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Consequently, the woman’s idea of Heaven, of a happy afterlife, did not include her parents. They were nowhere to be seen in her projection, and they wouldn’t feature in it at any point, except maybe to give her the apology she’d never heard from them in her mortal life.
Maybe I’d make them grovel in front of her later.
I fiddled with the details of the room, subtly adding a vase I’d just spotted in her memories.
Souls never truly figured out that the environment they perceived around them wasn’t actually real. That whatever surroundings they saw were merely a kind of virtual reality conjured by an angel to represent their personal idea of Heaven, to give them the maximum amount of contentment and happiness.
It was so different for everybody. For some, it meant being among all their loved ones, enveloped in a constant stream of visits from the people they’d cared about in life. For others, it was the solitude of a small cottage amid a flowering garden, with maybe an occasional visit from a person they loved.
The souls realized they were in Heaven, yes, that they’d died and passed on into the immortal realm, but they didn’t know that what they saw around them was a very individualized projection made for only them, from their respective memories and preferences, and not what the entirety of Heaven looked like.
And they didn’t have the slightest idea that when they saw one of their loved ones, it wasn’t actually that person’s soul they saw. It was part of their individual projection, a memory of that person, an image of them plucked from the soul’s mind.
Souls in Heaven never truly interacted.
When I’d first found out about this, I’d been shocked, and a little miffed. Of course souls in Heaven would interact! Entire religions were founded on this concept, that one would get to see and hug and speak with the people one had loved in life. Right? This idea that we would all get our happy ending and meet those again who’d had to leave us too soon, that we’d get to hang out together and enjoy eternity side by side.
Except, that was not how things actually worked in Heaven.
Up here, souls were kept separate from each other, each in their own little room. An angel would be tasked with creating an individualized afterlife projection around the soul, crafting this virtual reality that was authentic enough to make the soul believe it was real. Of course, the soul would know that this was their afterlife, that the environment they saw was a piece of Heaven, and that was okay. Souls were really chill about this. Something about being in Heaven, in general, put them totally at ease.
But they’d still think the images they saw of other people were those people’s souls, as in they’d really interact with other deceased up here. When in reality, they only ever interacted with their own memories of their loved ones.
Though I’d been appalled by this at first, I’d come to see it from a different side after some time. The system did have advantages.
If a soul only ever talked to a projection of a loved one crafted from their own happy memories, it meant there’d never be heartbreak. There’d never be strife or arguments, and they’d never slowly drift apart over eternity, because that projection of their loved one was, as a general rule, positive only.
When we as angels drew on the soul’s memories, we never plucked details from the negative ones. And the soul’s disposition in Heaven was to lean into happiness rather than unpleasant recollections. So the image they’d see of the people who’d been dearest to them in life would never disappoint them, never leave them, never hurt them.
There was a certain kind of peace in that.
In addition to that, this system of individualized afterlife projections that didn’t interfere with or touch on other souls’ ideas of Heaven meant that some potentially very cringe cases of reunions would never happen.
For example, if a guy married the love of his life, they had children, they spent decades living together as a family until they both died of old age, and then they got to Heaven, but instead of enjoying eternity with his wife, the poor guy then had to realize there was this dude she’d met on a boat when she was seventeen and had a hot affair with for four days until an iceberg sunk the boat and lover boy died, but the wife had been kind of hung up on him all her life, and now the boat dude wanted a piece of her in Heaven.
So much cringe.
With the individualized afterlife projections, though, it was possible to accommodate such cases. That way, the wife might have both her husband and her young lover—images crafted from her memories—with her, all of them happily living together, while the lover boy might get his own idea of Heaven with the woman, as a memory, being with him, without anyone else, and the husband similarly might have his ideal afterlife consisting of living with his wife without the presence or memory of the young lover intruding.
If none of these three souls actually interacted, each could have their own version of “happily ever after” and never know the difference. To them, it was real, and they were content.
The door behind me, which looked like a regular door in the apartment but actually led out of the projection room and into the corridor of the building where Derdekea’s souls were stored, opened, and Eremiel, my direct supervisor, walked in.
He stopped just beside me, sighed, and gestured at the scene in front of us. “What is this?”
I bit my lip. “Her idea of Heaven?”
“She’s covered in kittens.”
“Fluffy balls of happiness,” I corrected him with a raised finger.
Eremiel, a generally rule-loving angel with a penchant for finding everything around him annoying, pinched the bridge of his nose and then pointed at the chart he held in his other hand. It showed a graph depicting this soul’s energy production. “You need to step up your game, Chaya. This is well below average. She’s not as happy as she should be.”
I pressed my lips together, gave a tight nod, and then summoned a notepad and pen and scribbled something down.
“What are you doing?” Eremiel asked, his voice just this side of irritated.
“Taking notes so I won’t forget?—”
