Hello! How's 2015 so far? Hope you're happy now.
If you want to know what I've been thinking about lately, it is this:
Hell.
You know about Hell, right? That place where damned souls go to get tortured after their worldly death? People have written a lot about it during the course of human civilization, I think. In detail. Mostly it involves specific punishments (or penances, if the deity's a more forgiving sort) for specific transgressions.
Now, I'm not here to discuss all the variations of Hell humans have told each other about. That would take far more time and effort than I'm prepared to expend. No, I simply think I have an idea that might possibly be an improvement to Hell's function, if it were implemented.
Here's my idea: take Hell, whichever you prefer, and bind it in limited spacetime. More specifically, give those damned souls a queue. Make the damned wait for the previous damned to finish their Hellish experience before they get to go in. Why? Because queues suck.
That way, instead of a wide space with many districts designated to accommodate the damned's various treatments, we could simply have one room, just large enough for the currently ongoing procedure, and a very, very long corridor for the damned to queue in. Simpler. Cheaper. Nastier.
Just imagine for a bit. I'll use Dante's Purgatorio (alright, technically not Hell, but people are still being punished, so what the Purgatory) for this example, but you're welcome to substitute any sort of damnation here. Say the person before you is guilty of the deadly sin of sloth. The penance for slothfulness on Mount Purgatory is to run around at top speed while chanting examples of sloth and of zeal. So, before you get to do whatever it is you have to do because of your sins, you have to wait for that guy to finish running around and shouting. And that is only if you're first on the waiting list.
Oh, I just thought of another improvement. What if, before you're doing whatever it is you have to do, there's a sentencing? But, in the courtroom, there's only one objective judge holding all the evidence? No juror, no prosecutor, no defense attorney. The judge will have to look at every piece of evidence and veeeeeerrrrrrrrryy carefully determine what you'll be sentenced with. Imagine the length of the trial. That would make the queue a lot worse. Which is better, since we're talking about Hell. Heck, if the minister(s) of Hell know what they're doing, the system's probably in place already.
Because, while it probably could be made cheaper from an operational standpoint, why the Hell should Hell be efficient for the damned?
Thanks for reading. Comments are welcome, of course. Oh, and thanks to Mr. Neil Gaiman and his short story, Other People, which inspired this.
