At 2 a.m. Walkeden waited, cold and wet, at the back door of The Pearly Gate for his patron’s arrival. Fresh sleep and icy rain had filled him with second thoughts, though it was far too late to back out. Still, one thought troubled him.
He knew why the ASAA prohibited unpleasant afterlives. The lawyers for the plaintiff in the Supreme Court decision, a deeply Catholic individual who has been horrified to find that his wife had chosen a particularly sensual afterlife for herself featuring multiple s****l partners, had made much of the fact that the simulated persona of a living person had never been successfully transferred into an engineered afterlife. The simulation always crashed, as though some essential bit of code were missing.
The plaintiff’s lawyers had noted that many religious
