You Are Dead. [Sign Here Please]

by Andrew Stanek

  “This is our research and development bureau,” Ian said, gesturing broadly. “Here, our hard-working researchers have discovered a new and smaller font size, hitherto unknown to bureaucracy. We have already introduced it on a trial basis on some of our forms. We expect it to reduce paper usage by up to fifty percent.”

  “Very good,” Nathan said. He felt that he ought to say something more at this point, so he asked, “does everything have to have a form?”

  “Oh yes,” Ian said. “Absolutely everything. Nothing at all happens unless the paperwork has been taken care of. That’s what I’m trying to impress upon you, Mr. Haynes. Not a butterfly flaps its wings or a car horn beeps or a second of time ticks by until the appropriate forms are filled in.”

  “And, that’s all done here, is it?”

  “No, this is just the central office,” Ian said cheerily. “We have branch offices in heaven, hell, purgatory, and New York.”

  “Er, why do you have an office in New York?”

  “Well, we simply wouldn’t be a respectable operation if we didn’t have an office in New York, even if the rent is extortionate. It’s our nicest office. Just between you and me, I wish they would shut down the hell office. All our paper forms kept catching fire there. It’s a nightmare. We had to start making documents out of asbestos.”

  Nathan was not entirely sure whether Ian was being serious or not.

  Ian next led him to another little room. Inside it there were about a hundred desks, each of which had a long line of dozens of people waiting in front of it.

  “And here is where we process new arrivals,” Ian explained. “That is to say, the recently deceased.”

  “This doesn’t look like the room I came from,” Nathan said.

  “No, of course not. There’s no need for them to fill out a 21B. All these people have already signed.”

  “They have?”

  “Yes. Nearly everyone does at one point or another in their lives. It’s very rare to get someone like you, who hasn’t.”

  Ian did not elaborate.

  “Why are the lines so long?”

  “Long?” Ian laughed. “My dear Mr. Haynes, these lines aren’t long at all. This is the abbreviated system for processing new arrivals. People in these lines just have to sign a simple 19F, and then initial 25Es, Fs, and Gs, then 30s in triplicate, then a few simple waivers from the hundred series, then a 204 or two, then file sixteen Form 16s-”

  “-but why-”

  “-then initial the forms attached to their files - just to acknowledge that they are accurate - then P14 if they were born before 1982, or P15 if they were born after - unless they’re a child, of course, in which case they need to wait for a parent or guardian to die to assist them-”

  “-uh-”

  “It’s the absolute peak of efficiency!” Ian declared emphatically.

  “But why aren’t there any people over there?”

  Nathan pointed down at the far end of the room, where there were a few desks that were totally without lines. Each had a rather bored-looking clerk sitting behind it.

  “Oh, I’m glad you asked. Those are our Unlikely Death Forms desks. They are exclusively for people who die in very specific ways - ways that we expect to kill lots of people but don’t happen very often. That one, for example, is the Smallpox Desk.”

  He pointed to the closest one, which had an aged-looking woman in glasses seated behind it.

  “I should explain that smallpox is an infectious disease-”

  “Er, wasn’t smallpox eradicated?”

  “Was it? Goodness, that would explain the lack of business. And next is the Nuclear Disasters desk.”

  A chirpy young man waved to them from behind the desk and grinned. His teeth glowed green.

  Ian waved back and then continued on.

  “And this is the Ebola desk,” he said. “Fred’s the Ebola chief. Say hello, Fred.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said a bureaucrat from behind the desk. He coughed into his hands. A little blood tinged his palms. Then he reached out, offering a handshake.

  “Nice to meet you too,” Nathan said, avoiding the handshake.

  “This,” Ian said, indicating the second-to-last desk in the line, “is the Desk for People Who Died of Badger Attack While Simultaneously Having A Stroke And A Bathtub Fall On Their Heads.”

  Nathan blinked.

  “Is that likely?”

  “Oh, we’re expecting quite a run on it.”

