Please say One

“Hell?” I glanced around. It was still the same blank office hallway. I couldn’t smell any brimstone or hear anyone getting tortured. In fact, it smelled quite sterile. And all I heard was the hum of some air conditioning. Was this just the entrance? “You’re joking, ri—”

“If you are here because your life service plan has expired,” she said in a cutting, enunciated voice, “please say One.”

“My what? What does that mean?” I asked. She continued staring dead on, as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

“If you would like to report an immersion disruption, please say Two.”

I waved a hand in front of her face. Nothing.

“If your plan benefits are not up to your satisfaction, please say Three.”

“How long is this gonna go? You haven’t even blinked the entire time I’ve—”

“Si se necesita español, diga Cuatro.” 

I buried my face in my hands and groaned. Maybe this was Hell. 

“For any other matters, please say Five.” 

“Five!” I slammed my hands on the desk for added emphasis. 

“One moment,” she said, not even flinching. This girl had nerves of steel. After a pause, she said, “Please continue to Room 2202, through the door to your right. A team member from Hell will assist you shortly. Thank you!”

She dismissed me with a nod. I looked to my right and sure enough, there was a plain black door. Was it always there? Whatever. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do.

I took one last glance at everyone in line before going through.

It was another hallway, this time with doors lining both walls. Each door had a number, starting with 2000 on my left and 2001 on my right. I took a couple steps to verify the pattern. Evens on the left, odds on the right. Room 2202 would be on my left, about a hundred doors down. I found it without any problem.

Like all the other doors, it was a plain, opaque black with a silver doorknob and the door number on the side. But this one had a sign hanging on it: Customer Service Department. When I pressed my ear to the door, I could hear murmuring and phones going off. Opening the door made the murmurs transform into full-blown voices. 

The room extended far to the sides and to the back, full of the same wood desks arranged in a tight grid. Each desk was armed with a telephone desk set, a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and customer service agent in a cheap headset. The room was ablaze with conversation, with each agent juggling between using the computer, punching buttons on the phone comms, and relaying info over the headset mic. Phones chirped every few seconds and people hurriedly answered them. This was the only place in here with a sense of urgency.

And it was definitely Hell.

All the agents were so preoccupied that they didn’t even notice my presence. I tiptoed to the desk nearest me, attended by a tan-skinned woman with bronze bangs and a ponytail. Her name tag said Margaret. She was entrenched in a conversation with her client. Just as I opened my mouth to ask something, she jabbed her index finger into the air to make me wait. She didn’t even take her eyes of the computer.

Her call wound down after a few minutes. After saying her scripted goodbyes she turned to me, and looked me over with scornful, electric yellow eyes.

They settled on my face. “So how can I help you?” she asked.

“Uh, hi. Margaret. Um… where am I?”

Margaret’s eyes continued to tear into me as I felt how stupid the question sound. And I knew the answer too. I just wanted to be sure.

“Hell,” she said.

“Huh. Hell. So I’m…” I shrugged. 

“Dead? Yes.”

Hearing those words made it set in for me. I tried not to think about all the people who would miss me or all the homework I had to do or all the websites in my uncleared browser history or the summation of all the things that made up my existence. But I did. Of course I did.

Margaret said nothing as I had that existential breakdown. Her scrunched up face indicated she was not equipped for this and would rather go back to answering customer service phone calls. Patient as a saint she was.

“H-How? How did it happen?” I rasped out.

She shrugged. “I wasn’t there. How should I know? Besides, people die suddenly all the time. It just happens.”

“But why am I in Hell?” I asked “Is it because I wasn’t Christian?”

“That is part of it, yes.”

I stared at her before she belly-laughed.

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding! Hell is the LSP for humans. We provide coverage for a whole bunch of different species. The fact it shares a name with some religions’ conception of an afterlife is a funny coinkydink.” Her phone rang and she reached out to answer it. “Maybe if you actually listened to your Reaper you would know that,” she said under her breath.

“My what?”

Her hand paused mid-air. She raised an eyebrow at me. “The person with the scythe? Dark robes? The one who brought you here?”

I shook my head. “Didn’t get one of those.”

Her eyebrow raised even higher. 

“Jeez. Sounds like you really are in need of some customer service.” She pressed the call reroute button and cracked her knuckles. “Name?”

“Daisuke Mizuhara.”

As she tapped away at her computer, I thought back to what she said previously. I leaned in a bit closer. “Did you say LSP?”

“Life service provider.” She glanced up at me. “It’s our job to provide a satisfying existence for sentient beings. Based on your plan, we put you into the corresponding world and let you live out a life.”

“And then what? What comes after?”

She laughed. “Don’t be naïve. There is no after.”

She continued searching as I chewed on that bit of info. A couple more calls came her way, but she rerouted them too.

“Hmmm okay.” She focused on the screen. “Daisuke Mizuhara?”

“Yes.”

“Born in S City, M Prefecture? October 16, 200X?” 

“Yeah.”

“With a My Number of 41—”

“Hey hey! Don’t say it out loud!” I glanced around at everyone else in the Customer Service Department.

Margaret scoffed. “Or what? Some ghost will try to open a bank account in your name?”
She continued to rattle off digits. I sighed.

“Yes. That’s my My Number.”

She leaned back with her arms crossed. “Hm.”

“What is it?”

She looked at me with increasing suspicion. “You shouldn’t be dead. It says here you still have more than 60 years left in your current plan.” Her brows furrowed. “This ain’t good. Sorry, there must have been an error in Reaper scheduling.”

Margaret drummed her fingers against the desk as she thought of something. Then she snapped her fingers.

“We apologize for any inconvenience caused by our error.” The practiced words flowed out of her mouth. “As compensation, we will upgrade your basic plan to premium at no extra cost.”
I blinked. “Upgrade?”

“Yeah. Basically you still have some years left in you, so you can live them out in a better, cooler world than your previous one.”

“Can’t you just put me back on Earth?”

She shook her head. “Nope. Sorry. Earth is a permadeath resource management sim. Very basic and barebones with lots of mechanical interactions and emergent behaviors.” I nodded as if I understood what any of that mean. “Once you’re outta there, you’re outta there. But! You get to spend those 60 years somewhere better.”

Her phone began to ring again. The lines around Margaret’s mouth deepened as she frowned. 

“Look, a premium plan means benefits like 24/7 customer support, so if you have any additional questions or problems, just call our line. But helping you has put me behind my call quota, so hurry up and pick.”

She pulled out a large binder full of laminated pages. Each contained an picture of what looked like a video-game with some bullet points underneath.

“Okay, here are your options for the premium plan. We’ve got Triple Love Deluxe, that’s a harem high school dating sim rhythm game. Recently Honor-Stained Medals has been popular, it’s an MMORPFPS, which stands for massively multiplayer online role-playing first person shooter.” She rapidly named a couple more games, which all sounded like buzzword soup to me. Her urgency and rushed words made it impossible to pick anything. “And there’s Quest of Heroes—”

Wait. That couldn’t be right.

“Quest of Heroes?” I asked.

She nodded. “You got it.” 

And before I could clear up the misunderstanding, she punched in some stuff into her computer and slammed the Enter key. And I started blacking out once again.