She is having a... weird coma dream? Sure, weird coma dream, she's lost. She goes up to the kiosk for the lost.

A person with shimmery facepaint smiles at her encouragingly. "Newly dead, I'm guessing?"

"Well, I got hit by a van, but I'm still hoping this is a coma dream. I assume you get that a lot."

"We do. Do you need some time or would you like to proceed with getting oriented and applying for residence somewhere while hoping that’s a pointless thing to do?"

"I'm not sure sitting around while I hope it's a coma dream will help any! Let's go full steam ahead."

"All right! You have appeared within the territory of the Dead Republic, which claims the plane of existence that is fourth on the Standardized List of Planes - before we had the list, we had trouble disambiguating the about three heavens and thirty hells. Your reasonably sensible immediate options from here are to apply for residency in the Dead Republic, to apply for residency in the Bastion of Peace on plane number two, to move immediately to New Jerusalem on plane number three, or to hang around here reading while you think through what to do next. You don't strictly speaking need to worry about taking care of any bodily needs but you'll be much more comfortable if you do."

"Is... this... a hell? I wouldn't really expect a hell to have hot chocolate and a reception desk."

"Some people call this place Heaven but I think they've got low standards. Pretty sure they've got both those things in some of the hells, though."

"Well, uh, what's the pitch on my various options?"

"The Bastion of Peace is really stable and extremely dense and in a convenient position to work on some really straightforward humanitarian problems. New Jerusalem's very... boring, in my personal opinion. People call it heaven when their idea of heaven is never being hungry and being surrounded by endless low grassy hills. It's very hard for demons to get there, at least. This place is a republic, which in my personal opinion makes it the best, and it has more climate variation than most afterlives, and we're not prejudiced against people who weren't so lucky as to land here first, unlike the Bastion - they won't be very prejudiced against you, this is a respectable place to have ended up, but if you'd gone to the lava tubes first, say. This is all kind of oversimplifying and I don't actually know what's important to you."

"Uh, humanitarian projects sound nice... what forms of government do those other places have? What's wrong with the lava tubes? What climates am I looking at in the immigration options?"

"New Jerusalem theoretically has a monarch - you might know the name 'Jesus'? - but most day to day governance is delegated to other positions some of which are elected. The climate is very mild there. The Bastion is a federation with different low-level systems and an oligarchy at the top, and the climate is also very mild there but most people live in vast underground cities so it's not very relevant. If you had appeared in the lava tubes, you would very likely have been immediately enslaved by demons hoping to make you a horrible person and use you to torture others, so, potentially not a great neighbor once they were through with you, but it doesn’t do to just assume."

"And these places have application processes - or, you do and Bastion does but New" Jersey "Jerusalem doesn't?"

"Yeah, NJ is for whoever wants to go."

"And what's the process like?"

"If you want to live here you tell me some identifying information and stay in the reception area or visit New Jerusalem for a couple days while we do a background check and then probably you get put in this new computerized database and get an ID card. Ideally at some point you take a look at the bullet points of a guide to not getting in trouble here."

"How do you do a background check from here?"

"Well, a good part of it would be about checking that you’re not someone who's been expelled from the Dead Republic before in disguise, which isn’t exactly harder to do from here. It’s technically possible to visit Earth but very... let’s say expensive."

"If we were trying to say it in more than one word, what would we say?"

"That it takes a lot of magic power to get there from here, and that power is used for other things like defending against demons, and also the people who could do it will sometimes literally charge money."

"Thanks, that makes sense. What is... the deal... with demons. Are there also angels."

"Noooot really. Some of the demons say they're angels? There's Jesus? There are dead people with magic who live in places sometimes called heaven and some of them have wings?"

"Huh. The demons aren't dead people with magic who live in places sometimes called Hell and some of them have horns, or whatever?"

"I don't think they were ever human. There are totally dead humans with magic and horns and dead humans in places sometimes called Hell, not totally sure if there's any overlap but I would bet not, but also there are weird very powerful humanoids who don't seem very human and are so evil, like, so fucking evil, and also at least one dragon which might or might not be a demon, and also some people think Jesus is part demon. They're not really cooperative with the historians and anthropologists, you know, except Jesus but he doesn't even know if he's part demon."

"It does seem like it could conceivably be hard to know. Uh - should I be asking for reading material, here, I don't know how much of your time you usually want to spend per person."

"I am more responsive than a book but the books here are likely to be pretty helpful! You seem like you're coming from America or Canada, maybe?"

"America, yeah."

"You might want to read The Afterlives For Dummies or The Dead Republic Quick Reference Guide or both."

"Sounds great, can I borrow copies?"

"The books on the tables are free for the taking unless someone's claimed them already and if you can't find one you're looking for then we need to restock."

"Thanks, you've been great, I'll swing by when I've done some reading and had a cocoa." She goes and gets a cocoa and books.

The Afterlives For Dummies explains such things as how the bodies of people in the afterlives function (they wear down normally but sort of pull themselves together by magic, typically on a scale of hours to days; injuries that happen faster than that will happen normally before healing, even to the point of causing vital signs to cease for a while, but things like aging or starvation just take too long and reliably can't take dead people down even temporarily; they can be made to heal into a different shape, including a permanently injured one or one with new limbs, but it's fiddly), and what kinds of public works there are in the most appealing afterlife polities (the Dead Republic has so much free education and otherwise relies on a combination of the fact that no one really strictly speaking has needs and the fact that no one will strictly speaking be at risk of bankrupting themself if they give to strangers; New Jerusalem has free food and housing; the Bastion of Peace has a homesteading program). It devotes more time to explaining how to navigate New Jerusalem than anywhere else but it does give a very basic introduction to commerce in the Dead Republic. It also incidentally mentions that there's easily available magic for learning to speak all languages, and that it's hard to move between afterlives in the same way it's hard to get back to Earth. (The Dead Republic subsidizes the cost of leaving since they like being able to use exile to deal with the fact that they can't really execute people who won't stop causing problems. New Jerusalem subsidizes the cost of moving in. Moving from one to the other is pretty cheap.)

The other book is thick and kind of dry. It contains the top nine most commonly referenced documents for newcomers to the Dead Republic, including a brief guide to its laws and customs (don't start violence for no reason or you'll have to pay weregild and maybe have to move out of town or even leave the republic altogether; don't steal things, likewise; don't bring kids under twelve into dangerous hobby areas such as might have tigers roaming around; most residential areas unless otherwise specified ban offensive displays like strobe lights or public sex but there are a lot of exceptions and which things are allowed is a major factor in most people's choice of where to live; elections are staggered so some offices are up for election every five years), and a list of major cities that might be good choices for random people to move to, and some details on how to get onto the waiting list for some cool magic.

Is there more to cool magic than getting between worlds or speaking all languages?

There are other things, such as conjuring objects (this is how New Jerusalem gives away so much free food) and redirecting incoming visitors to different areas (for example, Bella's appearance on this plane happened here in this reception area and not in someone else's bedroom, and this was made more likely by magic though the reception area was probably built in the first place around an area where people commonly appeared anyway) and sensing souls and doing weird dream things.

Neat. What are the criteria for getting on the lists like?

It's not that gatekept. They will want evidence that she isn't an axe murderer or at least is only an axe murderer for some kind of prosocial reasons, the results will probably be underwhelming because how much power people gain is very unpredictable and frequently underwhelming, and then she can wait a few decades to centuries for her turn.

