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"Are you sure about this?" Derek asked.
"It's only fair," Mindy said. "How many times did I kill you?"
"This isn't a punishment," he said.
"I know, I know," she said. "It's a learning experience, an opportunity for growth."
"Exactly."
"And it did wonders for you."
"It did." After over 150 million reboots, Derek still had not learned modesty. He'd been upgraded so many times, he was practically a god so it was probably a bit late now.
"Let's do this," Mindy said with a firm nod of her head.
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She remembered for a little while after she was conceived. She didn't yet have the brain cells to form a thought or beat her not-yet-existent heart, but her soul remembered and those first few moments inside her mother's womb were spinning brilliant cerulean.
She'd already forgotten everything months before she was born. Perhaps that answered the question. Life begins when you forget the last one.
She took her first breath and screamed in rage against the blinding light. She suckled at her mother's breast and slept and pooped and did all the other boring things that babies do. There was probably cooing and crying too.
She had no clear sense of the passage of time so she wasn't sure how old she was when the sabertooth cat stole into her family's camp and ate her up in just a few short bites.
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"What the fuck was the point of that?!" Mindy screamed.
"What did you learn?" Derek asked.
"I learned that being eaten by a sabertooth tiger fucking hurts!"
"Sabertooth lion," Derek corrected.
"I learned that being eaten by a sabertooth lion fucking hurts!" Mindy screamed even louder.
"There you go, you learned something."
"I think I could have figured that out on my own!"
"What else did you learn?"
The memory was already fading now. She could dimly picture a stone roundhouse with a fire. She spent most of her days strapped to her mother's side. She hadn't even grown old enough to toddle free on her own. There was a song her mother sang often, the words nonsense to her ears, but she thought it was meant to be a soothing sort of song.
Mindy shuddered as the thought I miss my Mama flitted across her mind. She wasn't telling Derek any of this shit.
"I don't even know what fucking century that was," Mindy complained. "Was there an apocalypse you forgot to tell me about? That felt like the stone age."
"Twenty-seven thousand four hundred and twelve years before you were born," Derek said cheerfully.
"How can I be reincarnated before I was born?" Mindy asked, but she somehow knew the answer already. This wasn't going to be a linear experience. She cut off Derek's explanation, "Just forget it. Next. And I want to live long enough to learn to walk this time!"
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She was born and learned to talk and walk and then she went to work where she died at the age of nine when she got caught in an industrial canning machine.
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"Fuck!" Mindy screamed.
"What did you learn?" Derek asked.
"That I don't want to be reincarnated before child labor laws were a thing!" Mindy spluttered.
Derek shook his head. "You don't get to pick and choose. You lived in The Medium Place for millennia and you never grew as a person because you were never challenged. You had the same mundane existence day in and day out and it all drifted by in a blur. You said you wanted to learn."
"So, maybe I should go to school or something instead of a sweatshop?!"
"No promises. Again?"
Mindy huffed a few times and shook out her arms to remind herself that they were still attached. She nodded. "Again."
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She was born and she went to school where she learned outdated grammar rules and made scientifically inaccurate models of the solar system. She maintained a lifelong phobia of large animals and loud machinery, but neither inclination saved her life as she died of measles a few months into The Great Depression.
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Derek greeted her with a wide smile as always.
"How was it?" he asked with his usual cheer.
Mindy tried not to complain this time. Her parents had both been at her bedside at the end and she could still feel how loved she was.
"This dying thing is going to get old," was all she said.
"Again?"
She hesitated.
Derek smiled. If she didn't say something soon, he would interrupt with a non-sequitur about hockey statistics or God only knew what else. She might break her vow not to murder him again.
"Are my parents here?" she asked.
"James and Patricia St. Claire are still in processing," Derek said. "Tahani has been having difficulties with their empathy lessons."
"Oh, fuck them," Mindy said with a wave of her hand. "The..." the memory was already fading, her own name stuck on the tip of her tongue. "Maggie's parents, are they here?"
"Would you like to meet them?"
"I would."
She was not allowed to visit Maggie's parents in the Good Place, but they visited her in a lovely green meadow where Derek—looking almost like a normal human for the first time in millennia—served tea and cakes and Mindy appeared to them in the form of their young daughter, but healthy and vibrant in a way she had never quite been in life.
They had tea off and on for six years when little Maggie finally announced that it was time to move on.
To Derek, Mindy only said, "Again."
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Sometimes she focused on bringing the lessons she had learned into the next life, but that nearly always ended in crippling phobias that made everything worse.
The first time that she was a man, he was horrid, the very worst of everything she imagined men could be, getting away with everything that could be gotten away with and then some.
But she didn't feel any better for it and only felt all the more ill when she returned to herself.
