A Man For Every Purpose is a fiction book about a man who fragments when he is not able to deal with some of the problems in his life. It is told from the point of view of that character. One of my motivations in writing this tale is to show that true and moral fantasy has more to do with human perceptions than with magical events. Nothing impossible occurs in this novel but the telling of the possible events twists them and colors them in strange ways.

Excerpt:

I opened the door and saw what what had recently been a young woman lying on a stainless steel table. . .
By mistake I had walked into a cleaning room used by the operations people of my company. . .
And it was my company in a substantial sense. An employee I was, but also a founder and the largest stockholder. It was something to be proud of. Once I’d been a professor of philosophy at a small college and then I’d been unemployed and then I had wandered the city at night with some crazy missionaries and then I’d helped them to make something of themselves. . .

When I’d ﬁrst come into contact with them, they’d been no more than a band of do-gooders rushing around hectically to make sure that those who died poor would receive some Christian’s idea of a decent burial. From such impoverished circumstances had I managed to organize them to do something worthwhile. Now, we have given the world a better way of caring for beloved ones whose metabolic systems have ground to a halt. Yes, with the help of those crazy Christian missionaries, I’d founded a magniﬁcent corporation providing innovative services, modern services in great demand by people of all races and creeds, providing those services on all continents of the world but Antarctica.

We provide immortality to our clients.

Few there are who do not know that now there is a practical way to achieve immortality. And we sell a more practical form of immortality than that peddled for centuries by Christian evangelists. More limited in some sense, but more achievable, more imaginable, by members of a species of hairless apes in trousers. It is far better to have a limited but attainable form of immortality rather than vague promises of an immortality in some place called Heaven where. . .

Once did I consider the Christian idea of Heaven to be desirable though I didn’t believe in it after my adolescent years, after my mind had matured. Belief was not necessary, because the Christian idea of Heaven was not the sort of place a philosopher could accept.

And who would really want to live in Heaven anyway? For life without end or for a timeless instant we call eternity?

Not that the bad part is life without end, by some deﬁnition. No. Emphatically “No!!”. The bad part is that we would have to spend that life in God’s presence doing what He wants us to do. And there is little evidence in the Bible or the writing of saints in various traditions that God wants us to be building water slides and roller-coasters. He seems to much prefer churches and church social halls. My mother and father both acted as if they believed God would rather have us at a church picnic rather than heading for Acapulco. As if he He would rather have us gathering on our front-porches and singing vulgar folk-music rather than sitting in front of our TVs to watch videos of teenaged girls dressed to. . .

Isn’t it funny that so many respected corporations make so much money ﬂaming the ﬁres of illicit desires when we punish so brutally the wretched creatures who act out the implications of those videos or the catalogs ﬁlled with thirteen year-olds posed as if they were streetwalkers desperate for a customer?
Where was I?

Oh yes, I was talking about the wonders that can be brought about by the entrepreneurial spirit. And what greater wonder is there than the provision of a prolonged existence, maybe even billions of years if one is lucky. If the earth and sun remain intact. If no barbarian invader gets it into his head that it is sacrilege to. . .
I never thought of that danger before. Must make a note to mention it at the next insurance committee meeting.
Did I mention that I’m an honored and powerful member of the Board of Directors of a company that has popped into the Fortune 500 just three years after being founded? I sit on the science sub-committee, a very important group in a company that spends so much on research. I also sit on the insurance committee. . .

Did I already mention that?