[ WP ] On the day of their death , every human gets to have a vision of meeting the man they could have become .

Motor sport vehicles were the first to be outlawed. When you tell a man he has a day to live, and remind him he could have been a monster car driver if he had n't knocked that slut up in high school, more often then not, you end up with a wrecked truck and a dead man. Which is fine, insurance pays and you garnish the wages of his progeny for three generations. To outsiders, it just looks a little... exploitative. 
 
 It happens to everyone. You wake up drenched in sweat, with crystal clear knowledge of the totality of your failure. To some men, the heights they could have soared made recognizing this day nearly impossible. For many, the dream came with the depressing realization of how little they could have amounted to. But for those in the middle, those who cold yet conceive of a perfectly actualized life, the allure of this alternate reality consumed even the knowledge of their imminent demise. This combination of hope and myopia was the lifeblood of payday lenders for generations, it took them an embarrassingly long amount of time to tap this market. 
 
 The applications were the prospectuses of lunatics, incapable of separating their life of booze sodden compromise from the cloistered life of work and neglect which lead to their best selves And at the bottom of each is the untidy scrawled signature of the approving manager. Auto sports, oil prospecting, and pyrotechnics were all out. Cupcake bakery had become a fairly wise investment, after the first hundred thousand went under. For the most part though, these impossible missions were inaugurated with the nod of a middle manager. 
 
 They walked out of the florescent lobby and back into the lobby of a bank. There was a time when a man could show up at a medical supply store looking to buy one operating room in cash, but it was never long before a man in a faded polyester suit and a summons came to politely ask for all that money back. Cash or an overpriced platinum card, it made no difference. Purchasing alone took hours, and many had stress induced coronaries or wrapped their business Porsches around a pole before lunchtime. The hardier souls remaining sometimes even had optimism sufficient to order business cards before they succumbed. 
 
 Then came the collectors to inform the family their property was now forfeit. Complicating matters somewhat was the fact this was often the first the family had heard of their dearly departed for some time. Not many perfect lives contained imperfect families. Auctions were held, and deals made. Cheap cremations yielded coarse ashes in a bargain vase. Cinders and bills are all that are left of these most sad, most hopeful creatures.
