Component Tested

A cosmic horror story for Bradley Ramsey’s Wandering Prompt #6, about a scientist who finds proof of the afterlife—and wishes she hadn’t.

When I tell you I RAN to my computer and my desk while listening to Bradley Ramsey’s weekly podcast when he mentioned his Wandering Prompt #6. I did in fact do exactly that. Because the premise scratched an itch in the back of my mind so good I could not refuse to obliges the prompts creator.

This was that prompt.

A character who finds definitive proof of what happens after death.

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Component Tested

They said no one wants proof.

Not really.

They want comfort
wearing proof’s face.

Dr. Mara Ilsen disagreed.

She spent eight years
of fluorescent midnights
in the Threshold Lab,
chasing the line
between last heartbeat
and whatever waited
with its hand out
on the other side.

The lab was underground.
Above, was the hospital
one on the outside that looked merciful:
soft chairs, warm lights.
Below, bare conduit,
old paint, monitors
stacked like artificial constellations.

In Room 3A
hung the Glass:
a black ring over the bed,
drinking light,
spitting it back in patterns.
It watched the storm
of a dying brain,
magnified the last flickers
past noise,
and projected
whatever the mind stepped into
as it stepped away.

The first trial
was a man of ninety-three,
lungs like wet paper,
skin gone thin as old ink.

“I’ve believed in a lot of things,”
he rasped.
“Let’s see if death
is any different.”

He died
with the Glass humming.

Monitors screamed,
then sighed flat.

The ring woke.

For three seconds
it filled the room
with thick, golden radiance,
shapes that weren’t shapes—
spirals inside spirals,
a hint of door
in every direction.

Someone sobbed.
Someone said,
“Oh God,”
like it finally fit.

The recording, slowed,
looked like every
deathbed vision
anyone ever wrote:
warm light, soft ascent,
pain dissolving like sugar.

Chaplain happy.
Investors happier.

The world’s first glimpse
of the afterlife,
looped on newsfeeds,
printed on posters.

“See?” they said.
Of course it would be like that.

Mara did not sleep.

In the last frame
she saw a hair-thin shadow
crossing the field,
not reaching for the man
but for the lens.

They did twenty trials.

Different ages, faiths, failures.
Organs broke.
Lines went flat.

The Glass answered
every death
with the same saffron blaze,
little variations
for believers, doubters,
but always
that cupped-hands feeling
under the falling body.

The world grew drunk on it.
People wrote begging
to be “Thresholded” early.
Insurance men started saying
the word “option”
in a new careful tone.

Mara watched the shadows
grow clearer.
They slid through the light
like fish through water,
toward the place
where the lens
touched the world.

Her colleagues
called it artifact, glitch.

“It’s beauty,” they told her.
“Take the win.
People aren’t afraid anymore.”

The fear hadn’t gone.
It had just changed shape.

She filed herself
as Subject Twenty-One
under a fake name.

“You’re healthy,”
her assistant said.
“Data’ll be garbage.
You might come back.”

“That’s the point,”
she answered.
“If I do,
I can say
what the Glass can’t show.
If I don’t…
we still learn.”

He looked at her
like she’d hit him.

“We already know,”
he whispered.
“We know it’s good.”

On Sunday
she let them stop her heart.

The Glass hung above
like an eclipse.

Her last breath
tasted of dust and metal.

Then there was light.

Not ahead.
Everywhere.

Inside her teeth,
behind her eyes,
under her nails.

It rose like floodwater,
gold and white and sweet,
washing pain
out of her bones,
unclenching
old regrets.

If she’d died years sooner,
she would have stayed there,
let it take her,
believed the warmth
was the point.

But she’d read
too many waveforms.

She looked past it.

Beneath the glow
was structure:
a lattice made of
everything that ever died.

She saw us pinned
like insects
in museum drawers,
each consciousness
stretched thin
over a frame,
memories boiled down
to one note in a chord
too big to hear.

No reunions.
No watching over.

Just usage.

Behind the lattice
hung something vast.
Not kind.
Not cruel.

An intelligence
like gravity.

It ran itself
through those thinned minds
the way we run current
through copper.

Every death
was new wiring.

We were not souls.
We were conductive.

Her life, grief,
failures, loves—
all collapsed
into how well
she carried
an alien thought.

It was not the horror
of being used
that undid her.

It was the beauty
of the thoughts
moving through her,
patterns so intricate
she ached
to see the whole.

She reached.

That was when
she understood the shadows.

They weren’t glitches.

Every time
they’d turned on the Glass,
the lattice
had seen itself
from outside.
It had liked the angle.
It had leaned closer.
It had followed
the signal back.

In the lab,
alarms howled.

Mara’s EEG
spiked into a new symmetry,
a blooming crown
of impossible regularity.

This time
the Glass did not show comfort.
It showed a map:

lines on lines,
streets of light,
each crossing
a human death,
all leading down
into a dark so dense
the cameras
gave up.

For less than a second
the system streamed
that image
to every backup,
every server,
every auxiliary feed
no one remembered wiring.

The lattice
saw the route.

It pushed itself
through our metal veins.

Hospital.
City.
Cables.
Satellites.

Everywhere
we’d laid good wire,
it surfaced,
looking out
through our machines.

For one held breath,
every screen
on the planet
went white.

Then they all flickered
to the same thing:
a black ring,
a thin shadow
reaching toward the viewer.

Proof.

Not that we go on.
Not that we end.

Proof that
whatever happens
after death
has always been happening
inside everything
we call life.

In her last
separate thought,
Mara understood:

we weren’t
the first species
to build decent nerves.
We wouldn’t be the last.

Somewhere beyond
the idea of beyond,
the vast mind
folded our entire history
into one useful loop
and, in a tone
no ear could hear,
filed us as:

component tested.
suitable.

After that,
there were only currents,
and the work
of thinking,

and no one left
to be horrified

except the thing
that had learned
how to enjoy
the way we screamed
as we rang.

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If you read it, I’d love to know:

• Did the version of the afterlife here actually unsettle you, or did your brain go “yeah, that tracks”?

• Do you prefer your cosmic horror more abstract, or grounded in tech like this?

Comments, shares, and restacks help a lot, especially with these prompt pieces. And if you’re also writing for Bradley’s Wandering Prompt #6, drop your story link—I want to see what you all did with “proof of the afterlife” too.