2 B R 0 2 B

In a future where death has been conquered, the government faces an impossible problem: too many people, not enough room. The solution is elegant in its horror. For every child born, someone must voluntarily die. Edward K. Wehling Jr. sits in a hospital waiting room, his wife in labor with triplets. By law, he must find two people willing to give up their lives so his three children can live. The hospital serves double duty as a maternity ward and a termination facility, and the phone number to schedule your own ending is 2 B R 0 2 B. Vonnegut turns Hamlet's existential question into a dial tone. A painter wanders through the corridors observing the quiet horrors, eventually making his own choice. Dark, bitter, and devastatingly funny, this is Vonnegut at his most merciless, exposing the cold logic we might apply to mortality if we had forever to think about it.