P118089 waited for the holograph machine to finish rendering his coffee cup. Experimentally, it opened the mouth on its Homo Sapiens Sapiens rendered suit wide, inhaled and then let it out again.

“What in the spiritual realm are you doing??” P6607 remarked, in line for its own coffee.

“I was trying this thing humans do called ‘yawning’? I’ve seen some of those HSSs do it when they commute to work, or are waiting for their coffee to come out, or when they’re bored. I wanted to try it out while I’m in this HSS suit to see what it does..”

“…and? What did you learn?” 

“I’m not sure, it doesn’t seem to do anything at all. And yet it’s supposed to be contagious? I swear I still don’t fully get HSSs”

“Let’s go newbie.” P118089 heard P154’s barked command and after carefully balancing the coffee cup with the manual in its hands, fell into step with P154. 

“Who do we have in this session?”

P154 tossed the background file to P118089. “Why don’t you take a look and tell me?”

“17 year old female, car accident, seems popular given the activity on her social media accounts, had just gotten accepted to Georgetown and Yale.”

“Mm hmm. Look at her college essays, you usually learn a bit about humans this age from their college essays.”

P118089 quickly skimmed her essay. “She says she wants to run for office one day. Why would you “run” for an office? I thought you just needed to interview?”

“It’s a human phrase that means she wants to be elected into government. So, what render would you choose to process her?”

P118089 stopped in its tracks. “Are you saying I can process her?”

P154 didn’t stop, “Not a chance, you’ve only shadowed me thrice. We have at least 7 more of these to go before I can trust you to do one yourself.”

“Oh.” P118089 picked up its pace to catch up. “In that case, maybe.. The president – maybe Kennedy? She wanted to run for office, so she may want someone presidential?”

P154 rolled its eyes. “And this is why you are not ready. First, you can’t pick famous people – it throws them completely off and all they want to do is ask questions about them. Second, you can’t just pick someone they respect, it also needs to be people they are likely to trust.”

As P154 was speaking, it was fine tuning its look to a slightly older female, with a slightly dated but still stylish dress, reading glasses and a sharp but kind look.

“Is that.. a school principal?”

P154 scoffed, pushed up its glasses and entered the room.

Yana kept her eyes tightly shut. She couldn’t feel any pain, and only heard a distant voice announcing something, but she knew it must be the shock from the accident. Slowly her senses would catch up, until then she just had to breathe. Count to 4 in, count to 7 out. Repeat.

Wait a minute. Announcing something? Why would there be an announcement in the middle of a traffic intersection?

“…have led. Your Guide will be joining you shortly, so please wait for a few moments.”

Guide? Yana cracked open her eyes. Sure enough, a lady – looked a lot like her College Guidance Counselor Mrs Abrams – was walking in through the door.

“Welcome to the After Life Processing Center. I am your Guidance Counselor, here to help you with your soul-processing today.”

Yana opened her eyes fully wide. She was not at the intersection, in the upside down burning car anymore. She was in this cavernous black room with no one but this lady for company. She stood up.

Mrs CopyCat Abrams was looking at Yana carefully, as if waiting to hear Yana’s next question.

“Am I…. dead?”

She gave a small smile. “I’m afraid so.”

“And… this place is the afterlife?”

“Indeed it is. And we’ll be doing a-”

“Wow.” She did a little spin. “Cool. This place is cool.”

P118089’s message came through to P154 ‘She got over her death relatively fast. The other three had a much harder time of it.’

As Yana walked to the edges of the room, looking for the edges of the room and not finding them, P154 responded. ‘This speed-to-acceptance is not too unusual with teenagers – they haven’t lived long enough for regrets, and most of their life to this point has been at school where they are constantly learning how to absorb new information and experiences and be endlessly curious.’

“So.. what is this place? Am I in space? Or.. are we underground? Or is this all a non-physical construct – all in my mind?”

“We’re in the soul-processing center, in the spiritual realm. This space has no physical existence, it is purely meant to process the souls on earth”

“ALL the souls on earth? So like, ant souls too?”

“Yes indeed, we have an entire division for the Insect kingdom.”

