Sum, An Addendum

This is my own response/addition to the book Sum, by David Eagleman. More at Goodreads & buy the book via Indiebound.

In the afterlife, you see the world as it progresses without you. First, you see your family soon after your death; they are grieving, but soon cycle through their grief and move on. This doesn’t bother you, as it was your time to go. Your youngest child marries happy like the rest. You have raised all of them well. She ends up taking over the business and even opens a second branch, and a third. Your grand-kids are universal successes. They hear stories of you, but they don’t tell their own children these stories. Your memory ends there.

When you lose the connection to your family, who now seem to be just descendants, you find you can zoom out to a much larger view. The world is doing well. It seems we have solved the energy crisis. You can’t tell how they are getting energy, but you just seem to know not to be worried. The US finally got it’s high-speed train network. China and India are still the biggest populations on the planet, but everyone is marginally better fed now. People seem to be leaving the rainforests alone, finally. People seem to be interfering less all around. They look happy, and healthy.

You seem to be losing grasp on the countries and concepts of the planet after all of this time though. We’ve sent a crew to Mars. They establish a colony in a bubble — it doesn’t seem to go well. Although it seems to follow immediately, you can tell some time has passed because both the new ship and flags marking it look very foreign to you as they set up a new colony. This one takes hold. Mars looks much greener, and everything is a bit harder to make out through the cloud cover, so you move on.

You see the solar system. Things seem peaceful. Quiet. Among the objects out on the edge, you think you have picked out Pluto. You always liked Pluto. You finally are able to grasp just how big Jupiter is. And just how small you were. Mars has lost it’s cloud cover by this point, and the continents on Earth have shifted all around. You zoom out once more. This place doesn’t feel like yours anymore.

There’s the whole galaxy. You were once very small. There’s all of the galaxies around it. You were once very, very small. Then you see more and more, and who you were keeps shrinking. You were once very, very, very small. Then smaller; and smaller again. You were tiny. That’s when you see everything, and then you are too small to remember how big you were in the first place. You don’t remember blue alarm clock you awoke to every morning at 7:16, you don’t remember the car you drove to work that always drifted left out of your lane. You certainly don’t remember your business, or your kids. You don’t remember the town you were born in and never moved from. You don’t even remember that you were born, or the small blue planet you called home, or the solar system it found itself in, or the galaxy outside of that. You don’t remember you. You just stare at everything, quietly in awe, totally at peace, forever.