  He looked at the woman behind the Badger-Attack-Stroke-And-Falling-Bathtub-Death station. She was a severe-looking middle-aged woman in a mauve blouse with a terribly imperious expression on her face. Nathan got the feeling that it was very foolish indeed to suggest that this was not a good way to die in front of her.

  “Busy week, Jeanne?” Ian asked the woman conversationally.

  “I had one arrival,” she said tersely. “He died of an intracerebral hemorrhage while an old imperial clawfoot fell on him and a honey badger mauled his neck.”

  “Did you process him?”

  “Of course not. The honey badger isn’t a true badger. I sent him back to general receiving.” She tutted.

  “Good, good.”

  Ian nodded approvingly and turned to go.

  “What’s that one for?” Nathan asked, pointing to the last desk in the row. The desk was the same, but the station was otherwise very different from the others. There were no papers on it, only a surface of blank, dusty wood, and no clerk sat behind it - all there was to greet an arrival was an empty chair.

  Nathan immediately got the impression that he said something he shouldn’t have. As soon as Nathan asked about it, all of the clerks from the nearby desks turned and gave him, then each other, dark looks - as if he had just been invited over to an unfamiliar family’s house for Thanksgiving and inquired after a little old aunt in a picture who turned out to have run away to become a Somali pirate.

  Ian glanced at the empty desk only momentarily before turning away.

  “That is the desk for dealing with affairs pertaining to Mr. Travis Erwin Habsworth, of 2388 Shillington Road, Albany,” Ian answered quietly.

  “Who-”

  “Let’s go!” the bureaucrat suddenly said very loudly. “Lots to do. Other places to see. Like this filing cabinet!” He said, ushering Nathan over to a filing cabinet on the other end of the room. “A filing cabinet is a place where we keep files! See?” He yanked it open. It was empty.

  Nathan stared at it.

  “Er... where we usually keep files,” Ian stuttered. He slid the filing cabinet shut. The label on the door read, “Form 404A - Request For More Forms.”

  “Oh dear,” continued Ian. “We’ll have to get that fixed. But I think you get the gist of it. Why don’t we move on?”

  No sooner had he spoken than the room dissolved around them and they were standing back in the hallway.

  “And this is the corridor,” Ian continued. “Allow me to explain that a corridor is an avenue that connects other rooms.”

  “I knew that too,” Nathan confirmed sardonically.

  “Good! Well, I think you’ve now seen everything of importance. Do you understand why you have to sign your 21B now?”

  “No. I don’t understand at all.”

  Ian’s genial grin fell.

  “You don’t?”

  “No,” Nathan repeated. “I mean, it was all very interesting,” he said, trying to spare Ian’s feelings. “And thank you for showing it all to me. But I see that you have a lot of forms that are being filled out and that lots of people are working to make sure they are filled out properly, but I’m not sure I understand why you need them filled out, exactly.”

  For a moment, Ian stood there dumbstruck. He looked confounded, like a dog that has just seen the cat it was chasing escape by helicopter. Then, he shrugged his shoulders.

  “I see, I see. There is someone who can explain, but - Oh, well, there’s nothing else for it. We’ll just have to go visit him.”

/>   “Who?”

  “We will have to go see my supervisor, Mr. Haynes.” He started off down the corridor and then paused. “I should explain that I don’t at all like going to see my supervisor.”

  Nathan followed him with more than a little trepidation.

  Chapter 4

  At the very end of the endless corridor, a door appeared, and Ian - now with a distinctly unhappy look - opened it. Nathan walked through and found himself in an expansive office.

  It had a line of about a half-dozen chairs on Nathan’s right and left. Together with a pair of potted plants, they formed a path of blue carpet that led up to a stately hardwood desk which would have been large enough to accommodate several men - but only one man sat behind it.

