Five Idiots You Meet in Heaven

This last chapter is in italics. That makes it a little harder on the eyes, but it’s a short chapter so hopefully it won’t get too annoying.

Several decades after watching Joe bleed to death on the warehouse floor, Gonzalez was killed in a hovercar accident. The android paramedics that arrived on the scene tried desperately to flood his system with tissue-repairing nanobots, but Gonzalez knew it was no use. The end had come.

Of course, sometimes endings are actually beginnings in a certain way if you think about it. And Gonzalez’s death was exactly that sort of ending because it was also a beginning. The beginning of his journey in Heaven.

Gonzalez opened his eyes to find himself in the bleachers in a baseball stadium. And sitting beside him was a friend (casual acquaintance, really) that he hadn’t seen in many years, Old Joe the candyman, there to teach him the simple lessons that were the real and true meaning of his long and complicated life: that the power of love connects us all I guess, that you’re never alone even when you are, and that the truest secret of life is life itself or something.