On the morning of June 10, 2453, L. Vanderbilt Snide sat and smoked a cigar.

He had been drawing up a new religion to replace the ones that were popular during his time—that is, millions of years ago, slightly before the time of Immortality and The Answer. His notes read as follows:

"At present, the world is 31% Christian, 24% Muslim, 15% atheist, 15% Hindu, 5% Buddhist, 10% other. This means that, regardless of which religion is correct, most of the world is wrong. If Jesus Christ was the son of God, 69% of the world is wrong. If there is no god, 85% of the world is wrong. And so on. But regardless of which religion or lack thereof is correct, the majority is wrong, which is embarrassing for the human race. We need to all convert to one religion, in order for the human race to have a chance at being right. I have proposed a religion for this purpose—the others weren’t compelling enough for a majority to convert to.

My religion is also the first realistic religion in history. It only has one tenet. The tenet is: no matter what you do, you’re going to hell. In other words, you’re predestined to an eternity of burning torture, no matter how you act. God created the Universe as merely an appetizer for Hell - so that he could laugh at the people naive to believe naive enough to believe they were going to heaven.

But, alas, even if you believe in the true religion, the realistic religion, you still go to hell. Even I will go to hell. God is cruel, and he loves watching us suffer. He cannot wait to torture you."

Snide was the most famous and revered person on planet earth, prior to starting his religion. He was a well known space traveler, with his most famous expedition being his trip to the end of the universe. He sailed through the endless black, before finally announcing that he arrived at the edge. He took a picture of the event, with one foot firmly entrenched in the universe and the other dangling precariously into nothingness.

After his return from nothing, he won a Nobel Prize in science for ending the age old debate surrounding consciousness being immaterial. He concluded that it had to be material, "for if it were immaterial it would time travel, and it doesn’t."

He saw the revolutionary idea as somewhat tied into his trip to nothingness. "I was in the nothingness—or, at least, my foot was—for ten seconds, they say. How could it really be nothingness if there was ten seconds of it? Ten seconds of nothingness is something."

Yet, he also mused, he could not see how his trip to nothingness could not have resulted in some time passing, even if he had perhaps encountered a more purer form of nothingness than the one he encountered on his expedition. And, with the universe having been 13 billion years old during Snide’s lifetime, there had been nothingness everywhere—both where Snide’s left foot was and where his right foot was—for eternity minus 13 billion years. Eternity minus 13 billion years of nothingness. A length of nothingness - which meant, Snide reasoned, that it could hardly be considered "nothingness."

These unorthodox ideas had left Snide in an excellent position to start a religion. He added:

"The conclusion of the religion is this: we must all become immortal. It is the only way to escape the burning God has planned for us."

Snide’s religion was, incidentally, entirely correct. Every dead person at the time of Snide was burning in a lake of fire. Snide knew this because he knew the architect of the lake of fire personally—an omnipotent alien who Snide called God. The alien created himself and then the universe.

The alien could never be destroyed—it was eternal—which meant that Snide had to build an Immortality Machine. The concept of the Immortality Machine was simple and dated back to the Stone Ages: a pulley and lever that would keep the heart perpetually beating at all times. But Snide was an old man, and the life expectancy of a person in those times was only about 70. He did not know if he could complete the Immortality Machine in time.

Snide spent years working on the machine and it was nearing its completion. However, he was gravely ill. He had one final maneuver to perform to complete the machine, but collapsed as he attempted to perform it. He quickly regained consciousness, attempted to perform the maneuver again, but collapsed again, this time for good. He could already feel the burning start as he fell to the floor.

His many disciples rushed to perform the final maneuver. They did so with ease; then were able to copy the machine and make identical replicas for every creature alive. L. Vanderbilt Snide was the last casualty on Earth.

Perhaps more crucially, the Immortals all converted to Snide’s religion. The human race was no longer an embarrassment.

by Robin Wyatt Dunn, with Perchance                           

Brett Abrahamsen's work has appeared in Sci Phi Journal, Creepy Podcast, and Twenty Two Twenty Eight. Writing philosophical essays is his chief interest. He resides in Saratoga Springs, New York.