She endured darkness for a hundred thousand years before the light appeared, then fell through luminous nothing for another hundred thousand until the world coalesced around her and she found herself in the garden.

Huge trees draped with vines soared skywards, vividly coloured flowers burst forth between tangled stems – and everywhere, the creak and acrid stink of growing vegetation. She walked for centuries along green paths, through foliage kept in order by unseen hands, in an empty world.

Her memory was a shattered mirror, shards flashing in and out of focus but cohering slowly, until she began to remember who she was, or had been: her life, and death.

Heaven, she thought, and marvelled at the paucity of design – the monotonous, fractal trees, the homogenous blue sky that never yielded to night – before realising that this must be a minimal sandbox environment in which she might be held for subjective millennia.

Is it possible to die of boredom when one is already dead? she thought, helplessly.