Literature / Sivad's Question

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Sivad's question is a short story written by gazemaize. It portrays an afterlife where it is always Monday, home to around one-seventh of everyone who has ever died. They could all leave for a shared paradise, as soon as they agree on the correct answer to a yes-or-no question posed by the avatar of the place. It's a shame that it looks like they'll never escape.

Sivad's question provides examples of:

• Afterlife Antechamber: The seven weekday afterlives all have a mechanism for everyone to permanently move on to the shared paradise, and five of them have been vacated and collapsed accordingly. This is a cold comfort for those who have been stuck in the remaining two for billions of years.
• invoked Death of the Author: Discussed, as it is one of the central problems posed by the question — does it refer to the intent of the author, the expected reaction of the reader or to something else altogether?
• Different for Everyone: Sivad appears in a unique form to every inhabitant of the afterlife. Since he can only be summoned when a person is alone in a room, vanishing if anyone tries to intrude on the conversation, it's impossible to verify anyone's claims of how "their" Sivad looks. Likewise, it's ambiguous whether his Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder or if he genuinely takes a different physical form depending on the summoner.
• Epileptic Trees: A common activity in-universe, by way of arguing for one or the other answer to the question.
• God of the Dead: Sivad serves something like this role. He's the only being in Mondays other than the dead, greets all newcomers on arrival, and presents them with the question which everyone must answer to escape into the shared paradise. The narrator also appears to say the alterations to new arrivals' minds and bodies — like perfect health, unlimited memory and physiological stasis — are done by Sivad. He can be summoned to answer questions, and is the only real source of information to the inhabitants of Mondays on the nature of their predicament, though there are many questions he won't answer.
• Healthy in Heaven: Downplayed. Everyone has a functionally healthy body in the afterlife, which is also immune to hunger, thirst or exhaustion. However, everyone looks approximately like they did on death, and the narrator mentions how an old woman who died of degenerative disease still had a very frail appearance.
• Offscreen Afterlife: The shared paradise is this. All we learn is it's a real place (and not, say, oblivion) that no one would ever want to leave.
• Only One Afterlife: Zig-zagged. Life after death consists of seven "afterlives" together with one shared, final paradise afterlife (reachable by escaping one of the other seven or by dying before the age of 16). All adults go to one of the seven afterlives, depending only on which day of the week they die on.
• Place Beyond Time: Averted, as it is always Monday in Mondays. The narrator stresses that the afterlife is not outside time, though certain writings from the 20th century were sent back in time to (at least) the death of the first human.
• Sdrawkcab Name: Sivad himself. The narrator never remarks on the significance of this fact.
• Time Abyss: By the time of the story, humanity has died out and the universe has progressed far into heat death. Everyone still in the afterlife has been there a long time.