Anton Kupka made his way through a poorly lighted hallway that looked more like a tunnel to him. There were no windows, no natural light, only evenly-spaced light bulbs, which made soft, humming noises. It felt as if he’d been walking forever. He’d forgotten how his journey started and had no idea where it’d lead him. All he could do was to put one foot in front of the other. He wondered about his lack of memories. Maybe this was a dream? A dream in which he was dreaming another dream. He was naked. That was something Anton remembered from nightmares in which he left for work without first putting on his pants, walked the streets and made a fool of himself for every passerby. He remembered other dreams as well — swimming in a dark cave while being chased by aquatic dinosaurs was always a favourite one — but nothing about his actual life.

The end of the tunnel was sudden. Without transition, Kupka was standing in a palatial room with a large window looking out over hanging gardens sprinkled with fountains and waterfalls. On each side of the window stood giant statues of manticore-like beasts. The view was so overwhelming that he’d overlooked the young woman behind the desk. She was a slender, auburn-skinned beauty with long, raven hair, dark eyes, and perfect teeth. She waved her right hand over the desktop, which lit up immediately. Texts and colourful charts scrolled over the screen from right to left

‘Welcome, Anton,’ she said after a glance at the information at her fingertips.

‘Well, this dream just got a whole lot better,’ Anton said. ‘Where am I, young lady?’

‘This is the anteroom of the hereafter,’ she answered. ‘Please, have a seat.’

‘Ah, right, because I’m dead, aren’t I?’ he assumed, playing along with his dream.

‘Yep,’ she said, ‘Attempting the Tortin ski run at Verbier wasn’t your brightest idea.’

‘I’ve been skiing since I was four. I’ve done all the hardest black runs in Austria, France, and Switzerland,’ the man boasted. ‘I can handle them.’

‘Until you couldn’t,’ the woman said. ‘You didn’t turn quick enough at one of the moguls, lost your balance, and went straight into a tree. Of course, you didn’t wear a helmet. They had to scrape your face off the bark. I’ve got pictures too if you’re interested.’

Kupka was silent for a moment.

‘If I’m dead, why isn’t there a queue here?’ he challenged the woman. ‘Every minute, dozens of people die on Earth. I was alone in the tunnel, and I appear to be your only customer here. Where are all the other dead?’

He threw her a self-satisfied look and confidently sat down in the seat offered to him — not his best move as he was seated lower than she and, consequently, had to look up to face her.

‘You’ve only just arrived here and, you’re already mansplaining to me how the hereafter works? Really?’ she smiled at him. ‘Do you absolutely want to do this?’

‘Young lady, there’s no hereafter,’ Kupka retorted. ‘You’re a figment of my imagination. A beautiful figment, I’ll grant you that, but a figment nevertheless.’

She stood up, reached over her desk, and flicked his nose with her long, red-lacquered fingernail. Anton yelled in surprise and grasped at his nose with both hands.

‘How about that?’ she asked him. ‘Real enough for you?’

‘So, you are Saint Peter?’ Anton asked, rubbing his nose while eyeing her warily. ‘You’re nothing like I imagined him.’

‘Yeah, I get that a lot from white guys like you,’ she mocked him. ‘Even the unbelievers — and you are an unbeliever, aren’t you? — think they should be talking to an old guy with a beard and a huge key dangling from his belt. You probably think God’s a man as well?’

‘Well, to be honest, I didn’t think there was a god,’ Anton admitted sheepishly.

‘No, because you’re a scientist, right? And science and religion don’t play well together,’ she said, looking at her desktop. ‘Ah, here we have it. Physicist. Worked at CERN. Participated in experiments with the Large Hadron Collider. Didn’t you find the God Particle there?’

‘That was just a figure of speech,’ Anton protested. ‘The journos love that kind of thing. Give them a choice between ‘Higgs Boson’ and ‘God Particle’, and that’s what you get. Fucktards.’

‘I was just getting your goat,’ the woman laughed. ‘You guys were still twenty-five layers away from the most fundamental particles in existence. You’d need the energy of a galaxy to smash atoms to their tiniest bits. They’re such sticky bastards. Scientists still have a long way to go before they can see God’s hand.’

‘So, of course, God exists, and I’ve been wrong all my life,’ Anton concluded, comically spreading his arms in a gesture of defeat.

‘Is everything black or white with you?’ the woman asked.

‘It seems pretty binary, doesn’t it?’ Anton replied. ‘God either exists, or He does not. Unless He’s Schrödinger’s cat and He’s a bit alive and a bit… not, at the same time.’

‘There we go with the “He” again,’ she reprimanded him.

‘Listen, either talk sense to me or else wake me up. This is getting tiresome,’ Kupka grumbled.

‘You’re a physicist. You should have figured it out. Just do the maths,’ she challenged him.

‘It’s because I’m a physicist that I don’t believe in God,’ he took the bait. ‘Everything that happened since the second picosecond of the Big Bang can be explained by science without invoking divine intervention. All this drivel about “if only one of the cosmological constants were just a teeny-weeny bit off, then stars, planets, and life wouldn’t exist, and thus God made them as they are because He wanted to create Man,” is bollocks that inverses causes and consequences. We exist because we happen to live in a universe with those kinds of constants. Not the other way round.’

