In The Bureau of Eternal Rebirths

by Richard Lee Granvold

Morey Blinksky had been here many times before.

The Bureau of Eternal Rebirths, where the dead go on New Earth-917, was a vast, featureless expanse of led lighting, shinny linoleum, and   endless rows of souls connected to their cloud storage of digital records. The air smelled faintly of dust and cosmic indifference. Somewhere in the distance, a voice crackled in the air: “Now serving... 8,763,491,028.”

Morey sighed. That was at least three billion ahead of him.

He knew the drill. The first time he’d come here, he had been nervous, newly ghosted, dead, and confused. The twentieth time, he had been resigned. By the thousandth, he had started asking questions. By the six-thousandth-something, he was fed up.

 “Next!”

Morey shuffled forward and found himself at the counter, facing a humanoid entity with four eyes and an expression of deep, cosmic apathy. The nameplate on the desk read KLORG.

Klorg, the Vegan alien barely looked up from his holo-monitor. “Name?”

“Morey Blinksky.”

Klorg’s five eyes squinted at the holo-monitor, whipping his translucent snake like fingers upon the virtual keyboard, suspended in the air before him, with the enthusiasm of a burnt-out office worker three centuries past retirement. “Blinksky... Blinksky... Ah. Huh.”

Morey leaned forward. “Huh? What huh? That sounded like an important huh.”

Klorg exhaled through what Morey assumed were his nostrils. “You’ve been flagged with a Recurring Entity Code.”

Morey’s heart—or whatever served as his heart in this bureaucratic purgatory—sank. “Recurring Entity Code?”

Klorg pointed to the holo-monitor so Morey could see. His file was there, full of timestamps and incomprehensible celestial notations. One detail stood out: Number of Cycles: 6,978.

Morey felt sick. “I knew it.” He slammed a fist onto the counter. “I’ve been reliving the same life, over and over! Same parents. Same crummy childhood. Same dead-end job in insurance. I’ve tried everything—running away, moving to different planets, refusing to marry my wife—nothing changes! It all resets! And now you’re telling me it’s because of some clerical error?!”

Klorg nodded absently, scrolling through the file. “Yeah. Looks like you got the ol’ ‘Blinksky Loop.’ Rare, but not unheard of.”

Morey grabbed the edge of the counter. “Please. I can’t do it again. Anything else—make me a dog, a tree, a bacterium, I don’t care. Just not me. Not again.”

Klorg made a noncommittal noise, poking at the keyboard. “Alright, I’ll process a change request.” He touched a few virtual glowing buttons. “There. All fixed. Next!”

Relief surged through Morey. He was finally free. The world around him blurred, dissolved into brilliant light, and then—

Crying. He was crying.

A blurry face loomed over him, a nurse in scrubs. “Welcome to the world, little guy!” she cooed.

No. No, no, no.

A doctor’s voice rang out: “Congratulations, Mrs. Blinksky! It’s a boy. Again.”

Morey tried to scream, but all that came out was a newborn wail.

Back in the Bureau of Eternal Rebirths, Klorg sipped his coffee substitute, glancing at his holo-monitor. A blinking error message read SUBMISSION FAILED: FORM 24B NOT FILED.

Klorg squinted. “Huh. Wonder what that was about.”

Then he shrugged and moved on to the next soul in line.