  The proceedings of the immensely complex field of corporate sociology have yet to explain exactly why it is that businessmen wear ties. The tie is a piece of clothing that serves no known useful purpose. It does not keep the neck warm, nor does it keep the shirt from falling off, nor does it secure the collar to the shirt, nor even does it act as a counterweight to the heavy items that you might reasonably have in your back pocket. The tie therefore does nothing. Most women have quite sensibly forgone ties in favor of their own totally impractical and inexplicable garments, like high heels.

  After tinkering with the hypothesis that it must be used to keep some sort of devious shirt-python from jumping down your collar and biting you on the chest, corporate sociologists disregarded this - and indeed all snake-related tie theorems - and concluded that the tie must be a status symbol. While they have yet to entirely decipher the meanings of many individual ties, the sociologists concluded that the tie must be used to signal rank and authority to unfamiliar members of the corporate structure. Therefore, it must be possible to ascertain exactly how powerful a person is from his tie. A simple errand monkey, for example, might only wear a tie with a half-Windsor knot, while a middle manager has a tie with the immensely complicated triple Windsor knot.

  The man behind the hardwood desk was not wearing a tie. A little shiver went up Nathan’s spine. Such men are dangerous.

  The tieless man was very large, perhaps six and a half feet tall, wearing a gray suit and a bare white collar. His hair was silver-gray and there was a predatory glint in his dark, merciless eyes. He did not look genial or friendly or accommodating like Ian. In fact, he looked like the opposite of all those things. His finger tips were pressed together contemplatively.

  “Mr. Nathan Haynes,” he called out. “Welcome.”

  “Am I?” Nathan asked, with surprise.

  “No, not at all. In fact, Mr. Haynes, you are very, very unwelcome. I understand you have caused some problems in receiving, but I do not want to hear about them. I would prefer it if you shriveled up into a little ball of nothing and disappeared into even more nothing. But there are pleasantries that have to be observed, so I am going to pretend otherwise.”

  “I have been expecting you,” he added, after a suitable interval. “Donna told me what happened.” He pointed to the nearest seat, where Donna was quietly seated, her lips pursed.

  “I have been observing your progress,” the tieless man continued.

  Nathan could not immediately see how he might have done this, but he knew better than to ask.

  “I’ll just be going then, shall I?” Ian said with a fixed grin. He started towards the door.

  “No, sit,” the tieless man said. “Both of you.”

  Nathan sat down as quickly as he could. Ian did the same, looking very nervous.

  “I am Director Fulcher,” the collarless man said. “You are Nathan Haynes. Is that right?”

  Nathan nodded.

  “Now, I understand that you have refused to sign your 21B.”

  “Yes,” Nathan agreed. “I guess I just don’t see the point of all these forms and signing and whatnot.”

  “Ah, but Ian has already explained it to you, hasn’t he? The universe has laws, doesn’t it, Mr. Haynes? These laws don’t just enforce themselves. It’s us - the bureaucrats - that make it all happen. We are here to make sure that proper procedure is followed, and until every form is filled out, and every ‘i’ dotted and ‘t’ crossed, things simply cannot be allowed to proceed.”

  “You mean that you have to fill out forms for everything in the whole universe?”

  “Yes.”

  Nathan was not quite sure he understood what Director Fulcher meant.

  “So - er - butterflies in springtime?”

  “Each one needs a form.”

  “And beautiful sunsets?”

  “There is a form for that as well.”

  “And a sense of profound happiness and fulfillment?”

  “One hundred and sixteen different forms and a public consultation, at the absolute minimum,” Fulcher confirmed solemnly. “The whole vastness of creation, from blazing suns to tiny atoms of hydrogen, every object from the minuscule to the awesome - every event, from two little molecules of gas bumping into each other to galaxy-shattering supernovas - must have its paperwork properly filled out.”

  “Er... and what happens if you don’t fill out the proper forms?”

  “They do not happen.”