“Wow. They must have SO many souls to process!”

“Yes they do, but each soul also takes a lot less time. Not much to process when they’ve only lived a few years and can’t speak very complex thoughts.” 

Yana quietly nodded in understanding, then piped up again. “How about trees? Do they have souls? I’ve always wondered.”

Mrs Copycat Abrams smiled, like she was impressed. Yana stood a little straighter, feeling like a good student in class again.

“Good question! No, plants do not have souls. They are little chemical factories, aided along in their evolution by the insects, birds, and animals that subsist on them.”

“Hmm. That’s going to make my grandma really sad. She talks to her plants every day, since she thinks they all have little souls in them.”

Time to bring her back on topic. “Ok, let me tell you a bit about why you’re here..”

As P154 explained the LifeGraph to Yana, P118089 once more found itself furiously taking notes. It always seemed to learn more than the manuals said in these shadowing sessions. There had been no mention of trees anywhere in the manuals – homo sapiens or canis lupus – and it would have had no idea how to respond to that question. How in the world did humans constantly come up with these new questions? P154 was right, it was not ready for this.

Yana was staring at the screen, and chewing on her lip. What to pick? She had no clue at all. She turned to Mrs Copycat. “What do people pick most often?” 

P118089 knew this was one of the top FAQs that came up, and was flipping to the section with the stock answers when the girl suddenly shook her head as if deciding for herself that it was a stupid question that she didn’t want the answer to. 

“No, forget that. What would you pick if you were me?”

P154 tried to hide its surprise. It hadn’t seen many HSSs that could spare a second for the Guide’s opinions – they usually came in so fully preoccupied by their own dying and quickly got so enamored of a chance to relive their own lives again, that processors sometimes felt like a remote control for a TV. A 21 year old had recently even said without realizing “hey Google, play the life with the most spikes of happiness on this..uh.. TV” and then stared as if expecting P154 to light up and go “Ok, playing this on Soul TV now.”

So for this girl to ask for an opinion was unexpected, and therefore it hurt even more to disappoint her with the stock answer. “I have not lived a life like yours, and therefore cannot make a recommendation”. First time in millennia that P154 had had to pull that response out of the manual.

“Come on, you must have some thoughts. You do this a lot right? Process a lot of souls? So, what would you pick in my shoes?”

“I’m sorry, I really cannot make a recommendation.”

Yana scoffed, and mumbled. “The Mrs Abrams I knew would have told me what to do. Or at least asked me some question that made me realize what I wanted to do.”

Mrs Copycat seemed in deep thought. “You’re right, she would have asked you the right question to make you think, so let me ask you this – what is your biggest regret to date?”

As the girl tilted her head, deep in thought, P118089 chimed in. ‘Why biggest regret? Why not her hopes and dreams? I know all the dogs I processed always wanted to see the life where their dreams came true – opening that box of treats or their owners moving to a lake house where they could spend all their time swimming in the water.’

P154 was closely watching Yana’s face, but signaled back ‘Human dreams are seldom that simple, and humans are almost never satisfied even when they see them come true. You should look up the recording for Amik’s processing if you want an example. Also, dreams aren’t universal – many humans live life so in the moment that they aren’t even dreaming of a future. Regrets though – now those are universal, simple and fantastically abundant. Having lots of choices means having lots of regrets about paths untaken, and the LifeGraph essentially is the ability to take the path you didn’t in life.’

Yana had made up her mind, “Honestly, my biggest regret is not learning to drive. If I had, I wouldn’t have had to be in Lenny’s car, and I wouldn’t be here. He’s a terrible driver, I’ve always known that.”

“Ok – so if you kept everything else in your life the same but had learned to drive earlier, of the 2.6M lives you could have had, you could have been in one of these 4,578 possibilities.” As she spoke, a few thousand lines on the graph pulsed white. “Does that narrow which one you’d want to view?”

“Does this thick bunch of lines in the middle mean it’s the path I was most likely going to live if I hadn’t been in this stupid accident?”

“Indeed.”

