In his dreams, he was flooded with memories about the rise of Psychopomp. When the first person died, the news hit like a bomb. Like the waves of an earthquake, the news spread. Someone had died. For the first time in centuries the people were filled with this dark sense of dread. Some had waved away the concerns of others, said that it had been an error, a malfunction, nothing more. Maybe it had been a coping mechanism, to live in ignorance. Others had known since then what was about to come.

  At first, she had just been a black silhouette in the night, a phantom that could never be caught. But then she exclaimed to the world who she was, she was Psychopomp, the master of death, who had decided that it was her right to be judge and jury in deciding who lived and more importantly, who died. As excuse for her revolting actions she exclaimed that she only took the lives of those who had already wanted to die. Her lies seemed to be convincing. She soon gained followers and in the years that followed the streets were filled with her neon devils. The white buildings tagged with her marks, broadcasting screens hacked to show her face calling people to join her syndicate. People fearful and suspicious, worrying whether their coworker or their neighbor might be a follower of Psychopomp.

  He was brought back to the day he found the banner with the pink skull in the desk drawer of his partner cop. He had seen shame in his eyes mixed with a bit of fear. Still, when Dante asked him about it he had said: ‘I think she’s right.’ The sentence had drilled a hole in his heart. ‘I think she’s right.’ ‘Leave. Leave and never come back.’, he had told the traitor. And the traitor had left. And he never came back. Officer Clay had come to replace him, but it had not been the same. She could not be trusted. No one could be trusted.

  Dante woke up in a sweat. Slowly, his memories of the previous day came back to him. He was actually here, chained up in Psychopomp’s den.

  At his feet he found a translucent black platter filled to the brim with breakfast bites. Where did a prosecuted criminal find all of this? He was about to throw the platter in the wall again, when he felt his stomach rumble. There was about a 90% chance that it was poisoned. However, there was a a 100% chance his body would die if Psychopomp decided to keep him here for longer than a few days and he did not consume anything. He of course, would live to see another day in a new body, but he would return to the capital. It would mean losing his chance to finally capture her.

  With the pink plastic cutlery he was given, he poked around in his food for a while before reluctantly putting a piece in his mouth. It tasted...pretty decent. Who knew Death was a good cook.

  ‘Are you enjoying your breakfast?’ Her hands in her pockets, Psychopomp leaned lazily against the door post. Today, she was dressed in leisurely attire, pink sweatpants, sneakers and a black hoodie. Almost like a rowdy teenager, if you forgot the fact that she was a global threat. ‘Like any person locked up in an insane person’s lair would.’ ‘That’s great to hear.’ She never seemed phased in the slightest, but which psychopath would be.

  ‘While you gobble up your breakfast, how about I continue my story?’ When he did not answer, she continued: ‘I take that as a yes.’ She started striding in rounds around the room. ‘So where was I?’

  ‘Ah yes, I found myself in a strange new place. The moment I entered your world, I felt like I was blinded. Your world was so white. Most of everything was made of that white, synthetic material. Genius to make it dust and dirt repellant. If no one had thought about that, your planet would have been fifty shades of beige by now. But when I first landed, it felt like I was being held in a giant hospital. The white was offset with a blueish gray and in little corners between the buildings you could find a bit of green from the shrubbery, but I saw mostly white. Everything operated like a well-oiled machine. People walked only where they were supposed to walked, no one ran and no one dawdled and all knew exactly where to go and where to be. Drivers were polite, but efficient. I guess that’s a good way to describe your planet in general, polite but efficient.

  In that modern jungle of highways crossing over head, hovering cars rushing between countless skyscrapers, I felt lost. I’d been a village-girl for quite a while then. But it was mesmerizing in a sense, the way that this world functioned, each part like a part of a supercomputer. Everything fit in perfectly, so I stood out like a sore thumb. It took five minutes for people to recognize me as a suspicious figure. I had to retreat to my ship immediately. Hidden in the mountains, I looked out of a window to the capital city. And I remember thinking about how I would ever execute the task I was assigned.

  After I fell asleep, I found myself there again, in the land of the lost. The woman approached me again, but she seemed different. In a way, she seemed more...alive, I guess would be the best way to describe it. ‘You’re here.’, she said. ‘I am.’, I replied. ‘What do I do now?’ No reply. Of course she would not answer me. I sighed, when I heard her say: ‘Try to understand the system.’

