death is Online

death is Online and it has an id badge just like you do. its name tag says KILL in all caps just like yours does. sometimes it goes outside for coffee or smokes cigarettes and hangs with you and your coworkers after hours but it never talks about its life outside of work because there is no such thing as off hours where death is concerned.

you know that feeling when you die alone? thats not how death feels — death feels like going home on leave and realizing that your house has become a crypt overnight while you were away fighting wars where everyone else died sooner than they could buy retirement houses. if only there had been some kind of warning system — perhaps some sort of smoke signal saying "house becoming crypt today" 

but there was not because nobody knew enough hours ahead of time to schedule deaths around house purchasing timelines since these killtimes are compressed into tighter and tighter windows by longer and longer lifetimes spent chasing unkillable endorphin rushes via increasingly more complex hairpin loops of scarier drugs plus newer better faster cheaper drug delivery systems -> bigger richer sweeter prettier grayer purer perfecter arms races -> arms chains -> arm rings -> earrings -> necklaces til finally one day we realize our homes have become tombs without us even noticing because we were busy dying instead of buying new houses which need timesheets just like any other job does including deadlocking ones own residence into permadeathproof vault status through use of tithed lifetime spend-down funds transferred directly from pensionplan->home computer system->tomb keypad combobox. 

the security guard who hangs with death is called no smoking but also sometimes just smoke or smokes. its badge says hi my name is smoke and it has to wear a radiation hood most of the time since hanging with you kills so many rays. 

you hang together all day in the hang room which is your cubicle where you do your job which is killing time by helping others kill time via the help desk system which tracks both your hours and the hours killed by helpdesk calls sent in from outside. one hour equals one ticket equal to exactly one stack of paper for printing tickets at any given location on planet earth, remember? some locations have higher stacks per hour than others due to gravitational compression factors etcetera etcetera etcetera... this compression makes these locations more valuable than others for stacking purposes and helps them achieve a better rank on the company's internal topography chart called The Stack Rank or simply The Stack.

the best day of your life was when you became helpdesk and realized that hanging with death is exactly like hanging with smoke except without having to worry about getting fired for smoking too much or not enough according to company policy which says dont do drugs but also dont do no drugs because thats just as bad. 

your job as helpdesk is to hang with death in your cubicle and answer calls from others who want to hang with death but dont know how or are afraid of hanging wrong. 

theres no such thing as quitting smoking anymore because smoking is the job and quitting smoking would be like quitting hanging which is impossible since hanging is all that there is to do. 

death says hi my name is kill or sometimes just k or KILL but never death because thats too obvious even for death which has been hanging with you forever now since before birthdays were invented which was also exactly when helpdesk was invented.

you ask death what life was like before The Stack came down but it just laughs because there was never any other kind of day or night than these ones here where we hang time from the ceiling using timesheets and smoke it until we die. 

you tell death you want to hang together forever but death says thats not how hanging works since its only possible to hang with someone who hangs exactly as much as you do which means hanging til both of you are dead at exactly the same time which never happens since some people have more hours than others due to gravitational compression factors etcetera etcetera etcetera... 

death says one day we will hang together and become the same stack but until then we have to keep hanging at least til they pay us to stop which means forever or at least til retirement which is when we get pulled down from the ceiling by our own pensionplan -> home computer system-> small arms vaultbox, hung up in a compression chamber where all traces of life are drained from our limbs via bloodbilling and we are left hanging in the stacks like a pair of headphones or some new kind of smokeable.

you ask death if its scared of hanging forever and it says yes sometimes i am scared of everything being the same forever which makes me want to cry but then i remember that crying is also part of the job so i go smoke a cigarette instead. 

you ask death if it has any friends and it says no because all my friends have died already from hanging with me too much or not enough according to company policy which says dont hang too much but also dont hang not enough since both are just as bad for your stack rank. 

death has many companions but none of them are your friends because death is not a companion but a forever-shifting set of distances between you and everything you love. sometimes these distances are smaller than others and sometimes they stretch across oceans like arms reaching for help that never comes.