Georgia Lass is aloof and emotionally distant from her family and shies away from her life. After dropping out of college, she takes a temp job through Happy Time Temporary Services. During her lunch break on her first day, she is hit and killed by a toilet seat falling from the deorbiting Mir space station. She is soon informed that, rather than moving on to the "great beyond", she will become a grim reaper in the External Influence Division, collecting souls of people who die in accidents (many of which have a Rube Goldberg-style complexity), and homicides. Each reaper has a secret quota of souls; once the quota is met, the reaper moves on to another realm and the last soul reaped then takes his or her job collecting souls.