The sheer indeterminate nature of the darkness that I was currently floating in bothered me. I’d been an avowed atheist all my life, and my first ex-wife who’d been a dedicated southern baptist had explained that I would surely burn in the fiery pits of hell for all eternity, whereas I’d always imagined death to be an absolute end of the freakish bit of luck called life. Guess we were both wrong. Hope she found her chorus of heavenly angels though.

The thing about not having a body and floating in a dark abyss in a state of pure thought is that it gets old fast. I think… since that is pretty much all I could do. Mentally I told myself I’d been here eons, but it could very well have been only a couple of hours or days.

During that time I did all the standard stuff. I went over the events of my life. I relived the happy moments and celebrated the deaths of the relatively few people I didn’t like. I speculated on how the world ended. I spent a lot of time trying to move around in the infinite nothingness I now inhabited — but since there were no points of reference, I could have set myself to be zooming at a million miles a second for all I knew.

Then just when I thought I might go insane, except I was pretty sure that it was impossible to get looney here, a light that grew and grew out of nowhere surrounded me. It was the light of creation. Of pureness. Of something happening after all this time.

The light swelled and then suddenly I was standing in a long hallway. I was in a body. A human body. About as generic a human body as imaginable, in that I had arms and legs and ahead, but no hair, and no sexual organs or any distinguishable facial features.

Department store manakins had more character than I did then.  After the eons (or hour, or days, or weeks) floating aimlessly through a void of pure thought, I desperately wanted to get laid, and my current body was useless for that. I didn’t even have a mouth or a sphincter.

But I was in a hallway, which implied that the hallway went somewhere. More importantly, having legs and being in a hallway implied that I could go somewhere, maybe even that I was meant to go somewhere.

So I stubbornly turned around and examined the wall behind me for secret passage or leavers or hidden panels. There were none. Then I slowly walked forward, checking the floors, ceilings, and walls for anything… well, I couldn’t say out of the ordinary, since everything that had happened to me since I’d “died” had been out of the ordinary.

Then it happened. About 200 yards down the way I’d been going a voice filled the air.

“On behalf of the Xa’dar Corporation, we would like to extend our deepest apologies for your early planetary termination. One of our junior executives was sloppy with some calculations, and inadvertently caused all of the hydrogen in your world’s water to ignite. Your species will undoubtedly be happy to know that this being has been put on administrative leave and its pay has been docked.

“Following intergalactic law, we have spent the last 3 quij examining your history, languages, and cultures in order to properly re-assign your species to planets friendly to your kind.

“To answer your standard questions. No, we're not God, or Gods, or Devils, or Demons. And any attempt to treat us as such — as flattering as they may be — are against intergalactic law and will be punished severely, though our Lawyers insist we indicate that we must insist that this punishment is in no ways Divine in origin.

“Secondly, if your species would like to file a greivance against our corporation for the early annihilation of your planet, please have all members of your race elect a representative and file the paperwork, according to intergalactic law, by noon Vargus the 341-34 at the United Galactic Federation headquarters on the lovely planet Iiiaps which orbits the star I believe your species calls MACS J1149+2223.

“Thirdly after extensive research on your cultures, we believe we have found a method for reassignment that will cause the least distress to all individuals. Please step through the door at the end of the hall when this recorded message finishes and be prepared to be processed. Come to the light.”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

A light turned on at the far end of the hallway in an area that had been shrouded in darkness before. Instead of turning around, I chose to backtrack the entire way double checking the entire section of the hallway I’d already been through.

The only thing left was to turn around and walk into the light, which in this case was simply a large wooden door — the kind you would find in any midwestern home leading to any midwestern basement — with a glowing sign above it says “Re-assignment room” in the same casual cheery font that millions of Exit signs had been made on.

I opened the door not knowing what to expect, but even still I was surprised.

