“How did you find me?” Nathan asked.
“We Particularly Cynical Atheists have infiltrated all levels of government and administration and worked tirelessly trying to find someone who had never signed any contracts that could compromise his position with the cosmic bureaucrats. Dr. Vegatillius is, of course, a Particularly Cynical Atheist. That is why he never made you sign anything. It’s also the reason that he secured your body the second-to-last time that you died. Your bodies were very important for this. No one will believe a man with half his brain missing who says he’s died and come back. But with your bodies - your bodies are proof! There are two here and my agents have already collected the other two. They stand as definitive evidence that you have died repeatedly and come back to life, and are therefore qualified to speak about what lies beyond the pale curtain of death. You can tell everyone about the bureaucracy. Then my congregation will grow. We’ll be able to overcome the Atheist Absolutists, not to mention the United Atheist Confessionals and the Alliance of Messianic Atheists.”
“The who?”
“The Alliance of Messianic Atheists. They believe there is no god and that one day a messiah will appear to tell everyone about it,” he said off-handedly. “Maybe they’re right. It could be you. Now, come with me.”
He beckoned Nathan.
Nathan shook his head.
“I don’t think I really want to come with you. You just killed my only friend and murderer, so I’m not sure you’re a very nice person to help.”
“You don’t really have a choice in the matter,” the Archdiogenian said, and suddenly the room was full with the robed figures of Particularly Cynical Atheist zealots. They advanced on Nathan in that specially menacing way that only robed zealots can.
“You’re going to tell everyone everything you know,” Delroy continued. “And then no one will believe there is a god!”
“Why’s that exactly?” Nathan asked warmly. “Just because there are bureaucrats in the afterlife doesn’t mean there’s no god.”
“What?” Delroy said, momentarily taken aback. “Of course it does. It means the bureaucrats are running everything, not god. So therefore there is no god.”
“No it doesn’t,” Nathan disagreed, shaking his head. “That’s like saying that there’s no President because bureaucrats run the United States. The bureaucrats in the afterlife are enforcing rules, but who set the rules? God, probably.”
Delroy furrowed his brow.
“And what’s more,” Nathan went on, “there are bureaucrats in the Bible. St. Peter’s supposed to stand at the gates of heaven and judge whether you’re allowed in or not, right? What is that if it isn’t bureaucracy? St. Peter’s a bureaucrat. He’s even usually shown having a line of people waiting in paintings. Maybe,” Nathan continued thoughtfully, “Director Fulcher is St. Peter.”
This seemed deeply unlikely to him, but after everything he’d gone through this afternoon, he had to admit that anything was possible.
“Besides, I never saw past the bureaucracy,” Nathan said. “Maybe if I’d signed the 21B in the first place I’d have gone to heaven. Who knows? I don’t.”
There was a long silence.
“Blast,” the Grand Interlocutor said, his brow furrowed. “We’ll just have to kill you.”
“You can kill me if you like-” Nathan started, and that was as far as he got, because Delroy took this as permission and shot him in the head.
His last thought before he died was that he was starting to see Travis’ point about Dead Donkey being a very violent city.
Chapter 31
“Station Number Four, please.”
Nathan found himself standing back in front of the frumpy woman, her familiar look of disdain boring holes through his chest.
“Hello,” he said happily. “Good to see you again.”
The frumpy woman just glared at him for a while, then pointed to the door that had materialized nearby.
“I’ll go see Director Fulcher then,” Nathan pressed on. “Bye.”
He stepped out into the hallway, deciding that the frumpy woman was a hard person to know. Nathan crossed to the door he knew to be Director Fulcher’s and knocked.
“Come in,” Fulcher’s imperious voice boomed.
Nathan entered.
Fulcher looked up at Nathan and gave him an extremely wry smile.
“Ah, I wasn’t expecting you quite so soon, Mr. Haynes, though I suppose this isn’t too much out of line with your previous arrivals. How did you come to be with us this time?”
“I was murdered by robed atheists who were scared I would tell people there was a god,” Nathan said perfunctorily, and sat down in his chair.
Fulcher folded his hands.
“Normally there is a special form for that but in your case your first death takes precedence,” Fulcher said. “Now, let’s finish putting your papers in order and get you processed, shall we?”
“Okay,” Nathan agreed.
Fulcher reached into his desk and produced Nathan’s impossibly large file, which he slammed down on his desk (which had itself suddenly grown to inconceivably accommodating proportions).
“Before we get started, I’d just like to ask one last thing,” Nathan said.
