I sat in a hospital bed rereading the pamphlet they gave me. "Cryogenic Hibernation for Terminal Patients" was the title of the pamphlet, and the first few pages tried to take the edge off of the fact that they couldn't cure me. They talked about how medical science was advancing, and maybe someday, if nuclear war or man's greed didn't destroy all of civilization, maybe then they could save me in the future. For now, they were pretty sure that cryogenic freezing would keep me safe--but the only way to find out was to try.

It sounded like a bad bet to me, but it was free, and I didn't have anyone to live for. If worst came to worst and they failed to freeze me, failed to thaw me, or just ran out of money to keep the freezer running, well, all that would happen is I'd die peacefully in my sleep.

I looked out the window. There was a crowd outside the hospital; some kind of religious protest. It didn't make sense to me, but as numb as I was with drugs and my own impending doom, most things didn't make sense to me. Still, when a nurse rapped on my door and interrupted my moping, I must admit I was feeling clearer-headed than I had been in a while.

"Sir..." she didn't open the door all the way. "A man is here. He says he is your minister."

I didn't HAVE a minister, or priest, or church, or religion. For a moment, I had a brief but intense flare of anger in me, and after a moment, I smiled to the nurse and said, "Sure. Can I have a minute alone with him?"

The man who walked in had very severe eyes, but everything else about him seemed peaceful. I didn't know what he was expecting, but I decided the last thing I needed as I went off towards my death was to be dishonest about my feelings. So, after the door closed but before he had a chance to speak, I began.

"You know," I said, "I hate the church."

He seemed ready to say something, but to his credit, gave me room to speak.

"There is a lot of good that it does," I said, "Giving hope, spreading community, giving people the strength to keep going. But they couldn't survive as a secular institution, could they? They depend too much on this doctrine of faith, believe that people should ignore the truth and just hope that someone--not real people, but gods--will save them."

I gestured at the window and the people outside. "Look at the protesters, worried I guess about the souls of people like me, right? Except that the problem here is this: you define 'soul' to mean something other than me. If I were to say that I am my soul, you wouldn't understand. You wouldn't understand that when I needed people, that was my soul needing people. That when I needed help, it was my soul needing help." I pointed at his prayer book. "It doesn't matter whether the soul continues after death. I became what I am now during my life. It was that part of my life where I needed to be saved. The rest of eternity, after I die, I will be what I am at the time of my death. I will be a person who needed saving and was never saved. Coming in at the end to say a few words is you lying to yourself."

"God will watch over you," he said, and I thought his words held a mix of anger and pain.

"Let's talk about gods for a minute." I leaned forward, the pain killers keeping the massive stabbing pain from derailing my speech. "If you tried to say that your god was only a spiritual being, then nobody could disprove that he existed. But you say he is a creator god, a physical god, and that is something that is not subtle. Your book says things that are easily disproven, and they have been. So the fact that you wanted to make him seem better, more powerful, more important, all that does is show that it was a lie, and that keeps me from beliving that anything you say matters. You could have convinced me with a small lie. But a big lie, that is hard to convince people of. And since your religion has been saying it for millenia, you can't take it back now. So why bother? Why try to convince me?"

"What do you believe God is?" asked the priest.

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"No, let's talk about what a god should be," I argued in return. "A god--a real god who actually exists--need only be a leader. A spirit of great wisdom who can tell people what they need to hear, put them where they need to be, show them what they need to see, face them with problems they can solve. And one other thing a good leader does: they inspire other people to be great leaders. A leader isn't responsible for everything good that their people do. They make use of other leaders. That's how one god could guide billions of people, if there really were a god: by finding thousands, maybe millions of leaders, each of them guiding thousands of souls. Because if you take one person and say they are responsible for billions, even a god would be crushed by the weight of it."

"Your church is where it is because they believe in a myth, where one person saves the world and everyone else is just an insignificant player, a piece on the board." I reached over to the buttons by my bed and buzzed for the nurse. "I guess that's why priests like you get so mad when things don't go to plan. If the one person you believe in can't save the world, then there's no hope, right?"

The door cracked open and the nurse peered in. I held up a finger so she wouldn't leave and finished the thought, my anger finally winding down. "You really need to have more faith in people, Father. A good god would have told you that to start with. Only by giving people strength and hope while they still live can they possibly be happy in the afterlife." I nodded to the nurse. "Would you escort him out, please?"

The priest gave me a very dirty look and said quietly, "Whatever you may believe, God does have a plan for you." He turned to the door, without needing any coercion, but added as he left, "It may only be to serve as an example for others."

After the door closed, I huffed a gentle snort, then started coughing, each breath agony. When I recovered, I whispered to myself, "I hope so."

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Less than a day later, I was strapped to a table, ready to start the procedure. The painkillers were keeping me from paying too much attention, but I'd had the presence of mind to ask how many other people were getting the same treatment. "We only have one facility," a nurse told me, "But we have about a dozen people on the waiting list, and two more have gone before you. After that, assuming everything goes well, it's just about keeping everyone in storage."

I kind of regretted that I was too woozy to really take in my last moments awake. An IV was attached to my arm, currently full of saline but soon to be dripping in sleep juice. Only when I was out would the more advanced and, likely, disturbing parts of the hibernation process begin. So the last minutes of memories I'd have would be watching people get ready, but nothing would start until I was completely gone.

I think I might have mumbled to a nurse, "Take a video for me, for when I wake up," or something to that effect. But at that point the valve on my IV had flipped, and my eyes were getting heavier and heavier.

And then I woke up.

"To be fair," said a voice, "It's not so much that you woke up. This is more like a dream."

I drifted slightly ahead and to the left, nodding. "Yes, you could say that." I snapped back to where I'd been, suddenly, then forwards again. It felt quite a bit like having a really bad headache, if there was no such thing as pain.

"You people really don't know anything, do you?"

"Hm?" I bounced back and forth between going up and down for a moment. "If I didn't know, how would I know? You have to know to know that you know."

"Fair." The person who was sitting in front of me was looking ahead and to my right. He had no features, but I could see his mouth move, through his head. "You know you might be right about gods, right?"

"The world doesn't care what's right." My head swirled, and I am pretty sure I spun like a corkscrew as well, just... slower than my head was spinning. "People have to make the world change."

There was probably a long pause, but time didn't mean a lot to me under the circumstances. Another headache had me shrinking and growing in odd patterns.

"Would you?" He asked suddenly. "If you were a god?"

"Who cares?" My head really hurt, now. "You can't do anything to help."

"No." He looked at me. "But someone else might." After what was probably another pause, he asked again, "So would you?"

"Sure," I replied cheerfully, half convinced I was completely insane, and half too lost even to question it. "I'm good for it."

"I thought so."

The whole world shrank. I've had headaches like that before, but this time, it started to feel different, like not only was I receding into the distance, but someone had taken the opportunity to pull me out of my own head and stick me in a sack.

I'm honestly not sure whether or not it hurt, because parts of me seemed to disconnect, like a phone call to my body had lost connection in the middle of a conversation, and I never got to ask whether I was supposed to be upset or scared or not.

And I never woke up. Or rather, the person who woke up wasn't me.