"Let's cut the small talk. What are you selling?"

"Not really selling, but it's something you might like. Look inside."

"What is this? Some kind of wellness thing?"

"Until we get marketing on it, right now it's a personal heaven. That stuff there, in the tube? Five-nines-pure ionised gold pearl."

"You still haven't answered my question."

"Let me get to it. My team branched off one of the big quantum-hardware firms at Changi a year ago, led by one of their top engineers. Cool guy, did some good work with entangled consciousness for the Vatican's Office of Quantum Theology."

"OQT work? You mean that Dead Sea thing?"

"The gate to heaven, yeah. Though we're required to call it the singularity. The cardinals are right in that the worthy are entangled beyond the event horizon, incarnating there when they die. What they're not saying, in their press releases at least, is that we know it's not infinite -- and the number of Christians is growing."

"I see. You sure this isn't some kind of magnetic bracelet thing?"

"I told you I'll get to it. See, that's the end-of-life problem: increasing mass and constant volume equals increasing entropy, unless the lambda's hiding within our instruments' tolerances. At this rate, the gate'll reach Planck temperature in a few thousand years. Our team's solution has been to miniaturise the physics behind it, leaving just enough information to entangle a single soul. This brings us to our prototype."

"Go on."

"The glass vial in the centre contains the required gold pearl-ether mix, sparked on both ends by miniature cyclotrons. The rest of the donut is essentially magnets and shielding. And that little shining ball floating between the prongs is a tiny slice of heaven, keyed to the soul of yours truly."

"So you go in there when you die?"

"Exactly."

"I still don't see how that helps."

"It's insurance, so to speak. Heaven is finite, which means it's only going to get more and more crowded with time. Not the most comfortable of places, right? Think of the informational decay! However, if your entangled place beyond the gate could be induced elsewhere in, say, a manipulable handheld atmasystem, that effectively reduces your chances of ending up in the real thing, wouldn't it?"

"So that'd be like, a fifty-fifty split?"

"Not if you key more. With the facilities we're partnering with, we hope to get costs as low as five digits for a nine-out-of-ten shot at eternity -- still a hundred times cheaper than what the Vatican's offering with their error-correction services, mind you. We're targeting high net-worth Christians with loose wallets, lots of sin, and just enough conscience to feel it. Even minus the overhead, five-to-ten clients are all we need to be set for life."

"I'm still not convinced. Where do I come into this?"

"The thing is, we're barely out of alpha. We've managed to get this thing to run on batteries, but it isn't supposed to leave the office. I'm risking my neck here to ask for help."

"Okay, but you owe me my next drink."

"You work with thermal physics, right?"

"Sure."

"Tell me: if we've shrunk heaven down to the bare minimum -- why is the device still so damn hot?"