“Could I watch that? I want to know what my life would have been. Do I manage to get everything I am shooting for?”

“Absolutely.”

Yana watched the video speed through as her parents dropped her off at Georgetown, and she met lots of new classmates who eventually became her friends. Her first two years at Georgetown sped by, and she found her on-screen self seemingly gravitating towards all the courses on Environmental policy. She wasn’t surprised, her parents at home had very strong views on climate change, and had frequently had debates over dinner about how little the world seemed to be doing about it. Looks like some of that had sunken into her brain after all, even if she and her sister had always rolled their eyes at their tree-hugging parents going on another rant.

The video slowed down as she entered an ‘Advanced Environmental policy’ class in her junior year. The class features a guest speaker from the Department of the Interior to talk about the state of the country’s protected parks and natural resources. Yana goes down to speak to him after class, and gets herself a summer internship spot in his department. The LifeVideo speeds through her summer, and then the next few years of her working full time at the Dept of the Interior, cycling through several committees and spearheading various initiatives. The video slows again when she’s in her 30s, showing her dating Eric – a junior staffer from the Congress. The LifeVideo speeds through their dating, engagement, a beautiful – if cliche – wedding ceremony in a vineyard, and the birth of their two kids that look perfectly angelic and happy. 

“I guess I never ran for president, but apart from that, it seems like a great life, no? I’m working on setting policy like I’ve always wanted to. Eric’s hot I guess, or at least he dresses well – none of those stupid skinny jeans and converse shoes like the boys in my class. And I had two kids, even my house looks pretty nice!”

The video speeds through most of the year, but slows each year around Christmas, her time home with family. With each passing year, Yana’s eyes seem tinged with a little more sadness. As her family convened at their traditional Christmas dinners, Yana’s conversations seemed a little less enthusiastic about her job, and a little more jaded with the environmental policy her government is pushing for, a little more dissatisfied with Eric. However the course of her life doesn’t change much, until she dies peacefully at the ripe old age of 85, surrounded by her kids and grandkids.

“Well. That was.. fine I guess? I just don’t understand why I looked so sad though. Eric seemed hot, I seemed to have gotten everything I wanted, didn’t I?”

“I believe a part of your dissatisfaction was from the fact that your initiatives at the Department often seemed to be stuck in a bureaucratic quagmire – things never moved as quickly as you hoped they would.” P154 knew there was a second big reason, but knew that it would not go over well with Yana coming from an unknown ‘Guide’ – it would just need to hope that Yana would pick it up in her next LifeVideo.

“Hmm. Okay.” 

Yana was still deep in thought, chewing on her nail, when P154 pulled up the LifeGraph again, and prompted her to pick her second life.

“Hmm. I don’t know. I guess, why two though? Why do I get to watch two? Why not one? Why not three?”

P11089 was equally curious now. It had never actually given it any thought before, but it’s true, no matter the species, the lifespan, the era, every soul got only 2 rewatches. But why?

P154 smiled to itself – no doubt this girl had been the pain in the neck for most of her high school teachers. “One is too few to learn from, since you don’t get to contrast it to any other possibilities. Three ends up being too many to choose – when we initially ran these with unlimited re-watches, most souls would run out of ideas after the second one. You’re not even sure about your second one! So we started capping everyone at 2.”

Unlimited re-watches?? P118089 had never even heard of this! It was suddenly hit by the realization of just how ancient P154 was. It was here back when they had still been designing the life processing system! 

“When did you run these ‘initially’? When is ‘initially’? How long have you been doing this for?”

Mrs Copycat Abrams tilted her head in thought. “I’ve been here nearly a half a billion years now.”

“Half a billion years?? Isn’t that basically when the Cambrian explosion is said to have occurred?” 

“Indeed – I see you paid attention in your biology class! But, enough about me, time for you to pick your second life Yana.”

“But, that means you have seen and processed dinosaur souls too! Have there been dinosaurs in this room too? Wait a minute, when a species goes extinct, do their souls wink out too? What happened to all the dinosaur souls??”

“Souls aren’t tied to a species. So even if a species goes extinct, the soul lives on, going back to earth in another form.”