‘That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say since you arrived,’ she told him.

That shut Anton up. He’d fully expected her to demolish his argument and come up with irrefutable proof of God’s existence. He wanted to jump up and do a victory lap.

‘You mentioned Schrödinger,’ she reminded him. ‘He proved that God does exist.’

‘He did no such thing!’ Anton exclaimed.

‘Yes, he did,’ the woman said, ‘but the scientific community — and maybe Schrödinger himself — missed the point he was making when he called attention to the fact that Quantum Theory is a train wreck unless one accepts the existence of a multiverse, an infinite number of parallel universes.’

‘All right, I’ll bite,’ Kupka decided. ‘Tell me how parallel universes prove the existence of God.’

The woman’s eyes lit up. This was much more fun than when deeply religious types showed up. Those people usually saw all their pious convictions vindicated by her mere existence and considered it their god-given right to walk into the kingdom of heavens no questions asked.

‘When a physicist is working out a mathematical model to explain the behaviour of a particular aspect of sub-atomic reality, what’s the worst thing that can happen?’ she asked Kupka.

Anton just stared at her. There was so much that could go wrong. He’d once worked on a model for months, only to realise that he’d made a stupid, fatal mistake in its second line, and all his work had been for nought. He kept his silence.

‘Come on,’ the woman encouraged him, ‘work with me here.’

‘We don’t like it when the only way to make a model work is to propose values equal to infinity for certain parameters or variables,’ Anton finally offered. ‘That systematically opens the door to some bizarre shit.’

‘Right on the money!’ the woman approved. ‘Humans can’t get their head around the concept of infinity, and, nevertheless, infinity is a key component of reality. One of your colleagues’ theories about multiverses is that everything that can happen will happen. Each time reality reaches a decision node, all possible outcomes — an infinite number of them, in fact — actually come true and give birth to an infinite number of new parallel universes. That process is repeated over and over again. It means that even a single occurrence of some “bizarre shit” will, in turn, become common in an infinite number of universes.’

‘Hold your horses, young lady,’ Kupka warned. ‘Not every “decision node” has an infinite number of possible outcomes. I’d say that, most of the time, the number of options is pretty limited as all of them need to obey the laws of physics. I can’t decide to sprout wings and fly away or turn somebody I dislike into a pebble, can I?’

‘Ah, and that’s exactly where you are wrong,’ she pounced. ‘There is an infinitesimal probability that you could do those things, and therefore there is an infinite number of universes where people can sprout wings at will or turn their enemies into pebbles. All you can say is that it probably hasn’t happened yet in your universe.’

‘I see where you’re going with this,’ he said. ‘It means there’s an infinite number of universes where God or Gods exist and an infinite number where He or They do not.’

‘Exactly, you’re catching on quickly,’ she praised him. ‘Every thinkable and unthinkable God or set of Gods exists in an infinite number of universes. Your dear laws of physics exist in an infinite number of variations. Atheists are right in an infinite number of universes and so are theists. There is no right or wrong side of the argument when all sides happen to be true simultaneously in—‘

‘An infinite number of universes. Yeah, I get it,’ Kupka completed her sentence.

He was reduced to silence. The woman’s reasoning made perfect sense, although it shattered the worldview he’d held for most of his adult life. It took some adjustment to embrace this new truth. The question remained: If God existed in this universe, why was there so much misery in the world? Probably, it was Kupka’s bad luck to live in a universe with a psycho god who got off on people’s hardship. That didn’t bode well for the kind of afterlife such a god would provide to his subjects.

‘Penny for your thoughts?’ the woman interrupted his reveries.

‘What’s God like?’ Anton asked, bracing himself for her answer.

To his surprise, the woman began to laugh out loud.

‘There’s no god in this universe,’ she chortled.

‘What?’

‘There’s no god in this universe,’ she repeated, tears of glee trickling from both her eyes. ‘There’s only an afterlife. You should see the faces of all the zealots when they realise their God doesn’t exist! Priceless! Just like the face you’re making right now, by the way. You should be happy. You get all of the upsides with none of the downsides.’

‘Is the afterlife any good?’ Anton almost didn’t dare to ask.

‘It’s pretty okay, what I hear of it,’ she said with a shrug. ‘I never visit. I’m always sitting in this anteroom, waiting for suckers like you. Couldn’t really tell you for sure; it’s all hearsay.’

Anton stood up.

‘All right, that’s it,’ he said. ‘Enough of this nonsense. I’d like to wake up now.’

The medic of the Swiss rescue team turned over Anton Kupka’s body. It’d taken them three-quarters of an hour to get to his location since Kupka’s skiing buddy reached the end of the Tortin run and noticed his mate wasn’t with him anymore. Kupka had hit a tree frontally. His neck was broken, his thorax crushed, and his face caved in.

‘No pulse,’ the medic shouted to his two companions. ‘He’s a goner. Prepare the sledge; we’re taking him down with us. Call in to have his next of kin notified.’