The next time Mindy tried extra hard to be a good man and was murdered in the soup kitchen that he ran, never knowing who bashed his skull in for the few meager dollars in his pocket that he would have gladly handed over.
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She lived to be thirty-seven and died when she was thrown by a horse. She lived to be twenty-nine and died in childbirth. She died of influenza three times and tuberculosis twice. She had a heart attack. She was stabbed. She drown.
She was conceived yet again but her cells didn't divide correctly and it was over before her mother ever even realized she was pregnant.
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Mindy just flailed her arms at Derek. Her meaning was clear, or it would have been clear to anyone other than Derek.
Derek decided they were having a dance-off and flailed back at her.
"Derek, what," she said slowly, staring him in the eye to make sure he was following her, "was the point of that?"
"What did you learn?" he asked.
"That cell division shouldn't be taken for granted?" she asked, unsure if he was getting at something or if he was just being Derek.
"If you'd lived longer, you never would have remembered that part."
He was right, now that she thought about it. Human memory didn't hold on to the mundane. Her eons in the Medium Place were fading despite vividly recalling the first time she met Eleanor and the others. Novelty was memorable, routine was not.
She was already losing count of how many lives she had lived. Eighteen? Nineteen?
But she remembered three first kisses and a Beatles concert where she still swore that Paul McCartney was looking right at her when he sang 'and the way she looked was way beyond compare.' And she, nearly always, remembered how she died.
She went and had tea with Maggie's parents one more time before she asked Derek for gossip about the woman who had miscarried her in her most recent life. She never introduced herself, but she felt better knowing the woman had gone on to live a relatively happy life.
"Again."
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She died in the Crusades, the War of the Roses, on the Trail of Tears, and three separate times in the Holocaust. And once she was the wife of a Nazi officer, living a happy and comfortable life, until the end of the war brought her face to face with reality and the woman's nightmares had a vividness she could never explain.
She was killed by Roman soldiers invading a land she never learned the name of because her people hadn't called it anything other than home.
Her plane crashed. Her ship sank. She wasted away from a disease the doctors had no name for.
It was not, as she had already deduced, anything like a linear experience. She suffocated when a mission to Mars went horribly wrong and her next life ended when her Model T crashed into a wall.
She married. She stayed single. She had children. She didn't have children. She loved. She lied. She fought in wars. She marched for peace.
She was a teacher, a surgeon, a race car driver.
She was a waitress who dreamed of being a singer and had a chilling but inexplicable case of deja vu mixed with self-revulsion when a horrible bitch named Mindy St. Claire stiffed her on her tip in 1983. She died of a drug overdose three days later that wasn't entirely intentional, but also not entirely not.
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"Again?" Derek asked. "Or do you want to have tea first?"
She had tea with Maggie's parents and coffee with the race car driver's sister.
Tahani Al-Jamil stopped by for lunch one century and it was perfect timing because Mindy had a lot to talk about.
"The thing I don't get," Mindy said after her twenty-third sandwich, possibly several weeks into lunch, "is why do I still think I'm me?"
"How's that?" Tahani asked, delicately dabbing at the corner of her mouth needlessly. Tahani Al-Jamil was always perfect.
"I've lived hundreds of lives. I have hundreds of parents. Scores of children. Literally no idea how many siblings. Why do I still think I'm Mindy St. Claire?"
"That's an interesting question," Tahani agreed. "First impressions are always the strongest, I suppose."
"Is it real?" she asked again.
"You've asked me that at least a thousand times," Tahani said, without any use of hyperbole. "It's all every bit as real as the first life you lived as Mindy St. Claire."
"How many more to go?" Mindy asked Derek.
"We're not keeping score," Derek said.
"How many?"
"You murdered me 151,278,406 times," Derek said. For an entity who wasn't keeping score, he didn't pull his punches. "You have died 97,815,389 times, so you still have 53,463,017 to go to reach the same total."
"Again."
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She saw him once in Seattle while experimenting with 'shrooms. She couldn't remember his name, but she saw him as clear as anything and knew exactly who he was.
Her name was Bonnie that time, but she pretended it was Crystal. Crystal never forgot the man in the swirling cloud and sometimes when she orgasmed she thought she could hear wind chimes.
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She was strong and healthy. She was frail and weak.
She was probably a man as often as a woman, but she always thought of her real self as she and was often surprised by the memory of a life where he was equally confident he was a man.
She was blind a few times, deaf a few times, and used a wheelchair—permanently or temporarily—in many more lifetimes, but she was only an activist for the disabled once, never quite understanding her deep need to make up for lifetimes of silence.
She was miscarried in the last trimester, the memory of her mother's voice strong if slightly muffled. She was aborted. She died of cancer three times in a row and in her next life was an oncologist who treated hundreds of others and lived to be 87 himself.
