R.,a sculptor, rode a shuttle bus to the afterlife. He had no baggage. That the destination was the afterlife was understood, a given. This fact R. couldn't have explained. He didn't have to. None of the others on the bus—it was loosely packed, perhaps a third of the seats full—challenged R.'s certainty. They knew as well.
The facility was large. At a glance, all he had time for, R. failed to see its limits. Wide glass doors slid open, and R. and his fellow-passengers moved inside as if swept, yet willingly. Once they were within, the whole matter of the bus seemed irretrievably distant. (Had a movie been playing on an overhead screen? Had R. slept? What caused him to pay so little notice to the scene outside the windows, the journey that had led him here, to the afterlife?) In fact, as R. milled about, he soon lost sight of the doors by which he'd entered.
The central room, if it could be called a room, was almost unimaginably vast. Atrium? That was a word R. knew. This wasn't an atrium, nor was it a hangar. The ceiling, though high, wasn't so high as that, or arched. Instead, it was a flat, bland grid, translucent panels concealing the source of light.
Despite the size, R. was almost immediately aware of the presence of side rooms. Continuing to be swept by the general imperative of motion that had guided their entry, he and the others from the bus—which, he'd begun to feel certain, was only the most recent—dispersed and explored. There was room enough. R. turned a corner into one of the side areas, one relatively unoccupied. Windowless and featureless, in other situations, it would have been a large room. It was small only in contrast to the larger area at R.'s back. There were at the start only three or four others here, others who, like R., kept moving, circulating across the endless floor, in some cases exchanging words. There seemed to be no prohibition on speech.
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