Call me Ishmael… Is what I'd say if my name mattered to anyone. But since no one knows or cares about my name, not even myself, I'll just tell my story.
I was an average American millennial, with a job, credit card, and friends on social media that I never saw in person. It was a good life.
One thing that set me apart from the average guy was my love of technology. I didn't understand how it worked, or why, but that didn't matter to me at all. Every minute of every day of my life was spent in front of a computer screen, working, gaming, reading, watching movies, listening to music, everything I did was done on a computer, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.
Now, if you are wondering why everything is in the past tense, it's because I appear to have died. I'm not sure how, or why, but I am, without a doubt, deader than a doornail and without a corporeal form.
Looming in front of me in the midst of an infinite white void was what appeared to be a judges bench. It was well over fifteen feet high, with depictions of gods from the Norse, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Celtic, and various other pantheons that I didn't recognize, carved into the dark wood. There were also some images of items that people replace gods with, such as money, power, or fame, but they were shunted to the corner of the paneling as if the gods were telling them to know their place.
"Next soul please." A tired and slightly nasally voice came from the judges seat. I looked up to see a young woman with blond hair in her mid twenties with glasses at least an inch thick, working a computer seemingly plucked from the mid 90's.
"Mr. John Smith?" The judge asked in a deadpan voice without looking away from her screen.
"That would be me, ma'am." An older gentleman who was standing behind me spoke up and raised his hand. This seemed to catch the judges attention.
"Wait a sec." The judge said, a NYC accent starting to appear in her voice. "Did you cut the line? Bailiff, did this soul cut in line or skip over other souls?"
"No, your honor." The bailiff said ceremoniously. "As per your instructions, any soul caught cutting in line or pushing others aside have been sent to purgatory AKA working retail on Black Friday. This soul has neither cut in line or pushed others aside, he was actually quite polite to the line monitors."
"Well then who is he? Nevermind, get the pad." The judge tapped the desk nervously as the bailiff procured a device to identify me. "I swear, if you're a mole from St. Peter, tryna to get me in trouble then I'm gonna…"
"Send me to hell?" I offered jokingly. The judge stared at me like I was an idiot.
"What? No. I'd send you to be Zeus' butler. He keeps asking them to hide his kids and look after them and Hera keeps frying 'em. Both the kids and the butlers. Last time I checked, it's rated #12 in the worst afterlife jobs."
The bailiff finally found what he was looking for and approached me with a flat black square. "Please put your hand on the device and don't take it off until I tell you."
Since the bailiff looked and sounded like he might ask about a Mr. Anderson, with a full suit and dark sunglasses, I quickly followed his instructions. The pad device felt oddly warm to the touch, but I didn't see any other reaction from it. However it seemed to send the relevant information over to the judge's computer.
"Shit. Shit. Shit! This is bad. This is very bad! This is very very bad!" Whatever the judge was seeing on her computer screen had sent her into a panic. "You're not supposed to die for at least another fifty years!"
"Um, maybe you could send me back?" I hesitantly asked. There were more than a few tv shows that I hadn't gotten to see the ending of yet and more than a few sandwiches that I wanted to eat.
The judge scoffed at my suggestion. "Sorry, pal. When you died, your body was obliterated. There's nothing to send you back to." She began swearing again, and took a swig from a flask that poets would've said contained ambrosia but smelled like cheap whiskey.
Eventually the alcohol took effect and it seemed to cool down the judge a little. Now instead of swearing incessantly, she was just glaring at me while tapping her desk as she contemplated her options. The bailiff was the one who broke the silence.
"Your honor, would it not be most efficient to simply shred the errant soul or toss it into oblivion?" The bailiff said that with no emotion towards me, simply speaking as if I was bread that had gotten a little moldy.
"Efficient!?" The judge shrieked out. "Do you know how much paperwork is involved in shredding a soul?!" She snapped her fingers and a literal mountain of paperwork the size of Mt. Everest appeared behind her with a boom. "Does that look 'efficient' to you, Bailiff? No, the only thing to do is reincarnate this soul and hope he doesn't pop back up when the boss is here."
After another snap of the fingers, the paperwork vanished. The judge then turned to me with a scowl. "You, dingus, what do you want to reincarnate as? Only rule is that you can't die for at least a couple centuries. That's when the boss get's back and I don't wanna be around when he realizes I skipped out on the paperwork for you dying before your time."
A couple options popped up in my head. There were a couple different species of trees and reptiles that I knew of that lived that long. But then I remembered that it was questionable if Earth would make it a couple more centuries, so I discarded those options and kept thinking. The only other options on the table were from fantasy, and since this was how a lot of anime started I decided to take a chance on it.
"Maybe you could reincarnate me as an elf? They usually live for a pretty long time." My suggestion did not get the reception I was hoping for though. The judge started snickering, then full on laughing at me. Pounding the bench with her fist in amusement with tears streaming down from her eyes.
Eventually she settled down and looked down at me with a grin. "Sorry, pal. Have you seen your browser history? Your soul is nowhere near pure enough to be made into an elf! But I like your thinking. So, I'm sending you down as a dwarf, and to make sure you don't come back for a while I'll pump a little extra power into your soul. Just to let you know though, that puts you at risk of having your soul be devoured and will attract monsters. Maybe if I'm lucky your soul will become a snack and I won't have to see or hear from you again. Buh bye now!" The judge slammed a button on her keyboard and the floor opened beneath me, causing me to fall into an infinite black void with a cartoonish scream of panic until my consciousness faded.