“Oh. Oh that’s good then. In a way, the dinosaurs still lived on then, huh?” 

P154 waited silently for the penny to drop. P118089 was similarly waiting with bated breath to see if this human would pick up on what this new discovery really meant.

But Yana had moved on. “Ok, so, for the second life. Hmm.. What’s going on with that one there – that ends in the corner on the right there ? It’s so skinny it’s barely visible, but looks like it’s the longest of these lines.”

“It’s skinny because it was the least likely among these 4,578 possibilities, and longest because it’s the one that you earned the most wealth in.”

“You mean I was the richest? I don’t care about that.”

“No, not the richest. Wealth here means you worked the hardest to build something. In this case, you created a lasting impact on human ability to slow climate change as the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.”

“WHAT? I was the chair of a Senate committee? I like, talked to the President every day and gave him advice on Environment policy and stuff? Oh wait – was it a ‘her’? Please tell me it was a ‘her!’ That we finally got a female president?”

Mrs Copycat was smiling at her outburst of chatter. “You talked to ‘her’ pretty regularly, yes. Would you like to watch this life?” At Yana’s vigorous nodding, Mrs Copycat Abrams waved at the TV which started to play her life forward from the point she got her drivers’ license. 

The video sped through her first couple of years at Georgetown again, and slowed once more at her ‘Advanced Environment policy’ class. This time, as she walked in she bumped into someone who looked familiar. 

“Is that Myra from AP bio? What is that dork doing here? She was so annoying in class, with her questions that nobody cared about holding us up in each class. She looks different though, something about her face?” 

Myra seemed to have lost her oversized glasses and her baby fat, though she still dressed like a total dork – hoodies, baggy jeans and a lopsided messy ponytail. On-screen, Yana looked at her and then turned away, as if refusing to acknowledge that she knew this dork from her previous life. 

The same guest speaker from the Department of the Interior showed up again, but at the end when Yana went down to speak to him, she found the dork right next to her. Both of them peppered him with questions that he tried to answer as he snuck glances at his watch, until he lost patience, handed them each his business card and said, “Look, both you young ladies clearly have a lot of interest, so why don’t you get in touch with my office. We’re always looking for interns, so if you’re interested, we can figure something out.’

As he rushed off, Myra turned to Yana. “So, you gonna do it?”

Yana looked back at Myra. She’d never noticed Myra’s green eyes hidden behind those oversized glasses. “I guess? Dunno. I’ll decide later – bye!”

Fast forward to the summer, and to Yana’s surprise on her first day of the internship at the Dept. of the Interior, Myra was right next to her in the intern orientation session. For the first week, Yana and Myra sat on desks next to each other, barely speaking. Until Friday morning, when Myra walked in for the fifth time in a white shirt, black slacks and black pumps, and onscreen Yana lost it.

“Oh for chrissakes! Don’t you have any other clothes??”

Myra blinked once, self-consciously straightened her shirt, and said “I thought we’re supposed to dress formally.”

“Formally, yes. Like a waitress, NO.  What are you doing after work today? I don’t care, cancel it. We’re going shopping.”

In the room, Yana watched with mild astonishment as Yana on screen took Myra shopping, forcing her to pick more green outfits to match her eyes, and even managing to stuff her into some skirts and dresses. She had surprisingly nice legs hidden behind those shapeless trousers.

The LifeVideo sped up again as the cold shoulders turned to warmer fist bumps over the course of the summer, and Myra turned from being the quiet, annoying dork to a sharp and funny desk buddy as they tried to navigate the slow-as-morass workings of the government. 

The video slowed down to an evening, where Yana sat slumped over some wine at a bar and Myra was patting her back. “I kind of knew a government’s job was going to be slow, but this is nuts. I feel like I got nothing done the whole summer! Someone somewhere has to have a better chance at changing things than we do!”

“Well, yeah – changing policy in a big country like ours is hard. The people with the most power to change policies and change minds are the politicians – congressmen and senators and stuff.”

Yana sat up. “That’s it! Let’s do that. Let’s run for office!”

