The fluorescent lights hummed overhead like dying insects.
Raye blinked, as his eyes slowly adjusted to the sterile white brightness that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. One moment he had been sprawled on asphalt, his bones broken and bleeding from all over his body after a truck had sent him flying. The next thing he knew he was sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair that squeaked every time he shifted his weight.
"Number 77,449, please proceed to Window 12."
A monotone voice echoed through the vast space, and Raye's head swiveled around, taking in his surroundings with growing bewilderment.
It looked like a DMV. Or maybe a post office during tax season.
The room stretched impossibly far in every direction, filled with rows upon rows of plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Hundreds—no, thousands—of translucent figures sat waiting with their forms flickering like a bad television reception. Some looked bored, others confused, and a few were openly weeping.
"What the hell...?" Raye muttered, looking down at his own hands. They were solid enough and looked more real than the ghostly figures around him, but there was a faint luminescence to his skin that definitely wasn't normal.
"First time?"
Raye jerked his head toward the voice. Sitting beside him was a middle-aged man in a business suit, or rather, the spirit of one. His form was more stable than most of the others, showing he has been here for some time.
"I... yeah. I just died, I think? There was a truck without a driver and—"
"Say no more." The man sighed, leaning back in his chair with the weariness of someone who had explained this a thousand times. "Welcome to the God's Recycling Department, kid. The official name is something in a language humans can't pronounce, but we just call it the GRD."
"Recycling?" Raye's brain was struggling to catch up. "Like... reincarnation?"
"Bingo." The man gestured around the massive waiting room. "See all these souls? Every single one is waiting to be processed and sent back into the cycle. Birth, life, death, rinse and repeat. It's how the universe maintains balance, apparently."
Raye stared at the endless sea of waiting souls, his mind reeling. "So everyone here is dead?"
"As doornails." The man chuckled darkly. "Though some are deader than others, if you catch my drift. See that guy over there?" He pointed to a translucent figure who was barely visible, like smoke about to dissipate. "He has been here for three centuries. A bureaucratic mixup happened and his paperwork got lost."
"Three centuries?!"
"Time works differently here. It could be minutes or be a millennia before your number gets called. It depends on cosmic traffic, available worlds, karmic balance sheets..." The man waved his hand dismissively. "It's a whole thing."
"Number 77,450, please proceed to Window 3."
Another soul rose from the chairs, shuffling toward one of the countless windows lining the far wall. Behind each window sat a figure—some looked humanoid while others decidedly not—processing souls with the enthusiasm of overworked civil servants.
"So what happens at the windows?" Raye asked, watching the soul hand over what looked like a glowing scroll to a bored receptionist with too many eyes.
"That's where they tally up your karma, review your life's resume, and assign you to your next incarnation. Good karma? Maybe you come back as royalty or some genius. Bad karma?" The man grimaced. "Let's just say insects are always hiring."
Raye felt a cold pit form in his stomach. His life had been a disaster from start to finish. Orphaned at five, bounced through foster homes, unemployed, friendless, and ultimately killed by a truck while trying to save a cat that had already scampered away. His karma score was probably in the negatives.
"You look worried," the man observed.
"My life was... not great."
"Whose was? But hey, at least you're here and not in one of the other departments." The man's expression darkened. "Trust me, kid. You don't want to know about those."
Before Raye could ask what he meant, a commotion erupted near one of the windows. A soul was arguing with a receptionist—a being that looked like a floating geometric shape with far too many angles.
"I DEMAND to speak to a supervisor! Do you have ANY idea who I was? I had three PhDs! I cured diseases! I—"
The geometric shape pressed a button, and the soul vanished with a pop.
"Where did they—"
"And that is an express lane to the insect kingdom," the man said flatly. "Pride's a killer for your karma score. Literally."
Raye swallowed hard and decided to keep his mouth shut.
"Number 77,451, please proceed to Window 27."
Time passed strangely in the waiting room. Raye couldn't tell if he'd been sitting for minutes or hours. The businessman beside him eventually got called—Window 15—and gave Raye a brief nod before disappearing into the processing system.
Alone now, Raye watched the endless cycle of souls being called, processed, and presumably sent back into the reincarnation pipeline. The fluorescent lights continued their eternal hum. The plastic chairs continued their eternal squeak.
"Number 77,452."
"Number 77,453."
"Number 77,454."
His number was 77,455. He had checked the glowing ticket that had somehow appeared in his hand when he'd first arrived. Any moment now, his turn would come, and he has would face judgment for a life that had been nothing but a string of disasters and disappointments.
Maybe coming back as a dung beetle wouldn't be so bad. At least beetles didn't have to deal with student loans or workplace harassment or dying alone because even the cat you tried to save didn't stick around.
"Number 77,455, please proceed to... hmm, that's odd."
Raye's head snapped up. The monotone voice had broken its pattern of being bored, sounding almost confused.
"Number 77,455, please proceed to the Special Cases Office, Floor Negative-Seven, Room Infinity."
Special Cases?
All around him, the other waiting souls turned to stare. Even the ones who had been completely checked out suddenly focused on him with various expressions of surprise, envy, and concern.
"Special Cases?" Raye stood on shaky legs. "What does that mean?"
Nobody answered. The souls simply watched as Raye made his way through the rows of chairs, following the glowing arrows that had suddenly appeared on the floor, leading him away from the normal processing windows.
Away from the fluorescent lights and plastic chairs.
Toward an elevator at the far end of the room that definitely hadn't been there before.
The doors slid open with a cheerful ding that felt deeply out of place in the bureaucratic purgatory around him.
Raye stepped inside.
The doors closed.
And the elevator began to descend.
Floor -1.
Floor -2.
Floor -3.
The numbers kept dropping, counting down into impossible depths as Raye's heart—or whatever spiritual equivalent he had now—hammered in his chest.
Floor -7.
The elevator dinged again, and the doors opened onto a hallway that looked nothing like the sterile waiting room above.
This corridor was warm, almost cozy, with wooden panels on the walls and soft lighting that didn't hum or flicker. Doors lined both sides, each marked with symbols Raye couldn't quite read—they seemed to shift and change whenever he tried to focus on them.
At the end of the hall, one door stood out.
It was ornate, carved with intricate designs of intertwining figures and strange runes that made his eyes water if he looked too long. Above it floated a sign that simply read: ∞
Room Infinity.
Raye's hand trembled as he reached for the doorknob.
Whatever waited on the other side, it was clearly not standard procedure.
And given his luck—his absolutely abysmal, life-ruining, death-by-truck luck—that probably wasn't a good thing.
The doorknob turned.
The door swung open.
And Raye stepped into a room that would change everything.