Hello there, dearest reader. Before we get started, allow me to introduce myself. My Earthly name was Marcus Wade. I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of sharing my personal account with you is, but maybe I do it just because I can. You can make your own assumptions about me as you go. You can choose to believe what you want to. Still, I’d rather not go on a tangent for too long before the story. So, allow me to tell you about my experiences in the afterlife. I think they may interest you. Maybe things will change in the future, and if they do, I will continue to describe such experiences to you. For now, I present you with what I know and have seen.

I awoke, yet I did not remember falling asleep. Perhaps, that is death, if you can even call the process I experienced death. Can something which never was truly alive be deceased? I ask that as a man without a family or a legacy to call my own. There exists no language within the mortal world to describe where I found myself. It was in that instant, that I realized a piece of crucial information.

I realized that I only ever amounted to all that I had said, thought, and done. Furthermore, I understood that all I had said, thought, and done, revolved around my everlasting quest for knowledge. Yes, knowledge... it was knowledge that I wanted most of all. It was an object of desire people such as I would chase, so that we could achieve self-proclaimed superiority rather than become progressive members of society. Sound pretentious? That’s because that was who I was as a man. A pretentious fool. So there I sat, unmissed by anyone, and totally unfazed by the fact that I was in the afterlife.

Evidently, a state of clarity had washed over me once I found myself in this strange place. It was as if all my foolishness was exposed to me, and I was enlightened about the truth. Throughout my life, I was completely obsessed with learning as much as I could, so I could prove to those who doubted me that I was better than they had assumed I was.

Now that I was dead, I could only be surrounded by thoughts and memories. As my awareness expanded, I came to understand what I hadn't before. Fitting, wasn’t it? As a man whose sole purpose was discovery and intelligence, this newfound knowledge could only be described as a euphoric feeling to me. Heavenly, if you will. Yes, this was Heaven. It had to be, for what else could possibly be concluded based on the information at hand?

I found myself uncomfortable with the state of my being at first. The sensation of being sentient, yet disembodied was strange due to the amount of time I had previously spent as a living, breathing person, but I soon got used to my situation. I had all the time in the world to think, and so that is exactly what I did. I sat there for as long as I can remember, pondering over past events and actions. Some of them I took great pride in, whilst I kicked myself over my own stupidity when recalling others.

It felt like an eternity before I saw it. Some sort of bright light penetrated my vision, and I was finally able to see the world around me. A perfectly rectangular room, devoid of any furniture, was what I observed. I looked down and saw a hand. It was my own... I had seemingly regained my mortal body once more. The walls and floor of the room were in pristine condition, and everything appeared in a white coating of paint. In the center of the room sat a single white desk, where a large desktop computer sat mounted on top of it.