Author: Don Nigroni

I’ve been a junior assistant to Professor Tommy Kelp for the past five years. He’s the mathematical physicist who’s world-famous for the Kelp equation. It has something to do with converting dark energy into dark matter and vice versa, more or less, I suspect less.

Regardless, yesterday, late at night, when we were all alone in the observatory, I asked him, “Sir, do you know what happens to us when we die?”

“Yes, I do,” he replied, “and so do you.”

“My mother died three years ago, sir.”

“Your mother passed away three years ago. I know. I’m sorry.”

“I dream she’s still alive two or three times a week. I’m convinced when I’m asleep that she somehow survived her cancer and got better and wants to know if I want a sandwich with potato chips and a glass of milk or if I’d like to play a board game. She loved playing board games and was awfully good at them.

It all seems so real until I awake and realize that it was all just a dream. Sometimes I even dream that I had dreamt she was still alive many times before but that this time she really was still alive. But she’s dead and has been for three years.”

“No, you were right that your mother is alive. But you’re dead and so am I. My article on this subject will be published tomorrow. You might not understand the higher math but you should read the abstract.”

“Sir.”

He replied, “Okay, the truth of the matter is that the real core world is surrounded by a ring of bubble universes. We all begin in the core world but, when we really die, we pass on into one of those bubble universes. That’s our fate and our destiny. Then, when we pass on from a bubble universe, we return to the core world, the really-real world.

You and I are presently in a bubble universe, in an afterlife. Your mother is now waiting for you in the core world. She really is alive, but you’re not. And, who knows, she may be dreaming of you and, in her dreams, you’re in the core world and playing backgammon with her.”