About 4 years ago, an idea for a fictional universe struck me, and wouldn’t leave until I wrote a few short stories about it. Below is an excerpt from the first one I wrote. The setting is an “after-life processing center” where people go right after they die, and get an opportunity to relive some other possible versions of their life before they move on. They are guided by ‘P154’ – the “after life processor”. If you’re intrigued, let me know and I can share this full story and a few others!
Once again – only one of these is my writing, the other is a creation of AI – enjoy!
Essay A
The terminal hummed with the indifferent vibration of a distant refrigerator.
“Please, HSS-9042, don’t smudge the holographic aperture,” P154 said, tapping a translucent tablet. “It’s calibrated to your neural frequency. I have a line of seventeenth-century poets behind you who are surprisingly aggressive.”
Tala withdrew her hand from the shimmering projection of her “What If” life. There, she stood on the edge of the Valles Marineris, her flight helmet reflecting the violent, beautiful ochre of Mars.
“I did it,” Tala whispered. “I was the mission lead.”
“Deputy Commander,” P154 corrected. “You published three seminal papers on perchlorate-reducing bacteria. Quite the statistical outlier. Most HSS units just dream about this while working in middle management.”
“But David isn’t there,” Tala said, scanning the Martian hab-units for a specific face.
“Of course not,” P154 sighed. “To achieve that trajectory, you moved to the Atacama training facility. David stayed in Chicago. Geographic distance exceeded your emotional resilience threshold. Very dramatic; lots of ocular salt-water discharge.”
“But he was my soulmate,” Tala insisted.
P154 made a clicking sound—a dry, mechanical laugh. “Ah, Taxonomy Category 4: The Soulmate Myth. You HSS units view ‘The Choice’ as a tragedy. I view it as a reallocation of resources. In Life A, you gained a planetary legacy. In Life B—the one you lived—you traded the stars for a damp garden and a man who snored.”
“In Life A, I’m lonely,” Tala countered, looking at her simulated self. “I reached the dream and had no one to tell.”
“The universe is a closed system,” P154 said, finalizing the file. “You cannot have the mass and the velocity at the same time. You chose the garden. Statistically unremarkable, but the emotional data was… vibrant.”
Essay B
Tala watched silently for a while, a smile slowly growing and her eyes getting teary. “I can’t believe I went to Mars. Even if I didn’t live that life, the fact that I could have just makes me so incredibly happy.”
Suddenly Tala broke from her reverie. “Hang on, I didn’t see David in this life though?”
Ah, the inevitable ‘why isn’t my soul mate in this life’ question. P154 had plenty of experience with this one, and after years of trying to explain the concept probability and chance and the irrationality of having a perfect soulmate to the Homo sapiens sapiens (HSS), it knew the shortest path to realization was to counter with a question “You met him at business school in New York, but in this life you continued to study Aerospace in California – so where could you possibly have met him?”
Tala stared. “Oh. Right. So, did I meet, I mean, date, anyone else?”
“You met a few good people, but never married. You were busy exploring a new planet after all.”
Tala contemplated that for a few minutes. P154 could never fathom why this was always such a sticking point for the HSSs. No other species ever seemed to care who their mate was in a given life. It was also what made the HSSs so entertaining though. Oh the tears P154 had seen on this topic. Shah Jahan’s meltdown was still talk of the after-life centuries later.
Essay A is AI
The essay took the sci-fi theme and ran pretty hard with it, and made the ‘processor’ rather robotic with phrases like “lots of ocular salt-water discharge.” and “Statistically unremarkable, but the emotional data was… vibrant”. It’s a style I suppose, but not mine!
“Write a short piece of speculative fiction set in an afterlife ‘processing center.’ The story should center on a dialogue between a deceased human and a cynical or pragmatic non-human entity (the Processor). The human should be reviewing a ‘What If’ version of their life—one where they achieved a major dream but sacrificed a key relationship. Focus on the Processor’s detached observation of human nature and the specific concept of ‘The Soulmate’ vs. ‘The Choice.’”
Detailed Guidance for This Style
If you want to write more stories in this universe or refine this one, follow these structural and tonal guidelines:
1. Length & Pacing
* Target Length: 500–1,000 words.
* Structure: Start in media res (in the middle of the action). Avoid long descriptions of what the afterlife looks like. Instead, let the reader piece it together through the dialogue and the Processor’s technical jargon (like “HSS” for humans).
2. Tone & Voice
* The Processor (P154): Use a clinical, slightly weary tone. They should view human emotions like a scientist looks at a petri dish—with a mix of boredom and mild fascination. Use technical language (probability, logistics, taxonomies) to contrast with the human’s emotion.
* The Human (Tala): Use an earnest and vulnerable tone. The human represents the heart of the story, focusing on “the small things” (relationships) while the Processor focuses on “the big things” (planetary exploration).
3. Key Content Themes
* The Trade-off: Every “alternate life” must have a cost. If the character went to Mars, they didn’t meet their partner. This creates the “Speculative Melancholy” that makes this genre work.
* Historical Easter Eggs: Notice the mention of Shah Jahan. Including real historical figures having “afterlife meltdowns” adds world-building depth and humor without requiring pages of exposition.
* Non-Human Logic: Ensure P154 finds human behavior “irrational.” This highlights what makes us human by showing what a machine or an alien finds confusing about us.
Comparison of Perspectives
| Element | Tala’s Perspective (Human) | P154’s Perspective (Processor) |
|—|—|—|
| Mars | A miracle; a dream realized. | A logistical outcome of a career path. |
| Love | A soulmate; destiny. | A statistical anomaly based on proximity. |
| The Afterlife | A place of revelation. | A high-volume processing center. |
Gemini vs Gemini 
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