“Certainly,” Fulcher answered magnanimously, his face breaking into a smirk.
“Last time we spoke, you started telling me something about the universe and how I fit into everything, but then you stopped and said you couldn’t tell me any more until my forms were signed. Now that they’re signed, do you think you could tell me?”
“Of course,” Fulcher said with a grin. “Where was I? Right. The start of the universe. Well, it was manageable at first, but the problem with the universe is that so very many things happen on a day to day basis. In fact, nearly everything is doing a huge number of things at once. Think about it - particles bumping into each other, neutrinos decaying into other kinds of neutrinos, objects influencing each other with their gravity... every single one of those things requires a form. The number of forms grew exponentially, and soon we had a backlog of more than a quizillion forms to file. Time was getting very dilated - not like the beginning when it moved fast - and even though we’d expanded the universe so things wouldn’t bump into each other as often, we just didn’t have the manpower to comply with our statutory obligations vis-a-vis the basic forces of the universe. So we hatched a very long term plan. We found a suitable planet with a long-lived main-line sun that was a reasonable temperature and didn’t have any nearby gamma ray bursts or anything, and we assembled some self-replicating goop out of primordial acids and lipids. It was a bit of a liberty under our assigned powers, I admit, but it was much better than simply defaulting on our legal obligations.”
Nathan frowned. He was trying to understand.
“Are you saying you created life on Earth?”
Fulcher nodded.
“Exactly. And just a few billion years later, humans had evolved. Everything went just as we’d planned. Humans developed language and culture and finally - politics - government - and inevitably-”
“Bureaucracy,” Nathan finished.
“Yes. You’re catching on. So we gave them souls so they could come here when they died, and we could recruit them as bureaucrats to help us run reality. And that’s what keeps reality running at the smooth, regular pace and extremely high resolution that you’ve come to expect.”
“You’re trying to tell me,” Nathan said slowly, “that the meaning of life-”
“Is bureaucracy,” Director Fulcher said with a nod. “Of course. How else is reality supposed to keep on going? Why, if it weren’t for us, it would be chaos out there. Totally unstructured chaos. Dogs would be mewing and buildings would be doing backflips and the sun would be a dark and purple square. Someone has to impose order.”
“I don’t think I want to be a bureaucrat for the rest of eternity,” Nathan said.
“Are you sure? The benefits are very good. And you get one weekend off
per quizillion years.”
“I’m sure.”
“Oh well, to be honest we probably wouldn’t have wanted you as a bureaucrat anyway. You’re a bit too unpredictable. Not to mention that you’re obviously no fan of paperwork.” He shrugged. “So we’ll just get you processed and moved on, shall we?”
“I don’t want to be processed. I think I’d rather go back to life.”
Director Fulcher leaned across the table with a patronizing smile on his face.
“My dear Mr. Haynes, now that you’ve signed your 21B, you don’t have a choice. You’re going to be processed and moved on regardless.”
Nathan did not smile back.
Fulcher’s smile widened, though, and he leaned back managerially and opened Nathan’s file.
“Is that my 21B on the top?” Nathan asked, peering at it.
“Yes it is,” Fulcher confirmed.
“Maybe you ought to take a closer look at that.”
“Take a closer look at what exac-” Fulcher looked at the 21B and did a double-take. He stared at it, then gawked in disbelief.
“I’m getting fed up with everyone thinking that just because I’m missing part of my brain I’m stupid,” Nathan said. “It’s very insulting.”
“It’s not signed,” Fulcher said, staring at the 21B. “But you signed it. I signed it. I brought it here.”
He stared wildly at Nathan.
“Did you do this?” he demanded.
“Yes. I knew after you sent Donna and Ian and Brian after me and they all failed that you’d eventually come yourself, and while I was walking around with Travis in Dead Donkey, I found a piece of transparent plastic and picked it up. This piece of transparent plastic,” Nathan added, producing it from his pocket. “When we went into the travel agency and then saw the supervisor there, I knew immediately that it was you. I recognized you because I’d seen you so many times, and when you asked me to sign the form I knew it must be a 21B. I asked you a question about the machine so you’d turn your head away for a second, and then when you did I slipped this piece of plastic over the 21B, which is the thing I signed. It was dark and shadowy where I was standing so you didn’t notice. You never got my signature.”
Fulcher gritted his teeth in annoyance. His face went red and he was breathing hard. His fists clenched.
“Clever of you,” he said after a while. “This doesn’t change anything. I’ll be after you-”
“You signed it too,” Nathan said.
