Reggie Cautious and the Cosmic Oops

Reginald "Reggie" P. Cautious was, by all accounts, a man who took life's fragility very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he hadn't left his hermetically sealed, HEPA-filtered, radon-mitigated, Kevlar-reinforced, earthquake-proof, tsunami-ready, rodent-deterrent, fire-suppressed, WiFi-shielded, organic-kale-smoothie-stocked bunker in over thirty years. He'd outlived three wives (who'd all succumbed to "the outside"), seen countless pandemics come and go on his newsfeed, and avoided more tripping hazards than a government health and safety inspector. His life was a meticulous testament to extreme vigilance against every mundane, terrestrial danger.

One Tuesday, precisely during his scheduled, thrice-daily, germ-free, self-administered colonoscopy, a rather large, flaming chunk of the defunct Skylab VIII satellite decided it preferred Reggie's bunker roof to the vast, empty expanse of the Pacific Ocean. The ensuing catastrophic structural failure was immediate and, for Reggie, quite conclusive.

The paramedics (after donning their full hazmat suits to approach the "safe" house) found Reggie precisely where he'd spent most of his adult life: utterly secure from bacteria, viruses, airborne pollutants, seismic activity, fire, water, and anything that might scurry. He was, however, quite dead, having been unceremoniously pancaked by a piece of space junk.

"He built a fortress against *everything*," his estranged nephew later quipped at the sparsely attended, outdoor funeral, "except the universe deciding he was next."