Myra scoffed at her. “Me? Run for office? Please – no one would vote for me. You on the other hand, everyone would vote for you. You should definitely give it a go.”

“What? Why would they vote for me, and not for you? We’re from the same schools, same jobs, we think alike.”

“Yes but, you’re beautiful, and passionate, and funny, and can convince anyone to do anything. You even made me wear a skirt!”

Yana giggled at that, swaying slightly. “You think I’m beautiful?”

Myra suddenly blushed and looked away. “I mean. Well. You know. Like. Yeah.” 

Yana’s face had also turned red. She slowly reached out to turn Myra’s face back towards herself, and leaned in to give her a short peck on the lips. It slowly evolved into something more.

“I’m lesbian?” Yana in-the-room gasped, her mouth hanging open.

“Did you ever like any boys in school?” Mrs Copycat Abrams asked. 

“Well, I sort of liked Toby! Everyone liked him, so I figured I did too.. Anyway, I never had time! I was too busy getting ready for college! But also, I married Eric in my other life! But, I guess I was kind of sad about that?” She fell into a thoughtful silence, chewing on her lower lip.

P118089’s voice came through, sounding confused. ‘Are those two female of the species performing a mating ritual? But why? There would be no purpose to this mating at all, as no procreation is possible of it. So why would they even find each other attractive?’

P154 had had a few decades to figure out the answer to this one. ‘Attraction is designed to help you find a mate that you would want to raise young with and pass on your traits – genetic or learned. In most species, the only way to raise young is to create one yourself. But among humans, there are ways to raise young without physically procreating – adoption, surrogacy, and now there are even medical procedures. So the human brain has now evolved to be attracted to other characteristics in their mates, not just the ability to procreate.’

P118089 was taking furious notes. What was ‘surogesy’? It would have to look it up later. 

The Life Video on screen was rapidly jumping ahead once more to Yana going on to get a law degree at Georgetown, and getting involved in the campaigns for several presidential elections and local officials over the next few years, before making her own run for senator. Throughout, Myra stayed a part of her life, showing up at every public event along the campaign trail, helping Yana manage the stress and excitement of it all. Yana’s platform on climate change resonated with so many of the voters who knew someone displaced by wildfires, floods, landslides. Yana was also unbeatable in debates – having a partner who was a PhD in environmental science meant there was no argument any opponent or the media could present to her that she hadn’t already furiously debated at home with Myra. 

Yana won her first election handily, and her unshakeable expertise on the topic meant she consistently got appointed to a succession of energy and interior committees. The video slowed once again as a new president – the first woman president in the country’s history – got sworn in, and she promptly called Yana to offer her the position of chairing the Environment committee.

As the video of her conversation played on screen, Yana broke the silence in the room. “She looks nice, but not what I was expecting. I always assumed our first female president would be all pantsuits and nude colors and perfectly coiffed hair, but she looks like she spends most of her time in jeans, colorful cotton shirts and her hair in an off-center ponytail. She looks more like a soccer mom than a president!”

Mrs Copycat Abrams smiled. “And that’s precisely what won her the presidency.”

Yana’s mouth hung open in a perfect O, before she nodded in understanding. Then she suddenly remembered to ask, “Wait, what was so improbable about this life? You said it was skinny because it was improbable?”

“There were two occurrences that had a very slim probability of happening – Myra joining you for that internship, and the first female president getting elected. For the first, 96% of the time, Myra loses the courage to apply for the internship because she’s so intimidated by the thought of working alongside her high school crush, and for the second, 98% of the time one of the newspapers manage to leak an unflattering photo of the presidential candidate that sufficiently derails her campaign and prevents her from winning.”

Yana had stopped listening halfway through. “I was her high school crush? Me?? But I barely ever talked to her! We didn’t even hang out in the same friend groups! And she was always dressed like such a dork!”

“Indeed. She would often plot ways to make the classes go a bit longer so she could spend more time in the classroom with you.”

