The Last Answer

The Last Answer is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the January 1980 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and reprinted in the collections The Winds of Change and Other Stories (1983), The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986), and Robot Dreams (1986).

In the story, an atheist physicist, Murray Templeton, dies of a heart attack and is greeted by a being of supposedly infinite knowledge. This being, referred to as the Voice, tells the physicist the nature of his life after death, as a nexus of electromagnetic forces. The Voice concludes that, while by all human ideas he most resembles God, he is contrary to any human conception of the being. The purpose of the Voice for intelligent life after death is for them to think for all eternity…