1n1REzE

Peter Watts 116 Blindsight
"Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more
certain they are their own."
—Aristotle
I couldn't say goodbye to Dad. I didn't even know where he was.
I didn't want to say goodbye to Helen. I didn't want to go back
there. That was the problem: I didn't have to. There was nowhere
left in the world where the mountain couldn't simply pick up and
move to Mohammed. Heaven was merely a suburb of the global
village, and the global village left me no excuse.
I linked from my own apartment. My new inlays—missionspecific,
slid into my head just the week before—shook hands with
the noosphere and knocked upon the Pearly Gates. Some tame
spirit, more plausible than Saint Peter if no less ethereal, took a
message and disappeared.
And I was inside.
This was no antechamber, no visiting room. Heaven was not
intended for the casual visitor; any paradise in which the fleshconstrained
would feel at home would have been intolerably
pedestrian to the disembodied souls who lived there. Of course,
there was no reason why visitor and resident had to share the same
view. I could have pulled any conventional worldview off the
shelf if I'd wanted, seen this place rendered in any style I chose.
Except for the Ascended themselves, of course. That was one of
the perks of the Afterlife: only they got to choose the face we saw.
But the thing my mother had become had no face, and I was
damned if she was going to see me hide behind some mask.
"Hello, Helen."
"Siri! What a wonderful surprise!"
She was an abstraction in an abstraction: an impossible
intersection of dozens of bright panes, as if the disassembled tiles
of a stained-glass window had each been set aglow and animated.
She swirled before me like a school of fish. Her world echoed her
body: lights and angles and three-dimensional Escher
impossibilities, piled like bright thunderheads. And yet, somehow
I would have recognised her anywhere. Heaven was a dream; only
upon waking do you realize that the characters you encountered