons.

"I see. Can you two give us a moment?" he asked.

They both nodded and then beamed into the lake, where they started splashing water at each other like children.

"You can speak freely now," the mayor said. "No one will hear your little secret."

"But I don’t have a secret. I really don't remember."

"Perhaps no one explained this to you," he continued patiently, "but anything you say to me is confidential and will not be shared with any of the other residents here. Even if I wanted to tell them something, I couldn’t. So… go on."

"Listen, the reason you’re here now is to help me find out who I am! Didn't they tell you?"

The mayor looked over at the Johnsons. "They did, but I never believe people. They tend to lie."

"Well, I don't know who I am. I swear."

"There, you see?" The mayor smiled at me. "Lies."

Patience, apparently, wasn’t my strong suit. I kept explaining to him that I didn’t know who I was and he continued to try to explain to me that I was a liar. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he had at least checked. I just wanted to know who I was, and his stupidity infuriated me. So the tone of my voice got higher and higher until eventually I heard myself screaming.

The Johnsons beamed back with worried faces, both completely wet.

"What's going on?" Jackie asked.

I couldn't answer her. I was that mad.

"Your friend refuses to tell me who he is," the mayor continued patiently.

"He doesn't know who he is. That's part of the problem."

"You know that’s impossible. Identity is an inseparable part of you."

"Well the fact remains, it happened. Can you not just check for yourself to see who he is? Identify him in the system?"

The mayor looked like he had just cracked the secret of the universe. "Of course! Why didn't you ask sooner? Give me your hand." He reached his hand out, but then pulled it back just as I extended mine.

"I’m not allowed to do this," he said. "Only by your explicit request. Do you wish to expose your original identity to me?"

"I do, I'm asking!"

His handshake was cold, stern, and short.

I looked at him, full of hope.