Harry Handelbar 
Rites of Rational Passage: Where camels bend, pi spins, and the hourglass forgets which way is down.
Heaven and hell are no different. Bliss and misery walk hand in hand and talk foot in mouth, without perspiring. No camps aim guns across the divide; only the still light of peace remains, imbibing. They sit on the same park bench and share a single pair of binoculars. Both look at entirely different horizons while claiming to see the exact same thing.
The reborn soul features three parts: the original soul, the souls of the three most admired, and the souls of the three most despised. In all cases, of course, the process retains only the ‘good’ in each to lay the groundwork for the next growth. All genetic quirks, however, both natured and nurtured, endure and influence the soul. The rest falls to that most quaint of constraints: the hourglass. It is a cosmic soup where your worst enemy’s secret punctuality might just mix with your hero’s tragic flaw. The universe simply loves a messy kitchen, stirring them all together.
The Babel-Gum Accord
The elders of Babel-Gum ratified this soul-merge algorithm on a day without date, during a meeting without minutes, around a rational-pi-shaped table. They argued for centuries—or perhaps twenty minutes, since time stays fluid without a calendar. They debated whether to filter out the existential dread or leave it in for flavor. In the end, the dread remained. Without it, they reasoned, nobody would ever bother getting out of bed to check the algorithm’s math.
They tracked the meeting room, which was also super-circular. The grooved table fit the space perfectly, causing the two to pair and the meeting to spin. All attendees wore musical devices that encouraged foot tapping. The soles of their feet tapped the moving floor and left distinct marks. At the meeting’s end, authorities analyzed the patterns, pended the patents, fringed the copyrights, and interested the bank balances. Here, bureaucratic systems constantly put the creative through her paces. There was no rest for the fickle muse. She had to dance to a rigid tempo just to keep her license to inspire.
The Weight of the Camel
Above the table hung the pendulum oracle of the camel and the needle. This proved once and for all that a small enough camel can fit through a large enough needle, provided he stays unburdened and she stays sharp. The pendulum swung in rhythm with the moving floor. It served as a heavy brass reminder that salvation is entirely a matter of proper scaling.
If the soul-merge protocol failed to balance the ratio of the admired to the despised, the camel would grow a third hump of pure ego. This expansion rendered transit impossible. But when the algorithm hit that sweet spot of perfect, self-correcting irony, the beast practically slid through the eye like buttered lightning. The elders watched the swinging brass, tapped their feet to the spinning floor, and signed the decree with invisible ink.
