2 B R 0 2 B

In the future, old age has been cured, and to keep the population of the United States at forty million, a new life can begin only when someone volunteers to die. The Federal Bureau of Termination, whose telephone number is 2 B R 0 2 B, 'to be or not to be', handles the arrangements. In the waiting room of a Chicago hospital, where a painter is finishing a cheerful mural of the perfect society, Edward K. Wehling Jr. waits for the birth of triplets, knowing that his family can keep only one of them unless two people agree to die.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) published this short, darkly funny story in a science fiction magazine in 1962, and it shows in miniature the satire and humanity of his later novels. Its title plays on Hamlet. Compare Zamyatin's earlier vision of a perfectly managed society, We.