Author: Jatayu

It made headlines. It was the talk of social media for a week which is, like, forever.

“Someone came back!”

“Wait, what? When? Who?”

No one knew who and that was cause for amazement too; since World Citizenship came online there simply weren’t any unknowns left. It was crazy!

Okay, that’s enough exclamations. You get the picture. As the days went by the newsies sent out little tidbits of information about the man; he was a man, first of all, a survivor of the New York firestorm- that was last year, thus ancient history except to those of us who lost loved ones. My husband died there. They never identified his body, incinerated along with almost a million others. I missed him terribly…

This man, this survivor, was one of the lucky few to be sent to HEAVEN. No one had ever returned from there.

The consensus of opinion (in a world of anonymous news and photoshop facts are hard to come by) is that the Hospital of Emendation and Aceology Via Enthetic Neogenesis, located somewhere near Oslo was a Virtual Eden which only accepted members of the platinum class and above who had suffered catastrophic destruction, uploading their personalities into a perfect virtual world while trying to salvage whatever was left.

Less than 1% of these patients were saved and none of them had chosen to return to the flesh.

Of course the other 98% of humanity, like me and my poor Bill, could never afford such things. Since Automation, most of us could barely survive. We live our lives and die our deaths and try to find happiness in between. But sometimes we get lucky…

Today someone knocked on my door. Today I found out who had come back.

He was surrounded by bright lights, cameras, and reporters but I only had eyes for my dear, my beloved Bill. I fell into his arms crying. I asked him, holding tight,

“What happened?”

He answered in his quiet way,

“They picked up the wrong guy. When they realized the mistake, they said I could stay, said they had a ‘moral obligation ‘ but I couldn’t stay.”

I thought of the long odds that had brought my heart back to me. I thought of miracles and sobbed,

“You were in Heaven my darling. Why did you leave?”

He looked at me with a love deep as oceans and smiled.

“Because you weren’t there.”