Pure, absolute darkness. Nothingness. The end of everything, the end of my life. I did not know how long I stared at the void because time had no meaning here. Sparkling lights, stars suddenly began to twinkle in the endless, vast night.

For a brief instance I wondered if this was something that Yuri Gagarin saw on his orbital spaceflight when he had departed from planet earth on April 12, 1961 on the Vostok rocket. Why was I seeing stars? Was I lucid dreaming in the last second of my death? How could that be? Had the fertilizer failed to detonate? The destructive power of the blast should have been equivalent to 1 kiloton of TNT or approximately 1/20th yield of the first nuclear bomb exploded by the United States over Hiroshima.

Aralsk-7 and I should have been reduced to dust! I should not be able to formulate thoughts! If this was just a dream, then I wouldn't be able to recall specific things at will, pull up dates or big numbers. I focused my mind, pulled at my memories of Hiroshima. One by one, like falling dominoes, my memories flashed into being.

The greatest act of war perpetrated by humanity with the power of science occurred over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th over Japan in which American nuclear bombs killed 355'000 people. For many months after the bombs detonated over Japanese cities, large numbers of civilians continued to die from the effects of burns, radiation sickness, and injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition. According to one newspaper I read, the people close to the explosion were nearly vaporized, organs and bones carbonized and the rest turned into shadows imprinted onto stone. I was thirteen at the time. I recalled how Soviet Union declared war on Japan on the same day, our tanks rolling into the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo held by the Kwantung Army.

I was born in 1932... when the Soviet–Finnish Non-Aggression Pact was signed. When I was seven, USSR invaded Finland. When I was nine Germany invaded the Soviet Union. I was too young to help, but I recalled how my mother was conscripted along with thousands of other women to dig anti-tank trenches and moats around the city as means of desperate defense against the invasion.

In 1952 I was selected to join the team of Dr. Lebedev at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering to help assemble BESM-1, the first Soviet mainframe supercomputer composed from five thousand vacuum tubes.

I remembered absolutely everything! I realized that I couldn't feel or perceive my body, as if I was just a pinprick of light myself in the shawl of eternal night. I was dead, there was no question about it now... and yet I could recall everything with perfect clarity. I clung to the memories of my entire life with all of my being, as if they were a life-saving vest amidst an ocean of darkness.

The stars around me slowly began to spin in an endless circle, accelerating with every passing moment. Soon the long, orbital curves formed brilliant rings... a tunnel to elsewhere. Perhaps the stars weren't spinning at all. Maybe it was me that had started rotating?

The tunnel of light gained more colors, attained vibrant brilliance to it, as if it was woven from flames. I realized what it was. Soviet urban legends had perpetuated the knowledge of the "eternal wheel" seen by people who had a near-death experience. Some of the Academy of Sciences researchers even claimed to identify the common elements that define NDEs: a sense of being dead, lack of negative emotions, sense of well-being, painlessness and most of all - "the tunnel". The people perpetuating the life after death mythos in USSR had called this tunnel, "Samsara", referencing ancient Vedas Hinduism texts from the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature. As the Orthodox religion was being actively dismantled and propagandized as an absolute evil by the Soviet government, some people like my father had turned to a mixture of Buddhism and Hinduism to explain what science could not. The tales of rebirth, remote dreaming, levitation powers and Samsara sort of squeezed into my childhood as a fun, mystical thing he often talked about over dinner.

I was seeing the damn thing for myself now. It was real! I couldn't believe it.

The Great Wheel of Life, Samsara!

I could not determine what the wheel and the limitless tunnel it formed was made from anymore. Stars? Angels? People? A multitude of strings, innumerable things reached out to me. A billion hands, for a billion souls, to take me beyond the veil of death.

Something had grabbed at me, turned me. The helmet of my hero - cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in his full spacesuit stared down at me. Galactic spirals and the Wheel of Samsara spun ceaselessly in the reflections of his helmet's glass. He silently watched me, observed me for what felt like a moment that lasted a second or perhaps forever.

“We saw your sacrifice and found it beautiful,” Yuri spoke with a whisper woven from a hundred male voices that gradually rose in crescendo like a wave arriving at the beach shore. He did not sound like himself. This was someone, no… something else entirely. Something inexplicable, something that our science did not reach, did not understand yet - a thing from beyond the veil of death.

“We?” I thought tentatively.

“The Omniscience,” the cosmonaut answered as if he could read my mind. It probably did since I wasn't actually speaking, lacking lungs or a mouth.

Soviet science had not discovered evidence for a soul or a god, yet here I was - now quite well aware of both.

“God is... real?” I trembled in a sudden realization, my Soviet atheism cracking for the first time. “Are you god?”

Now, normally I would have at least shed a tear in this terrifying and impossible moment. However, as I was currently deprived of my body… I felt exceptionally calm, lacking stressful feelings.

“We are the narration that underpins and pierces what you define as reality. Your soul is but a minute echo that cannot truly perceive us. You see only a symbol, an idea, a concept that you worship.”

“I worship nothing and no-one!” I mentally asserted.

No comment came from the spaceman. He simply floated there, observing me from behind his helmet.

“Will I be going to hell for my crimes then?” I asked, thinking of the three people who died because of me and countless others who had suffered from bioweapons and nuclear tests I’ve helped conduct in Kazakhstan.

“No, you’ll be going somewhere far more interesting,” the cosmonaut replied. “Somewhere where you perhaps make a difference. Or not. An interesting experiment, as it were. Do you agree to a continuation of your narrative?”

A window divided in half flashed in my mind with the words:

YES NO

The text started to flash, at about one flicker per minute.

Sure, I could [ > ignore the nonsensical blue text ...

Or I could answer it...

“Yes.” I thought with determination.

Anywhere was better than the nonexistence that I had expected upon death. Even hell would be an interesting place for me - a continuation of being. A thing to be explored, meddled with, modified, improved upon. Even though the Soviet system had utterly failed me, I still firmly believed in humanism, the power of science and rationality to change any world for the better.

“We like your attitude. We know exactly where you can belong.” The cosmonaut-shaped thing asserted.

"Where?" I asked.

“Come with us, transient soul and awaken once more with purpose...” The Omniscience concluded, ignoring my question.

“Wait! I have que…”

My line of inquiry was interrupted because the Wheel of Life had engulfed the cosmonaut and I with a brilliant, blinding flash woven from waves of colors I could not even name.