Yana just kept thinking and blinking. On screen, the LifeVideo slowed at her retirement party with several tributes from around the world expounding on the change she had wrought on the climate policies for decades to come, but Yana was clearly still pondering how she could have missed this high school crush someone had on her. Even with the gravity of her achievements in this life, she was most focused on the things that only teenagers cared about so passionately – crushes, friendships, clothes. In a strange way, this felt strangely parallel to P154’s conversation with Anne Frank. What a lovely bright spot that had been among the bleak years of the 1940s. 

P154 gently interrupted her thoughts. “Our time here is at an end dear. Before you head out, I have three questions for you. First, would you replace your life with any of the lives you saw today?”

Yana blinked a few times before answering. “Of course! I wish I could have lived that second life. Met the first female president, gotten to hang out with Myra – that seemed pretty cool.”

“Would you like to have memories of your own life to be available to you in your next life?”

“Yeah sure – at least I’ll know I should learn to drive sooner in my next life! Although hang on, I don’t remember anything from any of my previous lives and I can’t imagine I would have said no to this question every single time, so this question isn’t really a question is it?”

P154 was tempted to ignore the question and move on, but Yana’s eyes were brimming with a mix of curiosity and stubbornness it had seen many times before – there was no getting off the hook here.

“Your brain does not have the memory capacity for multiple lifetimes, so the more vivid memories will appear as gut feelings, visions, deja vus, flashes of memories, or most commonly, dreams.”

Yana let out an audible gasp and a giggle. “So that’s what dreams are!! Oh boy, all those psychologists interpreting dreams as signs for the future, and all they are is snippets of the past! And ohhhhhh! No wonder falling from a height is such a common dream – can’t think of a more vivid experience than that!”

She was still chuckling, lost in thought when P154 slipped in the final question, “Would you like to repeat any experiences-”

“Hang on – I just thought of something. You’ve been doing this for half a billion years, for ALL the souls on planet earth, and each of these souls comes here to get recycled to another body for the next lifetime. Which means my soul could have been recycled millions of times. Which means, I could have been one of those dinosaurs?”

Yana’s eyes and mouth were all a perfect O as she reached the end of her epiphany. P118089 chuckled, and after a second of searching beamed back, ‘Are we allowed to tell her that she was in over a million dinosaur bodies of all shapes – including some memorable stints as a T-rex?’

P154 smiled, proud that the penny finally did drop for Yana. “Indeed. As you said, the Dinosaurs did live on – in you. But, I must now hear your final answer –  would you like to repeat any experiences from your current life again in your future life?”

Still a bit distracted by her thoughts, she took a second to respond “Umm.. Yeah, my dinners with my family. As much as I thought they were boring and sometimes annoying, they were clearly a big part of my personality – I would want that again in my next life.”

Her body gently merges into the light at the door, still distracted by the ramifications of the fact that she once roamed the earth as a dinosaur. 

P118089 joins P154 on the trek back to their cubicle, still chuckling. “She’s going to be thinking about dinosaurs all through the reincarnation process – wonder if that’ll make her obsessed with dinosaurs in her next lifetime!”

P154 looked at it in surprise – P118089 may be the first processor in the last century to pick up on this. “You’re right as a matter of fact – many souls leave here having had that realization, and in their next life spend their childhood years imagining they are still dinosaurs. While the reincarnation team usually tries to erase memories of the soul processing itself, if the soul is holding onto their memories of this room really tight, sometimes stuff sticks. That’s one of the reasons why HSS has 3 questions instead of the standard 1 question for other species – we really want them thinking about their lives and not the soul-processing experience itself.” 

P118089 nodded, making a mental note to write all this down once it got back to its desk. Just as it was about to head in, P154 cracked a rare smile “But yeah, it’s funny isn’t it. All those dinosaur-obsessed kids on earth actually know something their parents don’t!”

P118089 laughed out loud as P154 walked off. As P118089 flipped open the manual to finish taking notes, its neighbor leaned in, “Hey – did I just catch P154 crack a joke? Wow, you’ve really settled in!”

P118089 looked down at its battered manual full of scribbles with a smile. Some of the scribbles were even ideas for Edition 323. 

It supposed it really had settled in after all.

Continue to Chapter 7: The Prodigal Perfection →