"Do you think you could give it a rest for a few minutes?" asked Jack of the rear-view mirror, frustrated. "I'm trying to concentrate here!"
What was supposed to be the perfect weekend away relaxing in the Alps had turned into a nightmare, for Jack at least, when Mark had met Jill by wiping-out into her on a particularly tricky section of a black run.
Jill was a snow-boarder, so, rather than being annoyed at Mark's ineptitude, had brushed herself off and remarked what a 'cool wipe-out' it had been.
Mark and her had hit it off immediately, making Jack instant gooseberry. It had continued all weekend, with Jack seeing nothing of his friend, and now to top it all off Jack was stuck giving her a lift to the airport and having to put up with some serious
tongue-Olympics going on in his rear-view mirror while he tried to concentrate on the narrow twisty roads down the side of the mountain.
"Sorry dude." Said Mark with no hint of an apologetic tone, and proceeded to stick his tongue back down the girl's throat.
Jack sighed. He felt torn. On the one hand he was pleased that his friend had found someone. Jill was after all very attractive in a ski-resort kind of way: rich, blond, posh accent, happy-go-lucky attitude. On the other hand, the weekend had been intende
d as strictly for some hard-core skiing and chilling out. No female distractions, just lots of snow and maybe the odd bottle of the '95 Margaux.
On balance, Jack though Mark could have been a little more considerate. His behaviour in the back seat was really starting to piss Jack off.
Jack turned round slightly in his seat, trying to keep one eye on the road. "Guys, do you min..." He noticed Mark's hand was well up Jill's shirt. "Um, mind. These roads are hard to drive on at the best of ti..."
"Jack!" yelled Mark, looking up, a glaze of terror marring his features, pointing out of the windscreen.
Jack turned back to the road, but it was already too late and he knew it. The little Renault hire car smacked into and over the dirt barrier at the edge of the road and plummeted over the cliff.
No one screamed. They were all too shocked. There are myriad places on the way down a mountain where going off the road is actually perfectly safe. This was not one of them. The car dropped vertically for several hundred feet before it made contact with a
nything. It then bounced and toppled over itself as it continued on down the rocky incline before finally smashing to pieces as it came to an abrupt stop after losing an argument with the valley floor.
**** **** *
"Just one moment Mr. Morris, I'll be with you shortly," said the middle aged woman behind the desk as she typed something into her computer terminal.
Jack looked around puzzled. He was in a smallish bare office with a single desk and a rather uncomfortable chair in which he sat.
The last thing he remembered was some falling and some hurting. The details were a little hazy.
The woman looked up at him and smiled. "Do you know where you are Mr. Morris?" she asked, pleasantly.
"Um, no." Replied Jack. Guessing seemed doomed to failure.
"Well, take a deep breath. This usually comes as a shock to people. I'm afraid you're dead." She sat back and waited for a response.
That didn't register at all, but somewhere in the back of his mind the image of a Renault Megane plummeting over a cliff flickered for a moment. "I don't feel dead." He offered, somewhat lamely.
"Do you know what being dead feels like?" she asked, a hint of amusement on her features.
"Well, no, but I rather expected it would be darker. And with less of the consciousness thing."
She grinned. "I hate to ruin your expectations, but being dead is not the end, in fact it can be just the beginning."
"Beginning?"
"The beginning of the next life. Assuming you qualify." Before Jack could ask what she was talking about, the computer beeped and the woman looked at the screen. "Ah, here we are. Your results."
"What results?" Jack was starting to lose his grasp on the situation.
"Let me explain." Started the woman. "Life, or at least the life you've just left, is the first rung on the ladder. If you lead a good life, when you die, you get to progress to the next life. If not, then you go back and have another go at the first one.
"
"The next life? Is that like heaven, with all the Angels and harps and things?"
The woman grinned at him. "Oh no, not at all. There's a long way to go before you get anywhere near any of that stuff. The next life is very similar to the last one. Just nicer, better, happier, you get the idea."
"I see." I wonder if this is a hallucination thought Jack, I'm lying, dying on some operating table somewhere and this is the oddness that my mangled brain is coming up with!
"And I'm please to say you have passed!"
Jack looked up at the woman. "I have?" That seemed unlikely for some reason.
"You shouldn't doubt yourself, you're over thirty points clear of the margin. Plenty of room to spare."
"So now I'm going to be reborn into this new life?" asked Jack. He wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. A beer seemed like it would be a better idea.
"No, no being born this way. That's just for the first life, you get to start the next life at any age you like."
