Eden

Twenty-Four

I think, and I decide that I must have been resurrected as some kind of standardized me. A me that is in some way the usual me, the me as I usually am, but made anew, made over, here.

The important bit, though, is it must be automatic. Or so I think. Because when I look at all the people in this marketplace, and then look at the city in front of me, and then remember the other people we walked past earlier in the fields, that's a lot of people. And when I think about how many people must kill themselves in a single day, all around the world, that must really be a lot of people.

Assuming I'm right that you end up here if you kill yourself. Assuming that.

But if I am, then with that many people arriving here, there must be some way to organise all of this so everything happens quickly and efficiently. There just has to be.

I mean, I can't imagine what machine or power or whatever did this to me, but whatever it is, surely it must just do it. Like on automatic settings, without really paying attention to each person. I mean, it has to, surely. It can't possibly be reset to different settings for each person's hair colour and eye colour and nose size, every time. Surely not.

So to resurrect all these people, or whatever it was that was done to us, there must be some kind of automatic setting, some standard design or plan or whatever that looks at how each person was when they were alive, and then just makes a whole new them.

There must be.

And that plan, or whatever it is, it must just know, in some complicated way, how I ought to look. And everyone else, too. On its own. It must know how we each see ourselves, and then it makes us that. That's what I think, anyway. I think that's what it must be, really, because that's the only way I can think of to organize all of this that really makes sense, without it all being far too much complicated work. So however this was done, and whoever it was done by, they must have been able to tell how I see myself, how I imagine myself to be, and then they just made me that.

I hope that's what they've done, anyway.

I hope it is. I wish I knew.