Chapter 1 – Sudden Death
So, I died.
I am just a manager umm a senior manager at a consulting firm with a few team members working with me. It’s a comfortable life with a nice enough paycheck funding a spacious apartment in this one of the most expensive cities in the world. It’s a cosmopolitan set up with global theme with all kinds of restaurants and cafes and high rises surrounded by greenery. It’s a decent albeit ordinary life with next performance appraisal and bonus being the biggest of worries.
Today is a brilliant day. I got a promotion at the age of 30, which is not extraordinary but a happy event for me, nonetheless. I am running to catch my MRT with multiple celebratory thoughts running in my head and a skip in my step. MRT is due in 3 mins, and I am wondering if I should get off at a station near the restaurant, I love for a takeaway before heading home. Suddenly I feel a push and next thing I know is I am falling with the train right in my view, heading straight towards me.
What are my last thoughts like – nothing. Utter shock leading to a blank and a curse “who the hell pushed me” ending in a complete silence. In the stillness, I try to gauge if I am dead or alive. Can I feel? Yes. Though to my surprise there is no pain just a calmness as if I am in an out of body experience rpg game. Can I touch? No. where are my hands? Or for that matter my legs? Can I see? No eyes but I can sense that everything around me is white. Its whiter than the white I have ever seen. It’s not a fog, though. It’s like the white you see when you enter a government office where the white lights have recently been replaced and are shining at their brightest, making everything seem gloomy and washed out.
Suddenly I hear a ‘GONG.’
I can hear yay! Does this mean I have ears? I don’t have any way of figuring that out since there is no sense of touch. I think I am dead.
Next thing I know I am in a miles long line. The person in front of me is in a daze and like a broken record keeps repeating “No No No Truck kun…..Nooooo.” It makes me think that we are all dead here and waiting for the next steps. Either we are going to be evaluated for our sins and sent to hell (if hell and heaven are true) or we are waiting to be sent to our rebirth (being a Buddhist and an Asian, I firmly believe in Samsara). Time for the mystery behind the ‘life after death’ or ‘afterlife’ to be unveiled. I feel a sense of curiosity, though it’s not like I can update my status on social media and share with millions for my post to go viral. Sigh!
Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!
There is this very annoying sound of Gong that keeps going on at the speed of multiple times per second. Every time it feels as if it’s the call of doomsday and is judging me. I still haven’t been able to figure out where its coming from. For most of my life I have been complimented for my analytical mind, which means I have keen observational skills supplemented by my calm nature allowing me to process information in a methodical way, more so than others. I try to calm myself by pretending as if I am taking a deep breath (I already know that I am not breathing at this point) as I don’t seem to have a body at all and I am not sure if I am a soul or in a spirit form.
I sense some people in black robes in this same white space, but I can’t determine what their purpose is or if they are any different. A while must have passed since I sense myself at the front of the line I was in and whoosh, suddenly I am sitting in my favorite café, where I have had hundreds, if not thousands of morning coffee, with a hot cup of coffee in front of me and the delicious aroma is enticing enough for me to momentarily forget about almost everything else that has been going on. As I pick up the cup and take a sip, which to my surprise I am physically able to, I notice a man in formal suit with a tie and a woman in a professional attire sitting opposite me at the same table.
Man, smirks at my surprise and says “this is just a simulation to make you feel comfortable. None of this is real.”
Woman coughs as if to interrupt this useless banter and asks, “If you were given a choice, what would you like your next life to be like?”
I was taken aback but try to use the universal consulting skill of buying myself a few minutes by using my coffee as an excuse. “I would like to be smart and skilled in my next life so that I can be rich and powerful.” I am not any otaku, but I do know my manga and anime’s, so I tried to cover all bases, not knowing if I am going to end up in a fantasy world, cultivation world or a regular earth. Can’t go wrong with being intelligent and skilled, rest can always follow. I wanted to add luck but who knows how that might turn out, after all there is no free lunch in this world.
Before I could say anything else, I realized that I had finished off my coffee, woman smiled, and everything started distorting and the GONG sounded – Oh! So that’s what it is, I thought. I tried to scream as if to ask something else, but I seem to have fallen into the same white space of silence and stillness.