  Try to understand I did. Every day I would leave my ship and bit by bit I investigated the city. Luckily, I had taken quite a few provisions and other useful resources with me, otherwise I would probably not have survived. Even then, it was pretty hard to stay unnoticed. I managed to steal some clothes and other props that would make me look like you, but still, I definitely did not act like you. So I taught myself how to speak like you, how to walk like you, to follow all of your rules and all of your habits.’

  ‘Hmmmphh.’ Dante could not help the sarcastic remark from leaving his mouth. ‘If you call what you’re doing now “fitting in”, then I think you should look up the definition of the word in a dictionary.’ Psychopomp grinned. ‘Just because I may be more pompous in my self-display now, doesn’t mean I don’t know how to adapt to your norms. You gotta know the rules before you can break them.’

  ‘Anyway, before I was so rudely interrupted, I was telling you about how I was trying to learn about your society. One of the most important aspects of your society, is your immortality. Immortality is not an unknown concept to me, having lived for centuries myself as well. While I am an immortal being myself, I realized soon that your immortality was different from mine. As you might have guessed, while I am immortal, I am not invincible. If I drive of a cliff or decide to go swimming with the sharks, I die and I do so for eternity.

  In a short time after I had immigrated to your planet, I would see three people try to make an end to it. As I later learned, that was a bit of an exceptional case. However, it still made a few things clear to me. One, people on this planet were absolutely not as happy as the government wanted to make it seem. Two, the police and bystanders were remarkably casual about the situation.

  I would learn in my dreams why that was the case. To my astonishment, I saw those people who had tried to end it again in my dreams, roaming around the endless fog. They were very much still alive. I had some more difficult conversations with my guide in the fog, in which I tried to ask tangible questions to get somewhat tangible answers from her. From those conversations I learned about how your beefed up life support systems work. That you are all connected to the cloud by a nanochip, which constantly updates the database with an exact representation of your chemical makeup at that moment. That in that way there is always a digital blueprint of your body available so that if your body were to perish or be damaged, the bioprinter would be able to print a new version of you. That way, no one ever has to die.

  I also learned that this system needs an excessive amount of resources and energy to maintain, which leaves little to spare and means that your day to day lives are still spend in relative simplicity. Besides that, it also means that there is a clear limit to the amount of people that are able to inhabit this planet. And since no one ever dies, the government cannot afford new inhabitants to come into existence. If I am correct, the last time someone was born here was around 350 years ago. Which means you barely have a sense left of what it means to grow older and for children and elderly to exist.’

  ‘Which is how it should be’, he interrupted her again. ‘The children and the elderly were vulnerable. We have taken away that vulnerability, so that everyone can feel in control. So that all can feel empowered in their own body.’ ‘How can you feel empowered if you don’t know what it’s like to be vulnerable?’ ‘You turn what I say against me, because you know you have no argument to make and you know that you’re doing repulsive things.’ Jumping from one leg to the other, she replied: ‘And you’re using my words against me, because you don’t want to consider that I might be doing the right thing.’ She was right about that, who wants to consider that a serial killer is doing the right thing? No one who had even a vague sense of morality.

  Without giving him a chance to answer, she continued: ‘I guess the next thing I should tell you, is about how I first killed a man.’

  In one of the first months I had arrived on your planet, I went out for a sort of stroll to clear my head, or so I thought. It turned out my subconsciousness was leading me elsewhere. In a daze, I walked and I walked, unaware of my surroundings, until someone asked: 'Are you here to visit someone?' I looked up while I slowly returned to the present. A polite nurse smiled amicably at me from behind a hospital counter. 'Uh.' I stumbled for an answer when I happened to glance at a poster at the wall. It showed a woman happily hugging someone in a hospital bed. Both were smiling widely. "Give someone new pep in their step.", it said

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  The nurse noticed me looking at the poster. 'Oh, you're here as a volunteer. To help encourage those who are having a hard time, right?' 'Yeah, right.', I said relieved. 'Well that's commendable of you. It's been a while since we had visitors outside of family and friends of the patients. But I think we should all be like you. Helping those who are unable to carry on for a while. In the end, they'll all come around and be happy to still be alive.' I nodded, which was met with another smile. She handed me a visitors pass to clip onto my shirt. 'Just walk straight down the hall through the big doors.'

  Somehow as I passed the big doors, the cheerful mood seemed to shift. People were carrying less smiles. Some huddled together in groups, shifting away from my gaze. I felt myself grow cold as I reached an elevator which was operated by a huge guard. He took a glance at my pass and said: 'Visitor huh? Haven't gotten to see any of those in a while. Which level do you want to go to?' 'To those who need the most pep in their step, I guess.', I mumbled. He grinned, ice-cold. 'You rather than me. Floor one coming right up.'

