“Is this Heaven?”

“Not yet!”

“But I’m definitely dead, though.”

“You were dead.  We fixed it.  Welcome to the year 26,538!  It’s a Tuesday.”

“Ah.”

“I can see that you need to process a little bit.  I’m a registered therapist and comfort biped, so you should pet me if you think that would help you feel a bit more grounded in the moment.  I can also answer your questions!”

“Um.  I’m not sure where to… Is it, um, is this more of a Star Trek situation or a Warhammer situation?”

“Oh, good start!  ‘Infinite diversity in infinite combinations’ is kind of our motto around here, actually.  Well, it’s my motto.  People have a lot of mottos.”

“So, uh.  The future is a nice place?”

“The future is every place!  Think of a bubble whooshing outwards from Earth, towards the stars but also in other directions.  Growing out through spaces like knowledge, and empathy, and art, and stuff you don’t even know about yet because they were so small when you were born.  Let it expand for a few tens of thousands of years, and that bubble gets bigger than anyone can imagine.  By now, a lot of stuff fits inside!”

“Even me, apparently.”

“Especially you!  It was really hard to make that bubble grow backwards in time, even a little bit, but we managed.”

“How.”

“Lots of math, probably!”

“Okay, why?”

“We missed you!”

“...have we met?”

“No, silly!  But we missed you.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Look, we’ve solved a lot of problems, like dying and getting old and being bored, but it’s not all bread and roses.  There’s stuff that’s still hard to figure out even when you have as many pocket universes full of supermassive black holes as you want.  And you saw things we never did, learned lessons we couldn’t.  And we felt that absence.  You were missed, Jeremy.”

“...oh.”

“You can still pet me if you like!”

“I had this… is he…?”

“Of course!  He’s right in the next room.  You didn’t think it was just humans being processed in here, did you?  And just between you and me, I think he might be an even gooder boy than I am.”