There happens to be an afterlife, high-tech and very pleasant, and those in charge don't particularly care about what kind of person you used to be. What's more, the afterlife is a real place with a distinct location, and once discovered by the living, it becomes a ripe target for invasion.
"Mount Vernon was the same, except for the lack of the slaves and the fancy aluminum siding. What I didn't anticipate was that our current President -- the truest leader of the human species -- would be sitting on the front lawn, smoking what looked like a big pipe full of ditch weed.
"The afterlife has days and years, and it enjoys complicated seasons, including an election season where souls complained and threw punches before voting for whoever deserved obscurity the least.
"When he was alive, our President was a Chinese peasant.
"A fat fraction of the afterlife used to be Chinese peasants.
"'Sit, GW. Sit,' he said."
Robert Reed is the author of hundreds of published stories, plus a respectable number of novels too. Awarded a Hugo Award for his novella, "A Billion Eves," Reed lives and works in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Genre: Science Fiction
"Mount Vernon was the same, except for the lack of the slaves and the fancy aluminum siding. What I didn't anticipate was that our current President -- the truest leader of the human species -- would be sitting on the front lawn, smoking what looked like a big pipe full of ditch weed.
"The afterlife has days and years, and it enjoys complicated seasons, including an election season where souls complained and threw punches before voting for whoever deserved obscurity the least.
"When he was alive, our President was a Chinese peasant.
"A fat fraction of the afterlife used to be Chinese peasants.
"'Sit, GW. Sit,' he said."
Robert Reed is the author of hundreds of published stories, plus a respectable number of novels too. Awarded a Hugo Award for his novella, "A Billion Eves," Reed lives and works in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Robert Reed's GW In the Afterlife