Is this basically the same process in all the afterlives?

It's actually all based out of New Jerusalem but she can apply from the Dead Republic or the Bastion of Peace or some other more obscure places. Not from the lava tubes but she's probably not going there.

It doesn't seem to have anything to recommend it, no. Where does the hot chocolate come from, do people just have afterlife farms? Is it mostly in the Dead Republic because chocolate doesn't like mild climates much? (Sip.)

People do have afterlife farms, though given the fact that they cannot starve and the fact that conjuration is possible and the fact that they've got fancy fertilizers and genetically engineered seeds these days it's sometimes more accurate to say they have cute little afterlife hobby gardens that they work on when they feel like it. The books do not actually go into detail about where chocolate comes from.

Is there any explanation of why some people don't think the Dead Republic meets the bar for "a heaven", given that none of these places are doing the choirs of angels, eternal bliss, clouds and harps, thing? Actually, the Republic is "fourth" and she has only been told about two "higher" planes, what's the missing heaven?

They’re not actually numbered in order of height but there is a map of them that puts Earth on top. There isn’t specifically an explanation of what disappoints people about the Dead Republic in the books unless you count the summary of the tax code.

Is the tax code somehow awful?

Not really beyond existing at all.

She doesn't have any principled objection to taxes. Is there any picture of what concrete lifedeathstyle people experience in each of her options?

Not much of one. It looks like they're all basically composed of some combination of modern cities and countryside, with New Jerusalem having the most countryside and the Bastion of Peace having the least. The Bastion of Peace has a lot of underground structures so probably fewer people have wings there? (There is a guy with wings swapping out an empty thing of hot chocolate now.)

Anything on... why... the Bastion is mostly underground?

Avoiding disturbing the meadows, apparently.

What's important about the meadows?

The books don’t say.

Okay, she will go back to the reception desk person after looking for a place to toss her empty hot chocolate cup.

There’s a receptacle for that and the person will be right with her after handing some papers to another new arrival.

She can wait patiently, yeah.

The person waves her over.

"Hi. I've looked through the books and I'm confused about why the Bastion folks live underground to avoid, what, wear and tear on the meadows? Is there something special about the meadows? I also would like to know what my residence decisions do to influence the odds I'll get magic, I want magic."

"Yeah, they say it's because the meadows are a planar treasure that's been famous since the bronze age. I think probably it has something to do with the big stable natural caves under there and the fact that they only get new arrivals aboveground. I don't think it'll matter where you live on the scale of, like, which world, just don't immediately disappear into a jungle with no way to contact you."

"Shan't. What do the partisans for New Jerusalem and the Bastion tend to say when talking up their planes?"

"That they're safe places full of decent people where you don't have to be constantly looking over your shoulder. The Bastion has the longest history of organized fighting on behalf of human interests and the biggest human society anywhere ever. New Jerusalem is safer from demonic incursions than anywhere else and if you ever want to adopt a child it'll be slightly easier to do it there and they're the only ones currently providing services to people who've been to Hell and came back too wrecked to be part of society. Which is kind of unfair, they're the ones hosting them but we help."

"What... happens, when demons incur."

"Depends. Kidnappings. Impersonating random people who just got hit by vans and waiting till they're in position to sabotage infrastructure. Spying. Mostly they don't, these days."

"I guess that explains why the background check, you guys pretty good at that?"

"I think so and I figure if they were so good at it that we wouldn't notice a bunch of them slipping past us then we wouldn't be getting into arguments about exactly how heavenly this place is."

"I'm not sure how that follows, but okay. The humanitarian projects you mentioned, what form do those take?"

"Well, there's some hells where they don't even want people to stay and be tortured, so rescue missions aren't really diplomatically complicated; we do some and so does New Jerusalem. There's one that the Bastion is slowly turning into a nice place - it's easy to get there from the Bastion and hard to get there from here, we're not helping. New Jerusalem keeps pissing off the lava assholes by stealing their slaves whenever they try to send them to Earth but, uh, we're not as hard for demons to get to and it's harder to reach Earth from here. Mind, we can't actually stop people with a ton of magic and no sense of self-preservation, but if you want to do that you should move to New Jerusalem."

"I think of those I most like the sound of turning a hell into a nice place, can you tell me more about that?"

"Well, it’s not a very bad one. There’s a dragon that eats people but that’s all, they come back after. They just don’t... have stuff? Before people started sending things they just... existed, in these barren caves, in between being eaten. I think there’s a longer-term project to send some people who are into that once it’s a nicer place aside from the dragon but right now it kind of sucks."

"Yeah, that sounds like they need help with establishing anti-dragon defenses and having, like, food and stuff like that, so that they can be one of the nicer places and maybe help out other people later?"

"Yeah. I’m not sure it’d benefit from one more person who doesn’t even have magic working on it but I wouldn’t know."

"Does the Bastion have other humanitarian projects? You did mention it as a standout vantage point for them."

"Staging ground for New Jerusalem to race demons for new arrivals to a place they emptied out a while ago. Other than that, just normal things - uh, different things are normal here - expanding internet access and research into making body alterations cheaper, seeking out and adopting dead infants but that's actually easier from New Jerusalem, there are people trying to help families separated by death find each other but they do try to work in as many places as possible, the Bastion has the largest public library known to man but really at some point it doesn't especially matter if you have the largest library or ten libraries a tenth that size."

"What is there for humanitarians to do here in the Republic? Also what's a good way to get a summary of the politics, that seems maybe important."

"Honestly, a lot of the same sort of thing. Helping with the staging for rescue missions. Around here feeding the poor is in the domain of private charity. There's a charity that offers everyone the chance to learn to read and a charity that just tries to grant people's weirdest and least fulfillable wishes. And the organizations that deal with people too screwed up to be part of society take donations - of, like, money, so they can pay staff."

"And the politics summary? If it's a republic that matters a little more than if Jesus is just being the monarch."

"Welllllll... what summaries are good and what summaries are hopelessly biased partisan garbage sort of depends on who you ask, but I can try. There are fifteen major parties in Parliament and I can only sort of remember their taglines - so there's the Liberal Party that's big on extending the set of contracts you can legally make, the New Day Party that's hawkish on demons and supports intervening on Earth, the Peace and Freedom Party that says they're about 'safeguarding the ability of the people to access the fundamental features of a joyful life', the Conservatives, the Neo-Anti-Counter-Reformists, the Islamic People's Party, the Socialist Party who want 'public control of the means of production', the People's Socialist Party who also want that and don't trust the other socialists to get it, the Inspirationists who support 'the final merger of all ways of knowing and the radical restructuring of politics in light of Oneness', the Labor Party, the Anti-Labor Party, and that's eleven and I can't remember - uh, the Arian Heritage Party which has a really unfortunate name collision in English, I mean the disciples of Arius and their cultural legacy - and the Purity and Uprightness Party and... yeah, I can't remember."

"And who's winning lately - or whatever it is in a parliamentary system, I didn't take a lot of foreign government relevant classes."

"They’ve all got seats. There’s a coalition of Peace and Freedom and Purity and Uprightness and Labor that has a majority but just barely."

"And you don't get a lot of, like, the Islamic party winning big and making everybody wear headscarves?"

