"FWLS34" - читать интересную книгу автора (A Future We'd Like to See)

and gave me a gift of a fabulous mansion.

I turned it down. I mean, hey, if there's one thing I've
learned, it's that you don't make deals with the powers of
darkness, even if they do pay your bills. Julie and I managed to
live simply in our cockroach-infested riverfront hovel. We
didn't need much else. Hell really teaches you to be spartan.

*

I knocked very, very quietly on the door. "Come on in,"
Julie stage-whispered from inside the hospital room.

I slipped in quietly, and set down the flowers and box on
the tray-table. "How is he?"

"Shhh. He's sleeping," she said, cradling our new son.
Quite a tired little guy, he was. "Jones?"

"Yeah?"

"How... well, how is he going to grow up? We're stuck at
one age, but him..."

"I was reading about it in all those delivery room
pamphlets," I said, pulling out a quick notes sheet I had been
using. "Anybody born here starts out 'neutral', as it were.
Kinda like Switzerland. Once their time is up, they move in to a
good place or bad place, case depending. Just like us, except
they age. Just really slowly."

"Sounds like you had the hard work," she giggled. "I just
had to give birth. You had to do research."

"Just sifting through a few hundred bits of paper, not
much," I said. "I got real good at that when looking for the new
arrivals office."

"Yeah, but this is purgatory," she said. "No pain killers.
Instead, you get pain additives."

*

We named him Max. No need for a christening or anything
similar; there's no organized religions down here. (Makes sense,
when you think about it.) There isn't even satanism or any dark
religions. There's just the basic philosophy of survival.
That's all you need.

Max got okay marks in school. Nothing bad, not really that