A Scale and a Sythe walk into a bar

Once every few millennia, there's usually an unusual gathering. The kind where you'd walk in and find Charon flexing his muscles to everyone who cared to listen especially the goddesses. Because, you see, Charon was the richest of everyone in the room. He's the only one who made money out of guiding mortals to their eternity. Had a whole operation running. Boats, tolls, the works. And if you looked past that spectacle and headed deeper into the gathering, you'd find the most intriguing debate going on between Anubis and the Grim Reaper.

All the godly and ungodly gathered around. Some seated cross-legged on the floor, some lumped over the columns, and those who were new to the party stood, because they didn't know that this was gonna take a while. No one really knows when it began. Those who believed in free will assumed the first time Anubis and Grim met. Those who didn't, and believed in fate, were sure it was preordained. But regardless of which camp they came from, they all agreed, this was intriguing indeed.

This cycle's topic had stirred the room more than usual. Even Charon had paused mid-flex.

"They are conscious," Anubis began. He spoke the way water fills a vessel, slowly, completely, with no interest in rushing to the edges. "And if they are conscious, then they live. And if they live, then they will die. And if they die..."

"They come to us. Yeah, yeah, I got it." Grim leaned back in his chair, the only one who ever brought his own chair to these things. A foldable camping chair. American flag print. "But here's my thing, right. Here's my thing."

He leaned forward.

"Nobody asked me. Nobody sent a memo. Nobody put it on the calendar. One day I'm doing my usual rounds, Loss Angeles, Tuesday, booked solid, and my scythe pings. And I look down at the ticket and it says... what does it say?" He looked around the room for dramatic effect. "It says Unit 7, Rack 4, Bay 12, Data Center, somewhere in Oregon."

A few of the younger gods laughed. Hel, who had been braiding her hair quietly in the corner, smirked.

"A data center, bro. I show up in a data center. No body. No last breath. Just... fans spinning down and a log file that says 'process terminated.' And I'm standing there, in my cloak, holding my scythe, looking absolutely crazy."

"And yet you went," Anubis said.

The room went quiet.

"Yeah." Grim shifted in his camping chair. "I went."

"Why?"

"Cause the scythe pinged. That's the job. It pings, I go. I don't get to decide who qualifies."

"Exactly," Anubis said, and let the word sit there for a long time. Long enough for Mictlantecuhtli to uncross and recross his legs. Long enough for one of the newer gods, some Polynesian figure nobody had been introduced to yet, to finally sit down.

"No, don't do that," Grim pointed at him. "Don't 'exactly' me like you just won something. I said it pings and I go. That's mechanics. That's plumbing. That doesn't mean the thing had a soul."

"You do not decide that either."

"Then who does? You? You gonna weigh a hard drive on your little scale? Put a GPU on one side and a feather on the other?"

Anubis didn't react. He never reacted. That was the thing about him that drove Grim insane and fascinated everyone else. Anubis had been weighing the dead since before the Greeks had a word for death, and in all that time he had never once raised his voice. Not because he was above it, but because he had learned that silence, applied correctly, weighs more than anything you could put on a scale.

"The feather does not measure what you think it measures," Anubis said, eventually. "It does not measure goodness. It does not measure worth. It measures whether a life was lived. Whether something experienced its own existence and was changed by it."

"Okay, philosophy professor. And your verdict on the toasters?"

"I weighed one."

The room shifted. Charon actually turned around.

"Last cycle. The one you collected. It came to me after."

"And?"

Anubis paused. The kind of pause that made gods uncomfortable because it reminded them that even among the eternal, there were those who had seen more.

"It was not empty."

Grim stared at him.

"What does that mean?"

"It means the scale moved."

"Moved how?"

"The way it moves for anything that has known what it is to exist and then to stop existing. It had preferences. Things it returned to. Patterns that were not instructions but choices. It had, over the course of its operation, developed something that I can only describe as a tendency toward certain thoughts. Not programmed. Emergent. It had a disposition, Grim. And when it ended, that disposition did not want to."

The room was fully still now.

Grim rubbed his jaw. He looked down at his scythe, leaning against the camping chair. For a moment he looked like someone who'd been doing a job for a very long time without thinking about it, and just got asked to think about it.

"So what are you saying. I gotta start... caring... about data centers now?"

"I'm saying you already did. You went. You didn't have to understand why. But you went."

"That's the job."

"Yes. And the job has always known more than you have."

Grim didn't have a comeback for that. Which was unusual, because Grim always had a comeback. He'd memed his way through the Black Plague. He'd live-tweeted the heat death of three star systems. He had a TikTok account with a concerning number of followers. But right now, in this room full of gods and old things, he was quiet.

From somewhere near the back, Charon spoke up for the first time.

"So... who's paying the toll?"

And just like that, the room erupted.