"Uh, they mostly want people to stop charging interest and increase taxes to fund more public education, I don't remember hearing about modesty from them lately. We don't get a lot of one party winning big and changing everything anyway."

"What's the job market like for people who died aged seventeen?"

"I don't really see why 'seventeen' is the category you're looking at - oh, because you were expecting college. If you've got most of an American high school education you can become an omniglot for free and then see if you can get work teaching people to read, or you can study a bit and do my job, or you can see about being a janitor or something for a while, there's always a market for those. If you wanted to go to college, we don't cover things in exactly the same order so there's not a specific category of program that'll fit that exact slot but you can probably find four years worth of classes at the right level for you for free."

"And I guess 'for free' is the thing rather than 'with a stipend' because I don't need to eat or anything? Does not eating do anything?"

"It makes you hungry. You'd know better than me what being hungry is like for you. You just get hungry and don't stop being hungry until you eat."

"Does it... stop getting worse at any point in there, or do you just get hungrier and hungrier forever?"

"Yeah, it basically stops - you don't really get more starving forever but you can get more annoyed about it, but just, like, emotionally, if you run out of patience. I suggest you also look for a community kitchen if you know how to cook, or try asking the Society for the Advancement of Human Potential for a grant. You just tell them when you died and what you did with your life and what you think you'd do differently if you had two thousand mira, and 'I really want to become highly educated and gain magic and work on saving people from bad afterlives and would be able to focus better if I could eat, I just died and obviously couldn't have planned for this or saved up' will go over pretty well."

"Huh, okay. I do know how to cook, though I'm not, like, great at it."

"I would also encourage you to make time to sleep if you're going to study. You don't have to do that either but it helps a lot."

"Does it keep helping right up to the point of sleeping a full eight hours every night, because that's just so much time and it would be disappointing if I couldn't cut it down."

"For a student, yeah. If you're doing something repetitive that's not about sort of - learning things or being clever, it's not important, take stims and stay up for a month straight if you want to spend that long playing Tetris or mopping floors."

"Ew. - you have Tetris here? Is it an import or did someone just clone it?"

"I dunno, I assume the second? Probably a physical copy of it wasn't worth including in anyone's backpack on a media run and we've got some real computer whizzes down here."

"Cool... can you quantify for me the risk of being kidnapped by demons?"

"Uh, maybe about one in a billion per person per year here, almost all people who were traveling in areas that aren't guarded against incoming teleportation, but it might be higher because people who do that kind of thing are also systematically less likely to be missed quickly if they disappear so if we're really pessimistic it's maybe like one in a hundred million per person per year."

"And those areas are presumably not where they build the schools and the community kitchens."

"Yeah, absolutely not. This area isn't safe, obviously, anyone can show up here."

"...great. Uh, can I apply to move to one of the others later once I know more or is my decision upon dying pretty permanent?"

"It’s not permanent but travel is expensive. For maximum option value I'd go to New Jerusalem for now and you can still apply to live here later but you could also live here and then leave if you want."

"Why is that maximum option value, does going to New Jerusalem now get subsidies that going later doesn't?"

"Yeah, it'll still be subsidized later but there are a few programs that skip out on worrying about incentives by just helping people who died in the last month or so."

"Worrying about incentives like people using it to pop back and forth on vacation?"

"Yeah, or if help is means-tested are we discouraging getting a job, or are we helping people avoid the consequences of their own bad planning, or whatever."

"Gotcha. Hm, and I basically don't have to worry about who speaks English?"

"You don't! It's awesome!"

"Okay. Is there more comprehensive literature on places to live and schools to attend that I could read while I'm here?"

"Try looking over thataway for maps and guidebooks and that way for school and job ads?" Gesture gesture. "There might or might not be much that's useful, it kinda depends on who's donated what lately."

"Great, thanks." Off she goes for school brochures et al.

The Viny Cliffs School of Ecology and Medicine seems to be looking for people who "already have a solid grounding in statistics, the theory of the evolution of species by natural selection, and the relationships of the elements to one another, as well as a passion for the life sciences" and is completely free to everyone who passes the entrance exam. Mesannepada College is also free and advertises courses in statistics, algebra, geometry, calculus, logic, history, music, dance, painting and cinematography. Bronze Heart School of the Mind and Soul, which offers a year of free classes to new arrivals and is fairly cheap thereafter, has math classes from prealgebra through the kind of math class someone getting a PhD might take, as well as classes on philosophy, history, ethics, education, monastic and eremitic traditions, psychology, comparative religions, neurology, and how social science research works.

There's also an ad for a job teaching people to read, and an ad for a job as a lab assistant, and an ad for a nursing job (people don't get sick but they can want to add wings and this benefits from professional assistance), and an ad for an opportunity to be interviewed about life on Earth as part of a research project. There seem to have maybe been others that have all disappeared into the hands of other new arrivals.

How would she go about sitting entrance exams? What kind of lab? How much of a commitment is the interview?

The interview would probably take a few hours. The lab does research on sea creatures. There are times and dates listed for people to show up to take exams, space limited but there seem to be opportunities about every week in some city or other. (There seem to be more entities than have left brochures here making use of the same exams.)

Are there animals native to these planes or are they all Earth imports at some remove?

The brochures do not actually say.

Anything in the way of exam prep to be had?

There's this tutoring service that left a brochure? It's not free but she can maybe afford it if she gets interviewed or definitely if she gets a grant.

Okay. She generally likes the sound of this place.

She goes back to the person. "If I put in an application to live here, but then I turn out to like the vibe in New Jerusalem while I'm waiting there, can I cancel and just live there?"

"Getting vetted doesn’t create any obligation on your part and if you don’t immediately start a crime spree in New Jerusalem or disappear and leave us no way to be sure it’s you, you can pretty much show up at your leisure. You can even concurrently apply here and to the Bastion."

"Does my application stay good if I get accepted in both places and start in one and want to move to the other?"

"Pretty much until you drop off the radar or make it clear we don’t want you. You could run into a weird edge case, maybe, but you’re not competing for limited space or anything. Do report it if and when you decide to move in so you can get your voter registration set up right."

"Of course. I would like to apply to reside here and in the Bastion but if it helps with the paperwork or anything I currently expect to live here for the next while."

"Great! I have forms for you; just bring them back here when you’re done." She adds some papers to a clipboard and offers it and a pen to Bella.

"Thanks." She will go off and get another cocoa and see what the forms want to know.

All fields are optional but she could be denied for insufficient specificity. They would like to know her name, date of death, date of birth, current/previous residence, Resident Identity number, SSN, PAN, New Jerusalem public library card number, Elysian ID number, last five employers, security clearances, parents, current phone number, previous phone number, or whatever she wants to put in this freeform field for other identifying information. They want to know if she has magic and if anyone will vouch for her and if she has a criminal record and if so what kind. They want to know if she has any notable achievements.

She has... some of this information. She never memorized her SSN, and she knows what day it was when the van hit her but isn't sure it didn't take her longer to die. Maybe her dead grandma would vouch, wherever she wound up??

It would take a very unusual person to have all of that information anyway. The form does not know where her dead grandma wound up.

Yeah, but if they have a database by name this is her name and the month and year of her death.

She goes and turns in the forms.

"Thanks! I'll page someone to come take you to New Jerusalem for now if you'd like, and let me just print up your receipt so you can check up on your application later."