Fulcher’s face suddenly went from red to white.
“What?” he said, his voice barely a whisper.
“You signed it too,” Nathan repeated. “I knew that you would have to sign it when you came because the frumpy woman at Station Four told me that the 21B needed a countersignature, so I knew you would have to countersign, so you also signed the piece of plastic. We both signed it. When I grabbed at you I wasn’t trying to get the 21B back. I wanted the piece of plastic, which I got. It wasn’t blank when you signed it. I wrote a contract on it. Would you like to hear what it says?”
If Nathan had been pressed to describe Fulcher at that moment, he would have called him white as an albino ghost with Lyme disease. Nathan took out the plastic sheet and unfurled it onto the desk. Letters in black marker were barely visible on the transparent surface.
Fulcher stared at it.
“What does it say?” he whispered.
“Oh, nothing too important,” Nathan replied. “It just says that you and all the other bureaucrats will stop trying to get me to sign a 21B or any other form, and any of your forms I sign in the past or the future are null and void, and you will stop bothering me. Oh, and it says no one will ever be able to steal my house by tricking me into signing anything either. That’s pretty much it.”
Fulcher babbled.
“B-but that means?”
“I win,” Nathan said cheerily. “I told you we should have played Monopoly. I’m not very good at that, so you might have won.”
For a full minute, Fulcher sat there ashen-faced while the cereal jingle played in Nathan’s head two or three times. At last, Fulcher shook his head in disbelief.
“Then I have no choice,” he said finally. “I have to send you back. I admit defeat. You win, Mr. Haynes.”
He held out his hand. Nathan gallantly shook it.
Then, with a weary sigh, Fulcher reached into his desk and took out a form, which Nathan recognized as the form that sent him back to the regular world.
Just before he signed it, Fulcher paused and looked Nathan in the eye.
“I take back what I said before, Mr. Haynes. You would have made a splendid bureaucrat.”
Nathan felt rather flattered.
Then Fulcher signed the form, and Nathan began to dissolve back into reality.
Chapter 32
Nathan found himself back in his own living room. To his great surprise, the cynical atheists had gone, leaving only their robes behind, and Travis was in their place.
“Travis!” Nathan said in shock. “I thought you went to Albany.”
“One of the tricks to teleportation is not to observe yourself until you’re where you want to go,” Travis replied. “I waited until I was back in Dead Donkey, but by then you’d already gone. I assumed you went back to your house, so I came here... but it was too late. You were already dead.”
“But what happened to the Particularly Cynical Atheists?” Nathan asked, looking at the robes.
“Oh. I convinced them they did not exist.” Travis smiled. “I’m good at that sort of thing. I’m much more surprised to see you, though. I thought I was too late. After Director Fulcher tricked you, you should have stayed dead. What happened?”
Nathan explained everything. By the end, Travis was smiling.
“So you are the only man alive other than myself who can claim to be truly free of bureaucracy,” he said. “You are free from death and all the other contractual and legal obligations that normally bind people. You are effectively immortal and in some respects all powerful. What are you going to do now?”
Nathan thought about this for a moment and came to a swift conclusion.
“I’m going to do my laundry,” he said, and disappeared down the hallway.
(Finis.)
Message to the Reader
Dear reader,
Thank you very much for taking a chance on an independent author. You Are Dead. (Sign Here Please) represents yet another format experiment for me. It’s the first pure comedy novel that I’ve ever written, and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.
If you liked You Are Dead. (Sign Here Please), there is a sequel: You Are A Ghost. (Sign Here Please). Amazingly, there’s also a third book in the series, You Are Doomed. (Sign Here Please), and a fourth, You Are Undead. (Sign Here Please), and now even a fifth book, You Are On Fire. (Sign Here Please). You can find all of them on Amazon and elsewhere.
I’d also very much appreciate it if you rated and reviewed this book or shared it with your friends. I rely on writing for my income, and I have struggled to get the word out about my novels, and just a little help from you could mean worlds to me. Since reviews are my only potential source of feedback, I also find them invaluable for my future writing.
I have written a large number of other books, some comedic, some serious. They are all available on Amazon and other online retail outlets, and you can find them by searching my name.
Best,
--Andrew Stanek
PS: If you want to join my mailing list, go to http://eepurl.com/bhTc9H. I send out notices about my writing and sometimes give out good stuff, like free books and advance copies of my new novels to people on the list. I won’t send you spam. You can contact me at [email protected] if you just want to talk to me about something.
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