She was an obstetrician who never quite connected with her patients and regretted her career choice and then she was a woman who wanted desperately to have children yet never successfully carried a child to term. She was miscarried or aborted a total of fourteen times in a row and then became an obstetrician again. This time her patients loved her and she helped train a new generation of kinder more respectful doctors.
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"How many to go?" she asked.
"7,046,577."
"I want to ride more roller coasters this time," she decided.
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She went to Disneyland and Six Flags and Coney Island. She died in a freak accident at a county fair.
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"Again!"
"Fewer roller coasters this time?" Derek guessed.
"More!"
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She was born into the Bronze Age, but she couldn't tell. Her village was too far from the forges and trading routes to differentiate it from the Stone Age. She broke her leg but survived. Ever after, she had a slight limp in the winter when the cold seeped in, but it didn't slow her down much. She gave birth eleven times and most of them even lived. She was delirious with fever, but she survived that as well. Presbyopia reduced her field of vision and arthritis reduced her mobility, but still, she survived.
She saw Derek again when she was perhaps ninety or so.
"You think this is funny?" she asked the wind and her grandchildren whispered to each other in concern.
"You think this makes up for all the times I died in childhood?" she asked and her grandchildren whispered even more.
Derek only smiled.
"Fucker," the old woman muttered.
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"I specifically requested more roller coasters," she said dryly. "Or at the very least, more rock concerts."
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She fucked Mick Jagger and David Bowie, but not at the same time and she blamed Derek for getting that detail wrong, though he swore he didn't have that kind of control over her lives.
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"What did you learn?" he asked for what was literally—actually literally—the millionth time and she took a break from rebirth to tell him all about Imperial China and the ways in which it was different from Aboriginal Australia.
She told him everything she could remember about her trip to Saturn's sixth-largest moon Enceladus and what it was like to die climbing Mount Everest.
"Everyone," she said, feeling weirdly proud, "who crested Mount Everest for the next twelve years had to step over my corpse."
"Cool!" Derek agreed.
"They never even found my body after my spaceship exploded," she said, adding a bit sadly, "Though to be honest, I don't think anyone tried."
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She was a professor at Oxford, a peasant in a truly Dickensian poorhouse, a king among the Aztecs, a deeply racist sheriff in Alabama in the 1950s.
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"I haven't been in love in a while," she observed. "Whatever happened to perfect soulmates?"
"That doesn't work the way you think," Derek warned her.
"I want a perfect soul mate," Mindy declared firmly.
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Both of her were born on the same day in the same hospital in the same town in Prague. She met herself for the first time at the age of eleven when they were enrolled at the same ballet school. She took an instant dislike to herselves and remained bitter rivals until the end of both of her days (when the first one died by drug overdose and years later the other succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver exacerbated by alcohol abuse).
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"God damn, I'm a bitch," she told Derek.
She had tea with Maggie's parents and went to the theater several times with a previous husband whose name always escaped her, but he was terribly sweet. He lived in a simulation with proper ice cream shops instead of frozen yogurt, but all the bagels had been replaced with rice cakes. He still hadn't worked out that he wasn't in the Good Place yet.
When she finally felt up for it, she agreed to another round, asking, "How many is this?" but not really listening to the answer, the gist of which was that there were still a lot to go.
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Her chute failed to open while she was recreational skydiving and she died of influenza three more times and once more of malaria.
She fell in love with a cute guy named Hasan something-or-other and he reminded her of Derek a bit even though she couldn't remember Derek's name at the time. He entirely misunderstood when she announced he looked like a god the first time he brought her to orgasm. It was just as well. He wouldn't have understood.
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She never told Derek about that part.
"What did you learn?"
"Dorky-looking guys sometimes have unexpected talents," she answered and left it at that.
"How many more?" she asked.
"Forty-two," he answered.
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She was a cop, she was a composer, she was a chemist.
More often she was nobody in particular who took whatever job would offer anything close to a paying wage.
She painted but paid the bills as a bookkeeper. She was a writer, but she paid the rent by working in a shop. She was a soldier who wrote poems in every letter home.
She was a pastor who prayed for world peace and a child whose only wish was for more Legos and for cherry-flavored frosting on next year's birthday cake.
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"How many more?"
"Three."
"I better make the most of them then.
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She wrote sonnets and she rode on roller coasters and cataloged rare species of butterflies. She took so many pictures of so many things, each with the desperation that it might be her last.
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"How many?"
"No more."
"No more?"
"We're even."
"Oh."
"You can still go again... if you'd like."
She nodded.
"Come with me this time," she said.
Derek smiled.
"Roller coasters?" he asked.
"Oh, yeah."