I've always thought that I'm a particularly good judge of character, so I was happy to put my theory to the test with Deadline: Afterlife Processing's new demo where you play as some corporate angel judging whether the souls of the recently deceased should go upstairs or downstairs (I think we all know what that means).
Deadline's demo starts like most stints in corporations do, with paperwork. I'm not entirely sure whether I signed my soul away, but I was sad to hear I won't be getting time off anytime soon. After I was done with all the bureaucracy it was time to get to work.
First thing's first, you need to clock in, every minute counts and you don't want to be late for work when your boss is either the creator of the universe or someone powerful enough to force the deceased into a suit and tie. The rest of my work day played out pretty normally: I'd grab a coffee, sift through some notes, and use this giant machine which can read the souls of humans and extrapolate key details of their life. This is what I used to decide if people had been naughty or nice.
Most of the souls that crossed my paths were pretty obvious. They'd either donated their lifesavings to charity or punched a random old lady in the street—figuring out who deserves to go to heaven or hell isn't exactly rocket science in these cases. There were, however, a couple of scenarios that had me stop and ponder the ethics of a given situation.
One soul that came to me on the second day of my job had killed a stranger on the subway. Now, this is obviously bad, you shouldn't kill people, but the stranger had been playing their music obnoxiously loud, no headphones or anything. That's not to say they had it coming, but I can't say that I don't at least understand where this person was coming from. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and sent them upstairs—hopefully the music isn't too loud up there.
A second case that had me momentarily stumped involved a grumpy old man who never attended or donated money to the neighbourhood block parties. After thinking on it for all of one second I decided to send him upwards as well. You see, I also hate block parties, so not attending them is the right decision in my book.
I stand by my decisions, every single one of them. I think my nebulous boss liked them as well, because after a few days I was offered a fulltime position. This is when everything started getting weird.
I can't say what's wrong for sure as the demo ended not long after I was promoted but after finding a soul that could not be quantified I was sent down to storage to log it and store it for the foreseeable future. It was here that I encountered a soul orb that began glowing strangely and seemed as if it was trying to follow me out of the room. But managing the strange ethereal glow of abandoned souls isn't in my job description—I checked—so legally speaking that isn't my problem.
