Prologue

Purgatory is a long, white hallway with a bunch of empty chairs and many doors. Some of the doors are open and behind each of them you can see a small room containing filing cabinets and a desk with an old computer on top. Some of these rooms have somebody inside them, typing away at their computer. Purgatory smells like sweat and coffee and xerox machines. Every now and then there's some random employee walking down the corridor with a bunch of paperwork, mumbling a quick "Morning..." as they pass. Some knock on one of the little office doors, poke their heads in and softly talk about files and processes, some even make time for a little office chit-chat. "Have you seen that thing I've sent ya?"

I just sit and wait for what may well be an eternity. It's hard to tell, since I'm dead and everything, but finally a door opens and the middle-aged lady on the other side calls me into her office. She points at one of the two cheap, wooden chairs in front of her desk. I suck in my gut and try to sit up straight. Not too straight, I don't want to look like I'm forcing it or anything. "Just one second", she mumbles as the types away at her keyboard. Most of the office is white. White walls, white cabinets, even the crappy desk is white, safe for the round coffee stains all over it. Some little plastic toys are neatly arranged around a potted plant, which is dying for some water. A bright light is shining through the window in her office. In fact, I can't see anything but light when I try to peek outside.

"So", she says, shifting her gaze from her computer to me for a second, then back to the screen. "You walked in front of a bus and died pretty much straight away. There's a bit of backlog right now, but we should have you back this afternoon. I will give you a coupon for the cafeteria while you wait." I knew I'd eventually get hit by a bus the day I moved to England.

"Have me back? Um, excuse me, but I don't believe I'm familiar with this whole being dead thing. Could you tell me what's gonna happen? It's my first time, you know."
The lady takes off her thick-rimmed glasses and rubs her forehead as though she was very tired or suffering a mild migraine. "Actually, this isn't your first time", she says. "Far from it. It's just that you don't usually get to see the reset. And immediately forget about it afterwards." She notices the look on my face, leans back and lets out a soft sigh.
"I assume you are familiar with quicksaves?"
Now she's speaking my language! "You mean like in a videogame? Where you save your progress, so you can go back if you make a mistake or die or something?"
She nods.

"We are going to bring you right back to where the bus hit you, except this time you will stop before it's too late and continue to live your life."
Seriously?
"Wait, so you're telling me you've done this to me before?"
"Mhm..." The lady takes a look at her screen. "That night where you had to be rushed to the hospital when your appendix burst? Didn't go so well the first time around. Oh, remember when you were hit by a car while you were on your motorcycle?"
"Twice."
"Exactly. You also choked to death during dinner once and you suffered a fatal heart attack during excessive... wow, twenty-three times?" She pauses.
Awesome. Because being spied on wasn't bad enough when I was still alive.

"I get the gist of it. I've died a few times, you've brought me back. Why, though? How? Does that mean I get to live forever?"
She is eying the lunch box that sits between her coffee mug and the potted plant. Tupperware with a bit of grainy bread inside. I believe there's cheese on it. The box is a little sweaty. It's a warm day and her office is rather stuffy.
"You are guaranteed a total life span of at least seventy-five years. You die before that, we bring you back. Some manage to continue living for quite a while after that, but you get no more 'quicksaves' from there."
"Why? What happens if you restore an old person?"
She shrugs. "Bad data? You can only restore somebody so many times before there are side effects. At some point you just can't bring back the whole person."
What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? "Dementia?"
"For instance", she says.

"Wait a minute. You say I'm guaranteed seventy-five years. Lots of people die way before that all the time! What makes me so special?"
She's doing that migraine thing again and it's seriously starting to piss me off.
"Everyone is 'special' in their version of life. Just because somebody died at a younger age in your life doesn't mean they didn't get the full seventy-five years in theirs."
My brain hurts.
"Different versions of life? What, like parallel universes or something?"
She lifts the corner of the lid on her lunchbox.
"In a nutshell. There is no guaranteed life span for your friends and loved ones. Not for your particular universe, as you put it."
And suddenly I have a million questions.

"Do you guys have a brochure or something? I'm not really sure I understand any of this."
The lady finally loses to temptation and opens her lunchbox.
"We don't usually get visitors here. Management has outsourced some of our processes and things aren't going as smoothly as we'd like during the transition, but..."
She takes a bite out of her sandwich, chews a little, then grimaces at it as she lifts up the top half of her bread. The cheese has gone all soggy and translucent underneath. It smells bad, but it's not even putting me off. I could totally eat that. I'm dead and I could eat! I'm not really hungry, just nervous, confused, angry and maybe a little bored.
"I should have put that in the fridge, but stuff always disappears from there. Look, we're going to bring you back, you will not walk in front of the bus and then you will immediately forget everything that happened in here. It will be just another day in your life, except you nearly got hit by a bus."

She has a photo ID badge, but it looks ancient and faded. I can't make out her name. Shame! I wonder what names the people have, who get to run the afterlife.
"So what if I don't want to go back? What if I'm tired of having a shit job, paying bills, housework, the whole treadmill that boils down to eat, shit and die?"
I immediately regret my question when I realize that the afterlife really doesn't seem any different to what I just described. Except maybe the dying part. Do people die in here or do they get to be middle-aged office slaves for eternity? Is this hell?
"Your girlfriend will marry a rich guy from Switzerland about three months from now. He gets to use your computer and keeps the few humble belongings of yours, which don't immediately end up in the trash. He also shows her pretty much everything you used to keep on your computer."

Harsh! Only three months? I think she knows about the furry porn, but I'm not sure how she'd feel about the manatees. Dog-faced, beaver-tailed turds of the sea. She'll never understand!
"So how do I get back?"
She types something into her computer. She's taking forever and she's hitting those keys really hard as if she was trying to prove a point. Why do people in shitty little offices like that always abuse their computers? Finally, her printer springs to life and starts pissing ink onto a small piece of paper, bit by bit, line by line, taking for fucking ever. Almost makes me glad I'm dead. Finally the machine finishes its job and the lady hands me the bit of paper. The print is all washed-out and faded. Somebody should really refill the ink on that printer!

"Here's your cafeteria coupon. Take a left when you exit my office and follow the signs from there. You get a free sandwich and a carbonated drink. No coffee, that's staff only! We're trying to bring you back within the hour."
So there's no coffee in hell unless you work there. Fair enough. She opens the door and waits for me to leave. Awkward. Do we shake hands on the way out or something? I bet I'm walking funny. I finally step into the corridor and the whole world turns black. Shame. I really wanted to know whether hell's cafeteria is any good.