Chapter 1: Please Hold for Reincarnation

Milo Park knew he was dead because the hold music was better than anything his company had ever paid for.

There were violins involved. Actual violins, not the royalty-free synth strings that looped every forty-three seconds and made customers angrier by the minute. A harp trickled notes like water over polished stone. Somewhere, a flute wandered through the melody with the confidence of a bird that had never once been asked to verify its billing address.

Milo floated in a luminous gray nothing, weightless and painless for the first time in years, listening to the most beautiful customer service queue in the universe.

Then a warm, sexless voice spoke directly into the center of his skull.

Thank you for your patience. Your soul is very important to us. Please remain in the transmigration queue, and a divine representative will be with you shortly.

Milo opened his eyes.

Or at least he thought he did. There were no eyelids. No body, either. That should have concerned him more than it did, but after twelve years in call center operations, Milo had developed a talent for accepting absurdity in manageable pieces.

Step one: assess environment.

Step two: identify stakeholders.

Step three: resist the urge to scream until after the meeting.

He looked down, saw nothing, and sighed without lungs.

Okay. Dead, probably.

The last thing he remembered was the vending machine in the break room.

It had been a big, old, stubborn machine with flickering fluorescent panels and a talent for stealing dollar bills. For three months, it had eaten coins, trapped chips, and flashed an error code that nobody in facilities seemed willing to acknowledge. Milo had submitted six maintenance requests, two follow-ups, and one photograph of a Snickers bar dangling behind the glass like a hostage.

Nobody came.

So at 2:17 a.m., after a shift full of irate customers, three no-call-no-show agents, and a supervisor group chat where the regional manager had typed “let’s circle back” like a curse, Milo had stood before the vending machine with a plastic badge still clipped to his wrinkled shirt and whispered, “You and I both know one of us is leaving this room with peanut butter crackers.”

He had rocked the machine.

The machine had rocked back.

There had been a metallic groan, a sudden terrible tilt, and an intimate moment in which Milo Park, thirty-two years old, supervisor of Tier Two Escalations, realized he had chosen combat with an appliance and lost.

Now he hovered in the afterlife with immaculate hold music and no snacks.

“Figures,” Milo said, discovering that he could speak. His voice sounded clearer than usual, less coffee-burned and sleep-deprived. “Even heaven has a queue.”

The music paused.

A chime rang out, bright as a silver bell struck inside his thoughts.

Your estimated wait time is: regrettably complicated.

Milo stared into the endless gray.

“That is not a time.”

We apologize for the inconvenience.

“Do you?” Milo asked.

The gray void flickered.

A crack of gold opened in front of him, widening like a seam in reality being pulled apart from the other side. Light spilled through it, thick and radiant, carrying the scent of rain on hot stone, incense, old parchment, and panic.

Definitely panic.

The hold music jumped half a beat, as if someone had yanked out a cable.

Please hold for reincarnation.

“Wait, what?”

The gold seam swallowed him.

Milo fell upward through a tunnel of stars.

There was no wind, but he felt speed. Galaxies stretched past like streaks on a wet windshield. Constellations shaped like dragons, crowns, wheels, and screaming tax accountants spun in the dark. He glimpsed worlds: an ocean planet with cities built on the backs of turtles; a red desert where glass towers sang; a moon cracked open to reveal blue fire inside.

Then the universe snapped shut.

Milo landed face-first on something hard and cold.

His body returned all at once.

Knees. Teeth. Fingers. Bad lower back. The dull ache in his right wrist from too many hours using a mouse. A stomach that remembered vending-machine coffee. He groaned into a floor so polished it reflected his defeated expression back at him.

“Ow,” he said.

Somebody gasped.

“He arrived conscious.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”