I immediately popped back into existence. It wasn’t particularly painful like you’d imagine FREAKING DEPARTING FROM THE WORLD to be, it was just a really weird feeling. It was like hearing a story from a friend and suddenly remembering an event that had totally disappeared from your memory, but all at once.

“What did you do to me?” I asked. “Essentially I moved you from one universe into a different one where you’ve read Edwin Abbott’s ‘Flatland’.” “You moved me into an entirely different UNIVERSE in order to read me a book!? ...That’s awesome! Dude, dude! Move me into a universe where I’m you and I’ll already know all this stuff and then I’ll move us into a universe where we can choose which universes we are experiencing at any given moment and then we can both be trying Chick-Fil-A for the first time at every moment for the rest of our lives!

The man god in white rolled his eyes at me. “First off, I kind of cheated by moving you between universes while you still have a human brain. The human brain is absolutely not designed to experience multiple timelines at once. There’s a reason that you humans have to be birthed through a temporal world first.” “Ok, first?” I responded, but he cut me off. “And secondly, that’s a terrible idea. You should have picked a universe where for every moment of your life you experiencing Chick-Fil-A for the first time AS BATMAN.”

I began making bowing motions and decided that this was a man I would listen to in the future. “And yes, I did indeed say birthing between worlds. Eternity will always inevitably become either Heaven or Hell depending on the person. You humans don’t usually understand the nature of timelessness and lack of entropy very well.

“When there’s no time it’s not as if you continue on in the same manner you did when you lived inside of the time domain. Think about memories. You experience an event and then later your brain recreates whatever relevant bits of the sense perceptions you attempt to call up. But you’re not truly reexperiencing those sense perceptions, you’re focusing on particular pieces of those sensations not the entire experience, and those memories will change over time as you coat and recoat certain myelin sheath paths and leave others uncoated, vulnerable to being overwritten by something you read in a book once or saw on TV. More importantly, you’re using processing capability to view those previous bits of sense perceptions.

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At a fundamental level you aren’t fully experiencing the past or the present when you’re doing this. You are generally playing a longer and longer game of telephone with yourself. Feeling at a recreation of a sight experience built from your hearing from yourself of a story you’ve told many times. And that’s the memory; when you’re focusing on the memory, the current input data from the world is slipping unexamined into your memory without ever having been viewed by your conscious mind. You’re then losing or misplacing bits of your experience of the world.

At a fundamental programming level you are absolutely never having to truly ‘do two things at once’.”

“...”

“Without time, every single thing that happens to you is currently and will forever be happening to you.”

“Forever.”

“It’s not a memory. Because there is no time it’s a present experience.”

“So everything you do, you’ll be doing forever. The entire experience of timelessness is inherently additive.”

“That’s why the Big ONE is such a stickler about the absolute purity thing.”

“Wait, you mean God?”

“Yep. The Programmer. The origin of information. The creator of the code. THEY... Well, I guess THEY more often self-identify as a He in your particular bit of the code.”

“He - although, honestly, there are plenty of worlds with one or three or thirty biologically differentiated outlines – and you guys got really weird about that whole thing. Have you never considered how brilliant a system of differentiated outlines is?” “Ok wait, but God?” “Right. If you hurt someone on your planet fully inside of the time domain, you can reexperience the traumatic event, and it can even sometimes wind up shaping an entire life. Well imagine how much stronger that effect would be if you lived long enough to have millions of those events?”

“I mean, just the infinity of stubbed toes alone.”

“Ok, I see that I'm boring you. Well, to bring it all back around, you’re in Purgatory.”