Long ago, people lived forever, and when they were done with everything they had wanted to do, they would take a bus to Bognor Regis, on the English south coast, and sleep in small seaside bed and breakfast hotels. They would spend the days walking along the seafront, possibly crunching along the shingle. Hundreds of them to begin with, but eventually millions, and then millions of millions. Needless to say, Bognor Regis became uncomfortably crowded, and there was nowhere to buy an ice cream or even a postcard. All of the Bed and Breakfasts had “No Vacancies” signs up.
I was only a boy, but I could see that this was untenable. “What if,” I suggested, “We make it so that instead of going to Bognor by bus, people who have finished just stop existing, and rot down. And what if we make it so it’s always been like this?”
“You are seven years old,” they said to me. “It will be many years before you take the bus to Bognor. Why do you let this bother you?”
“Because this is not tenable,” I told them. It was a big word I was proud of knowing and I used it whenever I could. “By that time the town will be so full that I will have to sleep on the pebbled beach at night, or even in the road. It will not be a good thing.”
I showed them my drawings, which included suggestions for how death would work, and stressed that for it to be successful it would also need to apply to everything else as well. Not just people.
“Even cats,” I told them.
“The cats won’t like that,” they said. But the cats thought it was going to be great, and explained to us that they had plans for the mice and the birds under the proposed system, and my invention caught on. These days almost nobody remembers what it was like before.
Also, there’s a character called Death in SANDMAN. I made her up, and Mike Dringenberg made up the way that she looks.