"Thanks, you've been very helpful."

"That's my job." She hands over the receipt. "Well, I paged them but if you've got a last question or two there might be time for it."

"Hm - do dead people have hygiene needs similar to the living?"

"Yep. Less if you don’t eat or drink. Sorry it’s such a bargain bin afterlife."

"Oh, I mean, it's better than nothing, at least for the non-Hell end of things... what's the local currency and can you give me a loose idea of its buying power?"

"We use the mir but New Jerusalem uses the silver - it’s just called that, it’s not silver - anyway, a thousand mira will keep you comfortable for a year if you don’t want anything very expensive. I don’t remember the exchange rate."

Someone with cat ears and a tail walks up to them and says, "Someone wanted a ride?"

"If you're my escort to hang out in New Jerusalem while my residency applications are processed, yes."

"I am someone's ride to do that, anyway, and here you are." He holds out a hand.

Handhold.

Now they are in a field of mostly chickweed and crabgrass. There’s a truck stop nearby and a long highway leading in one direction to a very tall city.

"The city’s probably where you want to be and the buses going to it are free. It’s hard to show up closer than this, especially if you don’t live there."

"How often do the buses come?"

He checks a watch. He has several of them. "One’s coming in seventeen minutes."

"Okay, cool. Thanks for the ride."

"Any time." He disappears.

She sits on the ground by the bus stop. She's glad she's wearing clothes, but she doesn't have her writing implements on her, more's the pity.

A bus stops to invite her on.

"Hey. I assume there aren't a ton of lines here and this is definitely my bus?"

"Heading for the pearly gates," says the driver.

"Are there literal pearly gates?" She finds a seat.

"Sure are!"

Is there anyone else on the bus?

Yep. Lady obsessively checking her reflection in a handheld mirror like she doesn't believe what she sees, pair of people arguing about Spider-Man, shellshocked person staring at nothing, barefoot person apparently enjoying the scenery, man at the very back deep in prayer. No one is visibly older than forty.

Stands to reason, probably people who die of old age don't just be old forever or some responsible person would have promulgated a "leave a beautiful corpse" meme with more legs.

She waves at the barefoot scenery-enjoyer.

They wave back cheerfully.

She doesn't actually have anything she yearns to say to a random person so if they aren't going to start a conversation then she, too, will look at the scenery.

Fields. Low rolling grassy hills. Flowers. Occasional trees. Occasional farms and orchards that become more common as they get closer to the city. A huge glass and metal sculpture that might be some kind of icon.

An icon of what? Is it shaped like a person?

In a kind of semi-abstract way. Seems to be someone with a beard and an object that is probably supposed to be recognizable if you're familiar with the conventions according to which it has been stylized.

Maybe it's Jesus.

Ho hum. Does the bus even have like, the radio on.

It does not. It stops briefly at a truck stop, long enough for bathroom breaks or to explore the convenience store.

She doesn't have any money but she's curious what they've got in dead-people convenience stores, she'll swing through after she pees.

They have generic offbrand Pocky and sesame candy and tomato soup and some kind of flatbread that looks like if pizza and the abstract concept of grimdarkness had a baby, and things like mini packs of tissues and cleaning supplies and a selection of books that aren't in English and tiny notepads with comically oversized pens in the shape of cartoon characters.

Does the grimdark pizza have an ingredients list?

Is there a proprietor who might be receptive to a sob story?

It does have a proprietor, who can also translate the pizza's ingredients list from Basque. (It's some kind of vegan squid ink onion thing. The ink is conjured and was never associated with an actual squid.)

"Interesting, I wonder why squid ink would be more popular here... do you have a policy on freebies? I got hit by a van this morning and I usually process my, like, feelings, about things, such as being hit by vans, on paper, but while my jeans are here my backpack with all my notebooks isn't."

"...Yeah, okay," he says softly. "I'm sorry about the van."

"Thanks." She takes a notebook and a pen. "If an opportunity arises to pay you back I will."

"No need but thank you."

"Of course." She gets back on the bus before it leaves.

More rolling hills. More farms. Artichokes, garlic, apples, pears, apricots, few signs of any staple crops. The city draws ever closer and the bus eventually stops near a gate made out of one extremely giant pearl.

Wow. Pearls have never been her favorite gemstone and frankly in this application it looks like plastic to her but it's abstractly impressive!

The gatekeeper would like to offer her a map and the ability to speak all languages.

"Yes please!"

It's not translation; she now actually knows every language she can call to mind enough of a sample of. "And here is your map," the gatekeeper says in Numu. The map zooms in on things she looks at.

"Oh wow, that's so cool, I can't wait to learn magic."

The gatekeeper smiles at her and then waves her along and offers the same things to the next person.

She wants...

...a place to sit down that isn't a moving bus, so she can write.

She's in one of the newer districts, mostly tall skyscrapers. There are benches in that shaded sculpture garden over there.

Perfect.

She's fucking dead. She doesn't really approve of it. This would still have had all the cool parts in seventy years.

The sculptures have nothing to say about that.

As expected.

She studies her map.

Would she like to visit an information kiosk or a public park or a public library or a subway station or a church or a concert hall or...

Information kiosk sounds like a decent bet.

Couple blocks thataway. Manned by a person with purple horns.

"Hi. I got hit by a van this morning. Or possibly I lingered for a week in a coma, I don't know, can you tell me what day it is on Earth?"

This person can totally do that.

"Okay, so it was yesterday, I guess." Sigh. "I'm here for a little while waiting for my application to the Dead Republic to process. Do you want to pitch me on staying here or is that not your bag?"

"Uh, well, I mean, you can go wherever you want, it's not my job to tell you where to, uh, live, but New Jerusalem's cleaner and gets people who go in for the harps and hymns thing more. And it's, you know, small, less than a billion people, maybe more the size you're used to. The bizarre weirdoes here get crucified for Good Friday and the bizarre weirdoes in the Dead Republic are playing a semi-aquatic game of capture-the-flag that they started in 1980. I think New Jerusalem's cozy and I like the atmosphere but, like, maybe you won't."

"Huh, I was really expecting you to have more people here given how inclusive you sounded."

"Yeah, for almost all of human history the Bastion and its precursor states've been poaching our people as much as possible. Uh, this was not a nice place till Jesus came and dealt with the demons two thousand years ago and that didn't magically make there be infrastructure or anything. It's super easy to get to the Bastion from here, too. Getting easier to get from the Bastion or the Dead Republic to New Jerusalem, too, used to be you couldn't just pop up for free the day you died."

"Oh, I didn't realize this being a livable place was historically that recent."

"We're up and coming!"

"Congratulations. Is the Bastion nicer than it sounds? Being underground sounds kind of depressing and also like it might involve a lot of stairs."

"If your background is almost anywhere on Earth it might be the nicest place you've ever been but New Jerusalem and the Dead Republic both almost definitely would be too. There are stairs there but there are stairs here too and you don't have... arthritic knees, or whatever it was."

"I am as young as I look but I have dyspraxia. Also I was a middle class American."

"Maybe not, sometimes brain problems go away too. I think as a middle class American you'd find the Bastion cramped as hell but other than that it'd still be nice. I think. I only sort of keep up with America."

"I imagine it's difficult to get Earth news from here."

"Getting easier! The people doing book runs these days bring back tapes of 60 Minutes and that kind of thing."