Interesting. "So I get to pick how old I am, or rather will be?"
She nodded. "Yes. And not only that, you have almost total control over what you'll look like. You can be who you want to be."
"Wow!" This was actually sounding exciting. He knew he'd have to get around to being upset about the whole dead thing and he'd miss his family and friends, but for the moment, that hadn't really sunk in properly. His brain was treating it all as an advent
ure and there was nothing to do but go along for the ride.
Jack realised the woman was continuing and he hadn't been listening. "... Now you'll get all the details later when you arrive. All you have to do now is pick whom you're going to be and get processed. One of our agents will give you a full briefing on th
e other side." She handed him a folded piece of paper. "This has all the instructions on how the system works. Read it carefully before you start, and feel free to ask any of the staff questions if you're unsure about anything."
Jack took the paper without looking at it. "Uh, thanks."
The woman smiled. "No problem. Now, the canteen's just out that door. Enjoy. It was nice to meet you."
At the word 'canteen', Jack suddenly realised how absolutely ravenous he was and was out the door like a flash, only just remembering to turn round and thank the woman for her help, as was only polite.
He found the canteen easily just along the corridor from the woman's office. It was huge. Row after of row of counters stood, each with a sign indicating the type of food available and a server standing behind. Every possible kind of food was represented:
the cuisines of China, Africa, the United States, all the European countries. Everything was catered for. There were lots of other people in the room all selecting their food from the counter of their choice. Jack realised they must all be dead and with
a second more disturbing thought, he realised that Mark and Jill might be among them, although he couldn't see them immediately.
Jack knew exactly what he wanted to sate his hunger. The exact thing he had had the night before that had been delicious. He headed for the French counter and waited to be served. There was one other person on it right at the far end and when she had fini
shed, the server, a 60-something classic school dinner-lady type, walked back to Jack's end and smiled at him.
"Hello young man, how are you today? Apart from the being dead thing, obviously!" She grinned. "Just my little joke. Now what can I get for you?"
The food was arranged in sections with meat and vegetables in neatly arranged containers. There was an overwhelming amount of choice.
Jack looked down at the first section. There was steak or a hotdog as the main meat item.
"I'd like the steak, please," he said. He was looking forward to the feast he was going to assemble.
"Good for you!" said the dinner-lady, somewhat confusingly. "Nice to see a young man with a more enlightened view of things." She placed a nice juicy steak onto Jack's plate.
Jack didn't really see how eating steak was particularly enlightened, but he chose not to comment. They moved down to the next section on the counter.
"Any baby-corn or corn-on-the-cob?" asked the woman.
"Can I have both?" asked Jack, he was partial to sweet corn in all forms.
"'Friad not. Should've explained better. You can only have one thing from each section. It's arranged so only one at a time makes sense."
Jack couldn't really see why having both baby-corn and corn-on-the-cob was a crime, but he shrugged and chose a few pieces of the baby-corn.
Some of the choices contained strange groupings: carrots, or parsnips, or red-cabbage, but not all three. He chose carrots. Mashed potato or roast, but not both. No problem there. Jack loved mashed potato and made the server pile on two large spoonfuls. S
he seemed concerned at this for some unknowable reason.
"You sure you want this much mash, love?" she asked. "Could leave you with some problems!"
The plate of food was getting rather full, but Jack felt hungry enough to eat a horse. "Don't worry, I can handle it." He replied.
The woman shrugged. "Your funeral," she said, somewhat inconsiderately.
By the time they reached the end of the counter, Jack had made upwards or ten decisions on what food he wanted and didn't want, often getting very confused as to why the exclusive restrictions were in place.
"Right, you're all done," beamed the kindly old dinner-lady. "Just take your plate and give it to the gentleman in the hatch over there-" she indicated "-and go through that door."
"Okay, thanks," replied Jack, looking forward to his feast.
To his surprise, the man in the hatch took his plate and didn't return it. Figuring it was some sort of pass-through system, Jack went through the small door and found himself in a small, white, bare room.
After waiting for a couple of minutes with no sign of his food arriving, Jack tried the door and found it locked from the outside.
"This place gets weirder and weirder," he muttered to himself. Sitting down, he pulled out the instruction sheet the woman in the office had given him and set about reading up on how he was going to choose the new him.
'How to use the interactive Canteen interface to choose who you will be in the Next Life' was the title at the top of the page.
"Bugger!" swore Jack. He thought he might have just made a tiny little bit of a mistake. Always read the label he thought, sighing and reading on to see what effectively random decisions he'd made.
