“Everyone gets the afterlife they think they’re going to get,” the angel said. “That’s the way it’s always worked. It doesn’t really matter what you do in life - if you think you’ve lived your life in such a way that you deserve to go to heaven, then you’ll go to heaven.”
“Sounds horribly unfair, but all right.”
“Oh I know, believe you me, but we haven’t had too many complaints about it - of course, there is the occasional sad case of someone who really, earnestly believes that they deserve to go to hell. We try to catch those before they enter the system, but a few do sometimes slip through the cracks.”
Faith paused at this. She mentally prodded the concept like someone poking a bad tooth with their tongue; then, like that same someone who subsequently felt the tiny blossom of pain, decided to leave it alone for now and think about it later. “Uh huh.”
“But then we had some trouble with the atheists,” the angel said. “Souls who don’t believe that they’re going anywhere, because they don’t believe that there’s anywhere to go to. It was a bit of a tricky problem - we didn’t want to destroy them, because that seemed rude and anyways would ruin our filing system. So instead we made this.”
“This” was a room that appeared to stretch forever in every direction. That included down; there must have been a floor, it had made high, clear marble sounds when Faith walked across it, but if it did exist it was invisible, leaving her walking over a pit that stretched down beyond her feet into infinity.
And everywhere she looked, there were stars.
The room was filled with stars, some smaller than a pinprick, the biggest as colossal as peas. They gleamed in a lattice of tiny glittering lights, stretching on and on, gathering into cobwebby galaxies and the occasional coloured gleam of nebulae.
“This is the universe,” said the angel. “Or at least, a small version of it we use for accessibility purposes. Whenever we receive a soul that earnestly believes that it’s not going anywhere, they come here.”
Faith tried to look around. She was doing her best not to look at the floor. Part of her worried that if she looked at it too much it would stop existing. “Where?”
“Here, just sort of-” The angel gestured vaguely. “Thin. Diluted, really - a droplet of human soul in a bathtub of the cosmos. Spread out across the universe so thin they can finally experience non-existence. It’s the best we can do for them - their souls continue to exist for our filing purposes, but here they rest amongst the stars, in the gleam of the infinite.”
Faith blinked. “Oh,” she said. “That’s - that’s kind of a nice thought, I guess.”
A nebula at Faith’s feet glittered.
“And of course, they can be reconstituted quite easily if we have to,” the angel said.
Faith wheeled around. “Wh- wait, wait, hold on, what about all that business about leaving them to experience non-existence?”
“Yes, but then we can dilute them again, and then they go back into non-existence and don’t have the wherewithal to think of any uncomfortable questions.”
“I - that seems really irresponsible.”
The angel shrugged. “I admit, it’s not a perfect system. I find that it’s best to just do it quickly - that way we can dilute them again before they start asking questions like, ‘Where the hell am I,’ ‘What the hell’s going on,’ and ‘I was just starting to enjoy my ego death.’”
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