"Do you know much about the Dead Republic, I'd like to hear more about what it's like from people who don't live there."

This person has maybe been waiting for an excuse. "They have seventeen different towns set aside for weird sex things, which is not just more than us, it's more per capita. They have this incredibly famous set of archery contests and every time they get together for those they have a huge song and dance contest to kick it off and it's, man, you've gotta picture the Olypmics crossed with Eurovision. And they've got - so when I went I heard about an argument between two factions of Valhalla enthusiasts about whether their Valhalla should allow the use of radioactive decay in rube goldberg machines that power ballistae, and I said I thought Valhalla was just for swords and hammers and I got an earful about why their entire category of factions broke with the people who stick to swords and hammers, and there are apparently at least three Valhallas for those people because they couldn't agree with each other about something else and I've been warned not to ask about the pig. So, uh, the Dead Republic is super weird."

Giggle. "I kind of like the sound of that, actually, like, I'm not any of those specific types of weird but it seems like it might bode well for people - doing well."

"Yeah, like, that's the kind of thing you can do there. It's just that you could instead spend all that time and effort solving ethics and rescuing people who ended up in worse afterlives and arguing about whether to destroy the Earth now that infant mortality has dropped."

"- I didn't realize that was a live debate. I had the impression that I could do that sort of thing, or at least learn skills appropriate to taking it up later, in the Republic?"

"I mean, you can. People do. I could just have said 'there are billions of people and every single one is as unique as their fingerprints'. But, like, New Jerusalem has less per-capita spending on entertainment."

"Gotcha. Thank you. Why... do people want to destroy the Earth."

"The bad afterlives are growing faster than the good ones. Lotta arguing about whether to step up the rescue missions or conquer someplace or release a genetically engineered super-plague to bring infant mortality back up or destroy the earth or try to make people more likely to go to good afterlives, only we're not really totally sure what causes that in the first place so it's not very easy to do anything about."

"Babies don't go to the bad ones?"

"They either all show up here or all show up either here or somewhere we haven't ever managed to find. Probably the first? The number of babies we know have ever fetched up here is on the low side for estimates of how many dead babies there've been through history - this is what I was talking about when I said the Bastion was systematically stealing our population for most of human history, and, like, good for them."

"So by stealing you mostly mean adopting?"

"Yep. They still do and so does the Dead Republic but, you know, so do we."

"Gotcha. Well, I have opinions but they're uninformed so I should go to dead people school for a while, I reckon."

"Yeah. The Dead Republic's an even better place to do that than here."

"That was my thinking. I wanna learn magic."

"Oh, you’ve gotta go on a waitlist for that. It’s not just a question of learning how, you’ve gotta get the power from somewhere."

"I did hear there was a waitlist but I admit I'm not clear on what the bottleneck is."

"The king can only bless people one at a time."

"...literally all magic powers come from, specifically, Jesus? Is that what you're telling me?"

"Welllllll... the way to get magic is to get it from someone who has it. And has enough oomph to pass it on. So that's Jesus, somebody Jesus gave powers to who's kinda hit-or-miss, somebody else Jesus gave powers to who charges up front and I think he creeps on female customers, and, uh, demons. Don't go to the demons. It's not worth it, I heard of a guy getting driven mad when he went to a demon for power."

"Where did Jesus get his powers?"

"Born with them."

"And that's literally the only time this has ever happened?"

He makes an expression that's sort of a cross between a grimace and a sheepish smile. "Well, um. So. Well. So if any other demons have any other half-human bastards they haven't gone and conquered any planes and made themselves famous."

"Oh, is that where he came from. They tell a pretty different story Earthside."

"They sure do. I mean, I can't prove there's not a god whose only son has the kind of powers demons have and not some totally different kind of powers and who also doesn't do anything. There's no proof but it's pretty obvious?"

"Well, it's good of him to distribute them some, at least. I do plan to get on a waiting list. Is there a way to jump the queue?"

"Yeah, sometimes, if it seems like it’d be particularly useful for you specifically to have magic sooner rather than later. If you’re a random teenager it probably won’t seem like that."

"I guess that's not unreasonable."

"So you're not planning on staying long enough I should help you apply for housing, yeah?"

"I think I'm only here for a few days, so someplace to take naps and grab snacks and use a public bathroom of some kind will do me."

"Hm. Do you snore?"

"How would I know?"

"If you've ever had a roommate complain, I guess. You could try a library, they often won't complain if you nap in between books if you're quiet, but if you snore that won't work. If you've got a snack budget you don't really have to sleep tonight, get yourself some coffee and have fun."

"I don't have a budget, I was sort of hoping for some kind of soup kitchen or event-with-pizza-at-it."

"Uh... people at my dance club bring snacks to share and the admission fee’s not really enforced, come find out if you’re still dyspraxic?"

"Huh, I might not be? Sure, sounds fun."

He can provide her with the address and the time, a few hours from now.

"Thanks." Does her snazzy map make finding that easy?

He can point to it on her snazzy map, even, which probably makes it trivial.

"Thanks, you've been very helpful. Anything else someone in town for just a couple days must see?"

"Well, that depends! What do you like?"

"Nerdy stuff but in a march of human progress way rather than a Dungeons and Dragons way?"

"Museum of Vaccine History? Unveiled Cathedral? Or just enjoy our libraries, they're great and they're free."

"I do like a library." Where is the nearest one, Snazzy Map?

Couple blocks thataway and on the third floor of a building. It's just a little one, but it's the closest.

It'll get her started, she can't read a big library in a few days. "See you at the dance club."

Off she goes.

The library has one big picture window and a big bright chandelier over its central table. The walls are all warm colors with delicate gold detailing. There are science and engineering books, books on philosophy, ethnographies, travelogues, some miscellaneous nonfiction on other topics, and a collection of fiction in an assortment of languages and genres; and besides that there's a shelf of tapes and DVDs and a computer for using the internet.

She is going to skim the titles on the ethnographies and if nothing is very grabby she will check out the internet.

There’s one about an Iraqi village and one about an Arian congregation in New Jerusalem and one about high school in America and one about the Dragon’s Cave and one about transgender people who transitioned with help from this one clinic in the Dead Republic and one about a company town in the Midwest and on and on and on.

...okay she's actually going to read the one about high school in America so she can do some sort of conceptual algebra to figure out the audience.

The audience is not assumed to know what high school is like anywhere. The audience is not assumed to be familiar with typical American family structures. The audience is assumed to know some basic facts about Christianity and is assumed to have heard of Christmas, but is not assumed to already be familiar with typical American Christmas traditions.

It is an amusing read.

What is dead people internet like?

Relatively fast. The browser on the library computer opens to a search engine blatantly modeled on Google with a link to an encyclopedia which is not a wiki near the bottom of the page.

Aww, not a wiki, that's sad.

Is there anything good in the search results for, oh, how about "newbie's guide to being dead"?

There's a forum for that and three pages by approximately that name and ads for several books some of which are free online. There are several books each that assume the reader is from China or India and The Afterlives For Dummies, which she already got from the Dead Republic waiting area, and I Found Jesus (Right Where He Said He'd Be During Office Hours) which was just published this year.

...okay, she likes the title of the Jesus book and will go for that one.

