The Torture Effect
BRETT ABRAHAMSEN
After centuries of speculation on the matter, there was now a definitive answer regarding the fate of an individual’s consciousness after death.
The sentence: fifty trillion years of torture, followed by an eternity of happiness and bliss.
God—actually a super-intelligent alien from Alpha Centauri – had devised the sentence as a means of testing the effect of long term torture
on creatures of limited intelligence—Earthlings. He had felt guilty about this, and appended a blissful eternity as some sort of reward.
A man named Lemming sat dying in a hospital bed. He was the first dying person to know what his fate would be.
Lemming addressed the doctor who was tending to him.
“Suppose—after, say, several trillion years – something kills the omnipotent alien. I’m tortured for several trillion years, and then at the mercy of some other super-intelligent creature.”
“The alien is immortal,”the doctor said. “You have nothing to complain about. A more interesting torture experiment would involve the subject being tortured for fifty trillion years, given a minute of extreme happiness, tortured again for another fifty trillion years, and so on.”
He died and the torture began. Every individual which had ever existed was being tortured with him, though some—those which had died in the distant past—were closer to the eternal reward than others.
When the reward came it was no longer recognizable to him. It felt like torture.
The author has sold dozens of works to numerous publications. He resides in Saratoga Springs, NY.