The room was definitely a basement. From the seventies style panel walls to the shag carpet, to the wet bar and a black and white TV that was playing “The Dukes of Hazard” apparently dubbed into Polish at a low volume. There was a poster of a woman with a tennis racket and her butt exposed on one of the walls. And another poster of Shaggy, Scoobie and the Mystery Mobile. A third showed a half-naked photograph of Burt Reynolds. He was very hairy.

In the middle of the room was a round-table, and unexpectedly at the head of the table facing me was a large fire-breathing dragon reading what appeared to be a D&D manual, behind a D&D screen. Sitting in one of the four orange chairs that surrounded the table was a nymph wearing a gossamer dress. Behind the Dragon were four burly Orc warriors with clubs. They were all looking at me expectantly.

Nymph said “As a representative of the Xa’dar Corporation legal team, please take a seat. After years of careful and might I say costly research, our anthropological department indicates that this is what your species considers most familiar when they think of character generation. While we advanced species might find all of this quaint,” the nymph gestured to the decor “you primitive species are due to your barbaric traditions. So please have a seat so we can get this process over with.

The Nymph then opened a bag of Doritos cool ranch chips and placed them into the center of the table.  She reached out and grabbed a handful and in a very un Nymph like way, crammed them into her mouth.  The Dragon puffed some smoke from his nostrils, then grabbed some nacho chips as well, but put them on a napkin beside the DM screen he was behind.

“Currently you are disembodied soul number 1,518,342,113 to be reassigned. We still have several billion more souls to reassign — you cannot understand how much your species is costing the company — so it will be a very busy and expensive quarter for us. So let’s get this over as quickly as possible and with a minimum of cost and fuss.”

I tried to ask a question, but not having a mouth, this proved difficult.

The Dragon looked up from behind his D&D screen. He put down nine 10-sided dice — one in every color of the visible spectrum, and two that I could not see but knew were there in infrared and ultraviolet — and in what I imagine was a Dragonly voice that seemed to echo through the cosmos said one word… “ROLL”

I picked up the dice. They were heavy with portent and meaning. Nine dice meant, let’s see, a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance to get any number.

I rolled the red one. It came up 0.

I rolled the orange one. It came up 0

I rolled again, this time yellow. It came up 0

What the fuck. Either this was freakishly lucky or freakishly awful or I was being set up. Either way, the dragon was impatiently tapping his claw against the linoleum of the table.

I rolled the green. It came up 0

I looked over at the Nymph and she just looked bored. Then I remembered. In D&D a 00 might be the highest roll possible, but a 01 was the lowest roll, and I still had more dice to throw.

I rolled the Blue. It came up 0

I rolled the Indigo. It came up 0

Why did the Dragon and Nymph still seem bored? Was this not some sort of cosmic fluke. Six 0’s in a row. Was that not a 1 in a million chance? Then I remembered them saying that they’d already processed over a billion people. 1 in a million chances happened all the time. These were just numbers were they not. Poisson’s distribution.

Besides I had no real understanding what any of these numbers actually meant. For all, I knew, I could be rolling 0’s for all of my stats and I could be the single weakest, least intelligent person on my new homeworld.

I rolled again. The Violet. It came up 0

Trembling, I looked in my and couldn’t see the Infrared and Ultraviolet dice, but knew they were there.

I rolled the Ultraviolet one. It came up 0

Then I tried to look at the last die in my hand the Infra Red. I rolled it. It came up a 9

The Dragon said, “INTERESTING.”

The Nymph said “Not really. This reassignment has already taken too long. Paid goons, send him on his way.”

I hadn’t noticed it as I was rolling, but two of the orcs with clubs had stepped behind me.  One of the Orcs tried to grab a handful of nacho chips.  The Nymph gave him a look. Together, the Orcs grabbed me by my arms. I started to struggle, and even dislodged an arm and managed to throw a fist at one of the two Orcs holding me. A third hit me over the head, and I stopped struggling.

Then the Orcs dragged me to a nebulous black void that had opened up in the wall, and without even a bit of sympathy or remorse threw me into the void.