[ WP ] At the age of 18 , everyone picks an unlikely life event . They will be reborn at 18 every time they die until that event happens . After that , death is permanent .

Death really fascinated me. Who would n't be fascinated by the most interesting part of life? I mean, immortality is something lots of people strive for, but death is really something special. The problem with this little system we have going is that there is too much death in such a shallow way and not enough true death. Whenever someone's body gets broken, we just toss them into the sea, which is much more convenient than burying them or burning them since the old bodies just turn into nasty cottage cheese anyway. After a few weeks, their 18-year-old visage appears coughing on the shores of Earth with access to a random group of their old memories and a fresh image of their last death in their skulls, suicides leaving them with a memory of six-months' worth of perpetual agony. Not many people opt for suicide, even to recapture their youth. 
 
 This cycle of birth and rebirth is convenient for quite a few things. I read that Dr. Maywether Tanner, who led the teams that developed faster-than-light travel and interstellar positioning at age 63 went on to perfect the spacecraft at age 20. It took him only two years to access all his scientific knowledge again. His team has worked together for so long now and their efficiency and compounding knowledge has done wonders to establish all thirteen colony worlds and fifty self-sustain Orbital Habitation Stations. Dr. Tanner's death statement reads `` When there is someone who will do my work better than I can.'' His fifth rebirth has done wonders to boost his self-esteem. 
 
 The biggest problem is the inconvenience that this cycle provides when certain people should really be dead. Rapists, traitors, extortionists, mass torturers, sex traffickers, warlords, politicians, grocers who do n't bag eggs correctly; all allowed to live consequence free if their statements are not met. There has been a war going on for 80 years on one of the backwards continents of Colony 9 with the same combatants. Thank goodness blatant impossibility is not allowed to stand as a statement. My job would be even more difficult. 
 
 The task of any Sandman is to do the job from the children's tale: put restless minds at rest and let them sleep. In some cases, forever. I had to actually rig a lottery winning and tie a grounding wire to a recrational torturer to put him down for good. It was complicated adding a drugged howler monkey to the lottery-lightning combo to put a family man turned domestic terrorist to sleep for good. 
 
 Dictator Juan Ricardo Cortez 
 `` Cuando ya no doy miedo'' 
 `` When I no longer spread fear'' 
 This was one of the more complicated jobs. But i volunteered. This was a little bit personal. 
 Lighting up one of his cigars -- his country grew marvelous tobacco -- I knelt down and tapped on the welded door to his panic room. 
 `` Oye hombre, do n't worry too much, Montoya will do a great job at breaking the news that you left to some other planet. Soon enough, they will have forgotten you entirely. And so goes the fear.'' 
 I stood to walk away, but paused for another moment as I let out a cloud of smoke. 
 `` Oh, and say hello to my sister for me when you get to the other side por favor, mi amigo.'' 
 
 A small whimper was the last sound of a dictator. The sound that fear makes as it leaves the world.