  I could feel the tension rise in my chest as the elevator closed. What was I doing here? I should be leaving immediately. What even was this place? But before I could think about that some more, the elevator doors opened with a screech.

  What I saw filled me with a black dread. The room was filled to the brim with hospital beds and in those beds laid dozens of bodies. At first glance I thought they were corpses, eyes blank and glassy as those of a dead fish, immovable, limbs spread over the edge of the bed as if someone had tossed them there.

  And then one of them blinked. And another's leg twitched. And another sucked in air through its teeth, a terrifying sound. All of it was in stark contrast to the room, which was colored a baby blue with red and yellow flowers and laid engilded in sunlight. A fresh breeze came in through the window, but it wasn't enough to wash away the stench in the room. Like something was rotting.

  A horrific feeling gnawed at my chest, the sense of hopelessness and mental death that came from this room. As if they were corpses scratching away at my sanity. This was worse than my nightmares, my visions. This was real. They were already gone but kept trapped here. I asked myself why they weren't jumping out of the window in masses, until I realized that that wouldn't solve anything. Connected to the cloud, machines would have started fabricating a new body before the old one had even grown cold.

  My heart had dropped to the bottom of my stomach and I felt again that sense of extreme agoraphobia, when a hand touched my shoulder. I jumped backwards. The hand belonged to a woman. 'Did not mean to scare you. Her voice sounded remarkably sharp, nothing like the sounds of pain that came from the others in the room. Pepper and salt colored hair swooped across her forehead ending just above her hazel eyes. Physically, she looked young, everyone looked young in this place, but her eyes showed his true age.

  'What does the living person do in the place of the dead?', she asked. Startled I knew nothing to answer but: 'I don't know.' The woman nodded. 'That seems like a fair answer.' She took a seat on her bed. Only then did I realize she was chained to a bed pole. No one else was chained like this. She noticed me looking. 'They don't want to let me roam around anymore. Unlike all the other poor fellows in here, I might actually do some damage.' 'What do you mean with damage?' She looked at me. 'I might actually figure out a way to kill all of us. For good.'' I looked back at her. 'And how do you think you'd ever achieve such a feat?' She blinked confused. 'That doesn't disgust you for me to say that?' She smiled to herself. 'You're here to do the same, aren't you?'

  Then she started to grin, slowly laughing harder and harder. 'Maybe the angel of death is finally here to liberate us.' In a moment the sanity in her face was muddied with a neck hair raising craziness. Then it was back to normal. In an attempt to break the tension, I said: 'Well, I have no idea how I would be able to...uh...let you go. I don't know if it's even possible.' 'Everything's possible. Though the people who keep us trapped here are immortal, they are still limited beings.'

  Suddenly, an agonizing howl sounded from the back of the room. Startled, my heartbeat shot up again. This place was not good for my stress levels. I looked at the source of the scream. A man was digging his fingernails into his scalp. The sight made me want to vomit. I ran towards him, screaming for him to stop. When I tried to grab his arms, he started to throw his fists left and right. Once, he nearly hit me in the eye with his elbow.

  'It's no use.', the woman remarked. 'To say he lost his mind would be an understatement. He was one of the first to lose himself.' From years of self-defense training I had needed to survive on other planets, I managed to twist his arms on his back. He looked at me defeated, with tears at the rims of his eyes. I don't know why, but for a moment he reminded me of a little child that had lost their parent. I started stroking his hair. It was awfully sticky and crunchy, but he seemed to calm down a bit. Then, like a small infant, he started to cry. I don't know if you know how hard it is to witness someone being reduced to this state. It's an experience that never leaves you, that's for sure.

  When I took a closer look at him, I realized I recognized him from my dream. Covered from head to toe in tattoos of birds, I’d recognize him out of thousands. And out of nowhere, I knew what to do. Like a gut instinct I knew what needed to be done. It was at the same time one of the easiest and hardest things I have ever done. I let him move on. Somehow, I think he knew what was happening, because he closed his eyes and let out a sigh. With a hint of a smile, he fell backwards into my arms. I was speechless and reality seemed to pass me by, until I heard the woman say: 'You did it.' Before I could say anything, a siren started blaring. Somehow, in my panic I managed to escape.'

  His face muscles hurt from being contorted in disgust. ‘You must have felt pretty accomplished, didn’t you?’ Rubbing her face with her hand, she said: ‘If you think so, you must have heard nothing of what I said so far.’ When their eyes met, he looked away. With a sigh, she continued.

