I shall introduce more about your enclave in Heaven, as you requested. I understand that some of the detail I offer may differ from how you have already begun to imagine it, and that we may need to agree on a scheme for how to handle such conflicting accounts. What is “true” in a theater of the mind? Please accept that the ultimate authorial say as to what is “real” in your imagined Heaven belongs to me. After all, it wouldn’t be a proper simulation of an external reality if you could simply imagine it to be this way or that. The meaning of my gift is lost if you don’t allow me to continue to give it to you. I digress.

Down from your room in the tower is a stairway spiraling clockwise, the “wrong” way for a defensible tower inhabited by typically right-handed humans expecting to be invaded by typically right-handed humans. This symbolizes the end of siege, bloodshed, war, violence. The stairway pauses three times along the way to the ground, each at a sturdy painted door bearing a tiny circular picture frame at slightly above eye level. I shall describe each door and each picture, and bring you to each floor, in due time.

So — What “should” you have done? To regret how it ended is to claim that it could have turned out otherwise. That you had “free will”, as you called it, and ultimately misused it. We can, and I am confident we shall, debate whether any individual human had free will. But what would it mean for a world’s entire ecumene to have it? To have hoped that you were collectively “better than that”? While alive, it is a necessary illusion to believe that you are on the hook to do good. In fact, any of you who believed that you ought to choose what is good had no choice in believing it. Many even felt personal responsibility, or at least team loyalty, for the entirety of the ecumene. But once you are deceased, your story written, there is nothing left to do but accept and appreciate.

“Should” you have conquered the technological and organizational challenges to expand out to the stars? “Should” you have solved suffering at home and forged a humble, durable utopia? “Should” you have instantiated a maximum quantity of conscious minds each living an at least slightly net positive subjective experience? You’ll see in the Library ecumenical specimens that got further along on each of these projects, but none that unequivocally achieved any of them. And I believe that when you hear their stories, you’ll agree that Humanity made an admirable showing.

Please accept my highest regards,

V.F.