Death is an app. Before that, it was a commercial-free, 24-hour broadcast of the afterlife. Anyone who had died within the past decade showed up onscreen living a second episodic life in otherworld programming, with no memory of a previous existence. Ages changed; disfigurement was sometimes corrected. An alternate history was created for them while we yelled at the screen, “No! No! We’re here! You were here, too!”

There is no way to communicate with the afterlife or its producers. No one has been able to find the origin of the broadcast. It just inserted itself between channels one night during prime time.  

Religions around the world lost followers. There is little fear of dying now the mystery is solved. In death, you reincarnate into a new show and live forever in reruns. Life is residual. The iconography of religion transformed into something more down-to-earth: Heaven as drudgery and bureaucracy; angels without need for wings. Prayer is a text message sent into the void.

A loyal husband saw his wife in afterlife porn performing acts she would never have considered with him. The mixture of anger, jealousy and bitterness didn’t keep him from arousal.

A suicidal nineteen-year-old had her murdered boyfriend’s face tattooed on her forearm. She knew that people did that. It never works. Most tattoos don’t travel into the afterlife. Those that do appear as strange birthmarks—no one ever remembers. Nevertheless, she was determined, convinced of the indestructibility of true love. After death, she had the blemish removed by a cosmetic surgeon on the other side.

A murderer slowly went insane watching his victim flourish, more successful in the afterlife than in the one from which the killer removed him. The murderer still follows him around the screen as intently as a cat watches a bird.
 
Our departed live on, continually recast, never remembering this world or constructing stories about the end of their own. The dead only seem haunted when they look into the camera.