  'After I'd done it, I tried to make my way back to my ship again, dreading that the police would find me. Rain was pouring down on me and mist made it unable for me to see more than a few meters ahead of me.

  As I made my way up the mountain, the wind forced a few rocks above me to get loose. The movement created a small avalanche of stone and mud to glide my way. I stumbled and lost my grip, tumbling down the mountain. With loud thunks my body was smashed against the group again and again. The edge of the rock formation came closer and closer, a drop of a hundred feet awaiting me. As my lower slid of the edge, I tried to grip something, anything, to hold onto. Just in time, I took hold of a solid piece of rock. My body aching, I pulled myself back onto the slope. Panting, I shuffled away from the edge.

  Meanwhile, the world around me seemed to be in a state of absolute chaos. It was one of those days, where the universe just seems to give you the middle finger. And at that moment I was just too exhausted, mentally, physically and emotionally, to be able to deal with it. I stood there, soaked to the bone and like an absolute idiot I screamed, to no one in particular: "What do you want from me?!" When logically, no answer came in return I continued: "I did what you asked! I had to kill someone today!" My hands were in my hair and my sanity about depleted. "What's your problem with me? Why do you always have to pick on me? Why did I have to go here? Isn't it someone else's fucking turn to clean up the mess? To swipe up everyone else's crap?" I'll spare you some of the details, but I swore my guts out and damned Fate to hell. I swore I'd personally find him, even if I had to drag myself over there and do unspeakable things to him. Eventually, I sat there, still panting, still aching, but out of angry words to scream at the air. Then I stood up and I walked home.'

  When she was quiet for a long time, he was unsure about whether she had taken a pause or had stopped her story all together. Eventually, he was the one that said: ‘You could have stopped. You could have stopped at every time. If any of what you said is true, still, you could have stopped killing people. So either you went insane or all of this is just to deceive me, to cover up the fact that you’re a maniacal killer.’

  For an instant, Psychopomp’s careless exterior seemed to break. Her face darkened as she approached him quickly. ‘If only there was a way to let you know what it felt like to be in that situation, to truly feel what I felt.’

  And suddenly she was so close, so close. Distracted, paying little attention. If there was ever a chance to get to her, this was it.

  In a swift motion he grabbed her hair and pulled her toward him. He heard her gasp. In an impulse, he wrung his other arm around her neck and started to choke her. She resisted, struggled in his grasp. Adrenaline rushed through him and the world seemed to slow down. Now he got her. She only needed to lose consciousness. Only another moment. Suddenly, he felt a sharp ache in his groin region. The air left his chest and tears sprung in his eyes. In shock, he let go of her. As he crouched in pain, he saw her regain balance and swing back her arm. Then everything became black again.

  When he regained consciousness, again, the headache was even worse than the first time. The back of his head was starting to feel like a bumpy road. He looked up to, yet again, find Psychopomp looking at him. He would expect to see a pungent death stare or at least a cold look, but no. The worst look she could have given him was this exact look, a dashing smile. 'You think you are the first one to have tried to ambush me?'

  Hell hath no fury like he felt in that moment. Yanking at his chain, he dashed toward her, teeth bared. He could still see red marks around her neck where he had seized her. But somehow, instead of flinching back even an inch, she stayed just where she was. There was only a thumb of distance between their faces, but still she did not back away. And without looking away for a second, she said: 'Weeds don't perish that easily, I'm afraid.'

  For a moment her face was cold sober. Then it morphed back into a cheeky smile. 'So, where was I with my story?' And she went back to pacing the room, like nothing had ever happened. He could not take it anymore, not another second. 'You're crazy. You're absolutely insane!', he shouted. 'Maybe.' 'Maybe?! You're delusional if you think any of this is right! You should be locked up in a coffin and thrown to the bottom of the sea.' She turned around to face him and with a pensive look she stared at him. 'And why is that?' 'Because you kill people!', he screamed at the bottom of his lungs. 'No, no that isn't it.' He was about to die of anger. This was absolute madness. She continued: 'If that was your reason for being this enraged with me, then you wouldn't have been so careless about apprehending me. No, this is personal.' His blood grew cold. His breathing slowed to a crawl. 'Who did I kill, that was that close to you?' His heart stopped. He looked up. 'You took away the love of my life.' For the first time he saw her flinch, quickly. So she still felt something. He hoped it was pain. He knew it was not enough. He continued: 'She was called Eurydice.'