  Nathan sat there in his chair, dumbstruck. The ramifications of this were mindbending, and as it turned out, his mind was quite rigid from the traumas (lesions, quizillions of forms, and gunshot wounds) that it had already suffered through and was not prepared to process it. Do not think about how or why bureaucrats would run reality, it told him. Think about this cereal jingle instead. It played him several seconds of catchy music from an old television cereal commercial while he pleasantly hallucinated about cartoon breakfast mascots, while the rationalization department of his mind hurriedly tried to come up with an acceptable interpretation of what Fulcher was telling him. By the end of the jingle, here is what it had come up with:

  “What does any of that have to do with me?” Nathan asked. This, the rationalization department had decided, would allow him to handily ignore the problem.

  Unfortunately, Director Fulcher did not answer “nothing at all - you may go now,” which is the answer the rationalization part of the brain always secretly hopes for but never receives when it directs your mouth to ask this question.

  Instead, Fulcher did what usually happens when this question is asked and sighed heavily, then leaned back in his chair with a nostalgic look in his eye.

  “Ah yes,” he said airily. “What does it have to do with you? Well to answer that, we have to go all the way back. Way back to the very beginning. We bureaucrats have always been around. In the beginning, the paperwork was very manageable.”

  “Are you talking about the beginning of the universe?”

  “You may call it what you like. Then there was rather a tremendous explosion in our workload. I understand you have heard of it on your side of things.”

  “Do you mean, the Big Bang?”

  Fulcher did not answer but continued to muse.

  “Things got pretty complicated after that. We had to invent all kinds of new forms to keep up with the law - which back then was rapidly changing. Our workload got bigger and bigger as creation got larger and larger.”

  “You mean to tell me that you’ve been filing forms for - for everything? Since the beginning of the universe?” Nathan gaped. His mind slipped back to the quizillion forms he had seen in the storage room, but then quickly caught itself and started playing the cereal jingle again, his memory defaulting to the wholly more sane image of a cartoon leprechaun trying to sell him marshmallows.

  “It was quite a lot of work. Fortunately, we discovered a loophole in the law. It turns out that as long as an object is very small, we don’t actually have to file paperwork for it unless someone requests the relevant forms - so most things have no paperwork at all, and if anyone asks for it we just file it on the spot. Useful, eh?”

  “I guess?”

  “But even given that,” Fulcher powered forward, “our workload eventually gr
ew too great. The universe, you see, kept growing, and in the end there just weren’t enough hours in the day to file all the necessary forms to keep reality running at the high operational standards that we have maintained from the beginning. We started to make compromises. Simplifications for the sake of efficiency. We slowed down time to make things easier on ourselves.”

  “You slowed down-”

  “But in the end, we realized this couldn’t continue. And that is where you come in, Mr. Haynes. You and everyone else.”

  “It - it is?”

  “Yes. But I am afraid I cannot tell you any more until you fill out your 21B.”

  “I don’t want to.” Nathan said stubbornly.

  Fulcher stood abruptly, eyes blazing. Ian and Donna cowered back and away from him.

  “Surely you must see how important this is, Mr. Haynes.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t understand at all. Does everyone have to sign these forms?”

  “Most people already signed theirs before they arrived, Mr. Haynes.”

  “They did?”

  “Oh yes. To be honest I am surprised that you haven’t. But anyone who has ever signed a car lease or rental agreement - or signed an overlong employment agreement - or clicked the - ‘agree’ button on an end-user license agreement without reading it has pre-signed their Waiver.”

  “Well, that explains it. I don’t really like signing things. I saw this report on the news about someone using these agreements to steal houses-”

  “The exact reasons are unimportant,” Fulcher said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “But everyone has to sign a Waiver. I must insist that you sign your 21B.”

  Nathan shook his head rapidly. He wasn’t even sure why he was refusing, except on the pure principle of stubbornness, and because his intuition told him that it was a bad idea. To be fair, this intuition came from the same consciousness that kept playing him cereal jingles, so maybe its judgment was not to be entirely trusted... but Nathan decided to stick to his refusals all the same.