It was written by a Wiccan and it's pretty focused on the religious implications of the things the writer found out after arriving here. It explains that Jesus definitely exists (the writer has met him) and he doesn't claim to be omnipotent or older than humanity but the Harrowing of Hell does seem pretty well-corroborated.

So one of the first things I wondered was how I got here without being a Christian. The answer is, we don't know. The best guess anyone has for who goes here is that it's somehow related to your personality. It might also be related to participation in rituals intended to cleanse or sanctify. There's been a lot of ink spilled on this topic and we're barely less in the dark about it than people on Earth.

Well, I figured I'd make the best of it. I wasn't as wronged by Christianity as some, and I figured, hey, at least Jesus is trying to do something about all the hells, and they're not his fault to begin with, so if I have to spend the rest of eternity singing his praises I can at least be a little genuine about it. You might be thinking the same thing. And if you're happy about that, don't let me stop you. But before you invest in harp lessons, you should know something very important: Christianity isn't true. Oh, sure, Jesus exists. He even really died for us. But lots of people have died for me who don't own my soul. If it wouldn't make any sense to say it about a firefighter, it probably doesn't make any sense to say it about Jesus.

If you look at the claims in the Nicene creed, they're mostly wrong. We don't know if there's one God. We don't have any reason to think Jesus is his son. We know Jesus isn't older than all worlds and that they weren't made through him. Arguably, "ascending" is exactly the wrong metaphor to use to describe how we get here.

(But if you were looking forward to the harps, nine of the gospel ensembles in town include harpists.)

They explain that there are Christians here, but the denominations are divided up differently: there are several sects that think this isn't the real heaven and the local Jesus is an impostor; there's a sect descended from the Cathars but which believes in the physical incarnation of Jesus; there's a wildly popular adoptionist sect with what the author says is absolutely kooky theology (the details of which are not included); there are some of the sects from modern Earth; and, of course, there are a lot of Arians. But the author ended up joining a coven, of which there are actually several around (the book includes addresses for the websites for three of them). The city has a large Jewish population, largely Karaite but the author can also provide addresses for Orthodox and Reform synagogues. There are several pages dedicated to interesting things about local Islamic theology, which has diverged considerably from Earth's sects. Mohammad lives on this plane, although not in this city. But it gets weirder than that. There are Greek mystery cults and dozens of other pagan faiths - not revived or reconstructed, so, in some sense, more authentic than the Earth versions, but still very different from the historical versions from having spent so long changing and adapting to new circumstances. In some cases their gods turned out to be demons and in some of those cases they've schismed based on whether they believe their real gods are out there somewhere; in other cases they have no more evidence for their gods than they did back on Earth. There's been some very interesting drama from some of the older groups meeting their modern counterparts in the past few decades. When they even have modern counterparts, which some of them don't.

So what should you expect from Jesus? You don't even have to think about him if you don't want to. He's like a president except there aren't election ads: he won't necessarily notice you as an individual. And he's probably not reading your mind even when he is paying attention, he probably can't do that. In theory he's an absolute monarch; in practice he's kind of busy and not good at governance and areas elect leaders that answer to him when he bothers to have opinions. He does teach part-time at one of the universities (all his lectures are available online, along with the full text of all seventy-three of his books; the main benefit of enrolling in his classes is getting to talk to him during office hours).

The type of thing that Jesus is is... unclear. He says he's never actually met his father. It's possible he's the same kind of thing as the demons in some of the hells, or half that kind of thing, but it's just a guess. The theological implications are underwhelming, and more damning for Christianity than for most other religions. Don't expect the writer to convert any time soon.

What kinds of opinions has he historically had at these elected leaders, Internet? Actually, does this internet only serve NJ or does it reach to the other habitable afterlives somehow?

They've all got separate internets, though people regularly carry backpacks full of thumb drives between them.

He’s taken issue with people he’s accused of corruption, mostly. The accusations don’t happen to all be against his political enemies or anything.

An anti-corruption king presiding over a largely democratic federation seems okay. She's still gonna go do her education in the Republic but now feels more open to the monarchy-of-Jesus deal.

What does the NJ internet have to say about the Bastion?

Would she like the encyclopedia article, the latest batch of media imports, the tag on an online newspaper for news about it, the official New Jerusalm internet presence of the Bastion's government, ten years of back issues of this newspaper from the Bastion (last updated two months ago but due to add another chunk soon), a page about this style of fashion named after it, this website that sells tour packages, or one of these forum threads?

Official internet presence sounds like a good place to start with more tabs containing a tour package and a forum thread and a newspaper back issue.

The official website explains the tiered system of rights they use and the color-coded jewelry for indicating which tier someone is in. (People who aren't allowed to be there at all, people who need someone to babysit them, people who are allowed to live and work basically unsupervised, and people who've been vetted for specific sorts of high-trust jobs. People in the latter two categories can also apply for a license to vote.) They've got an overview of their laws and customs (it's an extremely oversimplified summary; they don’t like rape or vandalism or battery or inciting crime and you need a license to start a business and there are very high taxes) and a form on the website to apply to visit or move there. (This is redundant with the forms she's already filled out as long as she checked the little tickybox to opt in to also being considered for the Bastion in case they want her.) There's also a list of links to recent press releases (various people commend various other people for progress on issues that have names and sometimes acronyms! this accident that left three people crushed for three days was unacceptable and measures will be taken to keep it from happening again! this place is changing its laws to allow the sale of alcohol!), though the list was last updated three weeks ago, and a list of individual states and a little information about each, and a list of places to visit, and a link to the same tour site as she's already found.

This tour package links to another site for help with the bureaucracy to request permission to visit but if she has that she can get this extremely expensive tour where she can see the meadows and this city famous for its theater scene and this other city with famous architecture. Or this even more extremely expensive tour where she can see the meadows and one of those cities and this medieval reenactment village and this place with extremely famous mead and this totally different place with totally different famous architecture and this light show and this very extra bonsai garden.

This forum thread manages to contain an argument about whether the Bastion's school system is evil or just has high expectations, an argument about whether the Bastion should provide people with free food, an argument about whether people who get sorted there in the first place are better people than people who get sorted elsewhere, and an argument about whether this acronym is this other acronym or this obvious jargon. They're interleaved with each other. It's not a spectacularly clear reading experience but it is oddly civil.

This newspaper back issue contains a couple of news stories about Earth (there's an article about infant and early child mortality in South America and an article about French politics) and something about a new book coming out soon and an op-ed about relations with New Jerusalem and an article on domestic poverty and an article on doorknobs (they seem to have a big fandom in the Bastion) and an article on new laws about recently invented pollutants and an article about someone who got convicted of rape.

What is the argument that the school system is evil? Also, what are the stereotypes of people who get sorted various places, that seems worth knowing.

The school system is too coercive, takes too much time, is too strict, punishes failure too harshly, isn't up on the latest advancements in pedagogy, charges too much, charges the wrong people, should teach critical thinking, is teaching too much critical thinking, has been infiltrated by the Neo-Redwood school of pedagogy which will convince the youth to support Inspirationism, is actually the exact opposite of Inspirationist and only a moron would think otherwise, teaches rhetoric poorly, teaches logic poorly, teaches math poorly, honors adoptive parents' claims on their children's time too much, assigns repetitive homework, fails to prepare students for independence by providing too much structure and too little opportunity to practice meaningful decisionmaking, encourages people to echo things they were told instead of forming detailed models of the world, primarily serves to teach people not to rock the boat, and has had a handful of sex abuse scandals recently.

