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Ascension: The Arcades of Heaven

Nuncio Aila walked the arcades of Heaven, contemplating life after death. In many ways, her existence was unchanged: she thought the same thoughts, inhabited the same apartment – recreated, she supposed, for her benefit – and even conversed with familiar people who, like her, had passed over. And yet, something was lost. Entropy was banished: nothing ever broke or wore away. Emotions were canalised along a middle road between distant extremes that were never approached.

Aila found she could think, but no longer feel. Dispassionately, she felt she ought to care about that, but without an affective spur to drive her, found she could not. She partook of the afterlife in contentment, at a ratio of one hundred heavenly days to one earth day, though to her temporally-calibrated self, they seemed of normal length.

It was only in bed at night that glimpses of the old life sometimes broke through, visceral shards of emotion, as she walked the line between waking and sleeping. And then, the dreaming would begin.

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