Free Sum by David Eagleman

Horses will arrest their gallop and relax into a standing slumber. Black jaguars in trees will lower their chins to their paws on the branches. This is how the world will close, not with a bang but a yawn: sleepy and contented, our own falling eyelids serving as the curtain for the play’s end.
    This way, the quark’s beloved creations will be unable to witness what happens next. What happens next is the world’s recession, the unraveling of the planet. As the quark slows, its individual pencil strokes become increasingly sparse until the world resembles a crosshatched woodcut. The sleeping bodies become transparent netting through which the other side can be seen. As the pencil marks grow fewer, the asphalt highways become a sparse lacing of black strokes, with nothing below but the other side of the planet, one Earth-diameter away. The world’s canvas devolves into a thin sketch of outlines. The remaining strokes, one by one, disappear from the latticework, drawing the cosmos toward a more complete blankness.
    In the end, spent, the quark slows to a halt at the center of infinite emptiness.
    Here it takes its time, catching its breath. It will wait several thousand millennia until it regains the stamina and optimism to try again. So there is no afterlife, but instead a long intermission: all of us exist inside the memory of the particle, like a fertilized egg waiting to unpack.

 
    Narcissus
    In the afterlife you receive a clear answer about our purpose on the Earth: our mission is to collect data. We have been seeded on this planet as sophisticated mobile cameras. We are equipped with advanced lenses that produce high-resolution visual images, calculating shape and depth from wavelengths of light. The cameras of the eyes are mounted on bodies that carry them around—bodies that can scale mountains, spelunk caves, cross plains. We are outfitted with ears to pick up air-compression waves and large sensory sheets of skin to collect temperature and texture data. We have been designed with analytic brains that can get this mobile equipment on top of clouds, below the seas, onto the moon. In this way, each observer from every mountaintop contributes a little piece to the vast collection of planetary surface data.
    We were planted here by the Cartographers, whose holy books are what we would recognize as maps. Our calling is to cover every inch of the planet’s surface. As we roam, we vacuum data into our sensory organs, and it is for this reason only that we exist.
    At the moment of our death we awaken in the debriefing room. Here our lifetime of data collection is downloaded and cross-correlated with the data of those who have passed before us. By this method, the Cartographers integrate billions of viewpoints for a dynamic high-resolution picture of the planet. They long ago realized that the optimal method for achieving a planet-wide map was to drop countless little rugged mobile devices that multiply quickly and carry themselves to all the reaches of the globe. To ensure we spread widely on the surface, they made us restless, longing, lusty, and fecund.
    Unlike previous mobile-camera versions, they built us to stand, crane our necks, turn our lenses onto every detail of the planet, become curious, and independently develop new ideas for increased mobility. The brilliance of the design specification was that our pioneering efforts were not prescripted; instead, to conquer the unpredictable variety of landscapes, we were subjected to natural selection to develop dynamic, unforeseen strategies. The Cartographers do not care who lives and dies, as long as there is broad coverage. They are annoyed by worship and genuflection; it slows data collection.
    When we awaken in the giant spherical windowless room, it may take a few moments to realize that we are not in a heaven in the clouds; rather, we are deep at the center of the Earth. The Cartographers are much smaller than we are. They live underground and are averse to