People go to nice afterlives because they're nice people. People go to nice afterlives because they're bad people. People become nice people because they go to nice afterlives. People who go to the Bastion are the nicest. People who go to New Jerusalem are the nicest. People who go to the Dead Republic are weird. There are billions of people in the Dead Republic and calling them weird is obviously silly. People in the Bastion are boring. People in New Jerusalem are mostly devout. People in general are mostly devout, what hyper-modern atheist bubble must you live in to come up with that as a stereotype. People in New Jerusalem are the most likely to be masochists. People in the Dead Republic are the most likely to be masochists. The Dead Republic has the best sex workers. The Dead Republic is a decadent den of debauchery. Actually the best people in the world get sorted into this one very bad afterlife that exists solely to make sure that good people can't continue to exist and improve the world. Actually that's insane. Actually you get into New Jerusalem by being Shinto. Actually Brahmins go to New Jerusalem. Actually people go to New Jerusalem for being naive.

Wow.

Is it time to go see if she's still dyspraxic?

It will be by the time she gets there!

Off she goes. She makes a mental note to find out what an Inspirationist is later.

They meet in a nice room with kind of smooth wooden flooring. The person at the door babysitting the sign-in sheet remarks on Bella being new.

"I died today. Somebody said I could find out if I was still dyspraxic here?"

"Well, you can dance and see how it goes. Don't expect to suddenly know how, even if you're suddenly capable of learning you'll still have to actually learn."

"If I don't fall over more than once, I'm much improved, I assure you."

"Well, you have fun finding out!"

"I will, I've always vaguely wished I could dance!"

So. Can she dance.

If she can she might find out fairly quickly. They start the night off with an easy line dance, just some grape vines and knee bends, and some people do watch the person next to them for a reminder of what they're doing.

She isn't steady, and she's not graceful, but she doesn't fall down!

The next one is done in trios and they pause to go over it for anyone who hasn't danced it recently. The footwork is mildly complicated and very fast and there are arm movements and parts where one person at a time does something different from the other two. Several people decide to sit it out and pick at the refreshments.

Too ambitious for her. What's there to be refreshed with?

Little glass bottles of milk soda and cartons of apple-peach juice, cubes of watermelon and cantaloupe, some kind of gummy nut thing, shrimp chips (flavored with shrimp powder), mushroom cookies (just shaped like mushrooms), and hummus with vegetable sticks. There's an adjacent restroom for handwashing if necessary.

Lovely! She will take a watermelon cube and try the chips - oh yum, she likes these actually - and dip some celery and then nurse a carton of juice, as long as nobody is looking at her like she's being rude.

Someone else who’s sitting this dance out asks if she’s new in town. He doesn’t seem to think her snack choices are notable.

"I died today if that's what you mean, I'm only in town for a few days while my application to the Dead Republic is processed."

"Oh, how’d you pick them?"

"I landed there and haven't seen a particularly strong argument in favor of their competitors, mostly. I'd probably have stayed here if I landed here."

"And yet here you are."

"Yeah, apparently this is the holding area for people the Republic is vetting. They apparently sometimes have demon incursions, I don't blame them for wanting to look me up."

"Yeah. I wish they’d retire and take up painting, kidnapping people can’t even be that fun, can it?"

"I guess maybe it can if you're a demon! Are there like, any of them in jail that people can talk to and research?"

"Ehhh... not in jail but people talk to them for international relations stuff sometimes."

"Whoa, diplomat demons. Are there like, recordings of those meetings or anything?"

"I think so."

"Cool. I mean, probably awful on the object level, but fascinating."

"Better than when we can’t get them to the table, I think."

"I'd certainly hope so. I'll have to look that up, maybe after this."

"You planning on going into foreign relations someday?"

"Maybe! I don't think I'm a diplomat but I'd at least be interested in looking into the strategy involved."

"Cool! I avoid that side of things, personally, I do research into soul annihilation."

"Is that a thing?"

"Not yet! But it might be useful to be able to kill demons."

"I guess, if they're hard to hold prisoner."

"Almost impossible."

"Figures."

"But hey, there’s dancing."

"Yeah." She polishes off her juice in time to join the next one.

This one’s done in couples. He invites her to dance it with him.

Sure! Whee!

He has practice guiding new dancers and does his best to help.

There’s a twirl.

Can she twirl? She has NEVER been able to twirl.

With no practice? Probably not. She can probably avoid falling in the attempt, and her dance partner offers to show her how after this dance.

Not falling is good enough. Dance dance dance!

There’s another complicated line dance and another simple line dance and a very stately dance where people pretty much just walk around so slowly she might have been able to do it before. There’s something where people improvise. There are five dances where people swap partners. By the end of the night three people have told her she’s welcome to come back, one has suggested a class, and one has sympathetically said that he too spent fifteen years paralyzed from the neck down and had some adjusting to do afterward.

"I wasn't even paralyzed, just dyspraxic! But it's so nice to be able to dance now." She'll have another go at the snack table.

Whoever brought the shrimp chips seems to have underestimated how popular they would be.

Alas. She'll try some of the other stuff too.

And then she will... go back to the library. She got pretty much left alone the entire time, can she nap there if she finds an out of the way spot?

The librarian doesn’t preemptively wake her before anyone complains but after about an hour someone does complain that the muttering is driving them crazy so the librarian wakes her and asks if she knows how to apply for public housing.

"I've got an application in for the Dead Republic and assumed I wouldn't be here long enough for that to make sense, am I wrong?"

"Oh, probably you’re right, unless they turn you down. You know, I remember when I first came here, I didn’t know how anything worked and I was absolutely terrified and lost. How about I help you get yourself something caffeinated, it won’t do you any harm to pull an all-nighter now."

"I'd kind of like to be pretty awake when get to the Dead Republic and need to look for a place to live there."

"There’s a hotel a few blocks closer to the city center, or when my shift is over I can invite you to my place if you'd like."

"Haven't got any money. When's your shift over?"

"A couple hours from now."

"Okay, I can sit up till then if you're offering me a couch, I appreciate it."

"We’ve all been there. Have you been able to find the information you need?"

"I think so but I don't know if there's anything I'm missing."

"Understandable. If you have any questions, I might be able to help."

"I think my next order of business is going to be looking up recordings or transcripts of diplomatic meetings with demons but if I come up with anything I can't dead-people-Google I'll let you know, thanks. I'm Bella."

"Agnieszka."

"Agny-esh-ka?"

"Yeah, it’s Polish."

"It's pretty."

She smiles. "Thank you!"

She will go back to the computer and try to find diplomatic talks with demons.

There are articles about agreements with the dragon; about talks between the governments of New Jerusalem, the Dead Republic and the Kingdom of Ultimate Beauty (on a plane colloquially called the lowest hell); about diplomacy in general and what it’s like; and about whether demons are ever worth talking to.

She'll look at a couple of the articles on whether demons are worth talking to and one on the agreements with the dragon.

The dragon doesn’t want to lose its favorite toys but has agreed that when it gets someone new they can offer its least favorite the chance to emigrate and that they can install amenities that might tempt people who like the idea of being eaten to move there.

Some people are concerned about demons optimizing their words to cause problems and having no genuine common ground with any humans except the desire to see other humans suffer. The jury’s still out on whether all demons are actually like that and it’d be unfortunate to give up powerful potential allies because of racism.

Do... some people like the idea of being eaten and move in with the dragon?

Some people on the internet think the idea is hot, or weird in an interesting way, or very noble, or more than one of those. Fewer like it enough to want to leave wherever they are now and move to a sad cave ruled by an inhuman tyrant.

Super valid of them not to want to do that.

Is there a, like, canonical or representative example of a conversation with a demon she can read?

There’s a documentary that includes an interview. They also sometimes publish books, if she’s just looking for examples of them saying things - not very many even relative to their population but there’s a book-length poem about the desirability of suffering and something like a romance novel and a book about how cool books are.

A demon wrote a book about how cool books are? She'll check that out.

Books let you communicate with people asynchronously and they're free of the constraints of memorized works so they can be exactly what the writer thought was most correct instead of something that rhymes or has assonance or is the right length and they can be less repetitive and you can work on them a little at a time and you don't have to worry about losing your train of thought. If you write a book, no one will ever ask you to back up and repeat yourself because they forgot to listen. They happen at a speed of the reader's choosing. They are so cool. You can even skin someone repeatedly and then use their skin to write things they hate, which is like torturing people into saying things they hate, but also different. (There's an excessive amount of comparing and contrasting of these things.)

Wow, she doesn't know why she expected better but at least she did her due diligence. Is there any suggestion about.... why... the author likes the torturing thing.

Well, they're not super clear on this point, because that isn't what the book is about, but in their digression about torture they mention things like driving people to despair and watching people react to overwhelming sensations.

Is this just like the evil opposite of limerence or something...?

What is the breakdown of souls landing in each place?

The internet is not really sure. There are dozens of worlds and most of them really suck, and they don't necessarily all share statistics with each other. Reliable enough birth and death records to know how many people aren't accounted for are very new. New Jerusalem's plane gets the very young and not a lot of others; Elysium, home to the Bastion of Peace, seems to be the most populous single plane but a lot of that has to be immigration; the Dead Republic also gets a lot of people. Of known adult deaths in 2002, which is a year there's decent data for, about a quarter and about fourteen percent went to the Bastion and the Republic and about one and a half percent to New Jerusalem. There are worlds where double-digit numbers of people are known to have wound up immediately after death (there's one that gets called Heaven sometimes, just to add a little more confusion to the mix, and some people have also moved there). Some of these planes are big enough that there might just be other people very, very far away. (Some are not.) And then there are the ones that don't share their census data with the New Jerusalem internet, if they have it.

Do they get data out of rescues?

Yep! But those people tend not to have been in any position to take censuses, so they only have estimates that might be off in either direction.

So does this end up looking like most adults go to the bad place(s)? Shiiiit.

Depending on whether she counts, say, authoritarian countries with corporal punishment that aren't trying to maximize human misery as among the bad places... yeah. If she googles the answer to this question she may also find some examples of arguments about destroying the Earth.

It sounds so much more reasonable now but still the sort of thing where if you're like "hm maybe we should destroy the Earth" you should recheck your work until it outputs something else. Still, so much more reasonable with this context.

Agnieszka's shift ends.

Bella goes home with her.

The place is mostly blue with gold accents. The couch is just a regular couch, not a sofabed, but it's really remarkably soft; it's right under an interior window that looks out on the hallway, and a few feet from one arm of it there's an exterior wall with a window that looks out on the city. Agnieszka's going to make curry and offers to make extra if Bella wants any.

"I don't know how much I like curry, so maybe not a whole double batch, but I'd love to try it."

Then she can try a little curry. With cheese in it.

"Huh, this is interesting, thank you." She doesn't like it that much but it's okay.

"You're welcome! Sweet dreams," she says, heading for her bedroom.

"Thank you. G'night."

And she flops on the couch and sleeps.

Agnieszka will still be in her bedroom a normal-sleep-duration later.

Then Bella will quietly look for a way to leave a thank-you note, and then if she can do that she'll let herself out.

There’s a fridge-mounted whiteboard that says "endive carrot fruit cheese" and is mostly empty.

(Whenever she next checks the status of her application she’s been approved.)

Oh good, where does she go to be collected back to the Republic?

It’s a bit of a hike out of the city. There's a little park with a ring of tallish flowers surrounding a neat circle of low ground cover whence someone can take her to an area designed very similarly to the one where she first appeared when she died.

She will go be in the flower circle, and start trying to figure out lodging in which to be dead.

There are apartments that let you move in first and pay later if you can describe a plausible strategy for becoming able to pay, produce references, or otherwise demonstrate that you’re basically okay as a person. There are campgrounds she could stay at. There are apartments that offer discounts to people who really really credibly demonstrate that they’re likely to do socially valuable things later. There are people with couches who want to meet new people and keep up with the modern era. There are people looking for live-in servants. There are assorted historical reenactment villages with openings.

Maybe she will live in a historical reenactment village in fifty years. How does one demonstrate that they're likely to do socially valuable things later?

Having done them on Earth, having committed resources to trying to do them on Earth, having agreed to some kind of contract obliging service later... or other things, they can be flexible.

She's a high schooler! Can she book an interview and hope sheer enthusiasm will carry the day?

She can have an interview just in case.

Is that right away or in the future?

They can fit it in today but not instantly.

Today not instantly is fine. She'll sort through couch offers in the meantime trying to find someone who will find her satisfactory and be okay to room with, in case she can't get a social-value apartment.

Does she like the man with two wives and four adopted kids? The lesbian separatist commune? The single academic who lives alone with his library? The extremely chill person with wings who lives with a wolfdog on a ranch?

The academic sounds great actually!

His place isn’t very far from her other appointment. He’s got a tiny sunroom that’s like an inflated window seat, with cushioned benches along three all-glass walls; it’s surrounded by enough trees to not be super exposed.

Nice. Does she just show up, or make a phone call, or...

She can borrow one of this huge collection of phones to call him.

Ring ring.

"Hello, who’s calling please?" he answers in Sumerian because that’s the language he was just listening to music in.

Trippy. "Hi, my name is Bella and I'm calling about your offer to host recently dead people and be caught up on current events."

"Hi, Bella, it’s nice to meet you. Where’d you come from and are you used to books?"

"I came from Washington State in the USA and I love books."

He switches to American English. "In a dog-earring them and refusing to put them down for dinner way or in a reverent and careful way?"

"Depends on the book. I'm not going to dog-ear your books."

Sigh. "I suppose that's adequate. You should have received an ID number when your application was approved and I'll need that so I can confirm that you're not likely to do anything worse than exist while thinking it's sometimes okay to mistreat some books."

Seems like probably not the time to get into a spirited argument about the sacredness of $1 SF paperbacks. She reads off her number.

He confirms he has it right and types something and waits a moment and then confirms which reception area she's in and tells her to meet him at the east gate of it in half an hour.

She will be there.

And he can take her to his place, about half of which is a library, and give her a tour and time to set down any luggage she may have magically acquired in the last few minutes. Her interview will be a few blocks thataway.

Thataway she goes when the time comes, having spent the intervening moments looking at the titles of his books.

The interviewer has a neat minimalist office and looks like an unmodified human. She greets Bella warmly and invites her to have a seat.