The Painter is a nameless, cynical 200-year-old man who appears to be 35 due to anti-aging science. He is begrudgingly painting a mural titled "The Happy Garden of Life" in a hospital waiting room, adding the faces of important hospital and government staff to faceless figures. He views life as inherently messy and chaotic, standing in direct opposition to the perfectly neat and sanitized society around him.

Edward is a 56-year-old expectant father, considered quite young in a society where the average age is 129. Described as rumpled, colorless, and virtually invisible, he waits in distress for his wife to deliver triplets. Because society dictates a strict population cap of one life in for one life out, the imminent birth of three children places an impossible burden on him to find three volunteers to die.

Dr. Hitz is the hospital's handsome, 240-year-old chief obstetrician. He carries himself like a tanned, white-haired, omnipotent Zeus, booming with importance and the joy of living. As the creator of the first gas chamber in Chicago, he is a staunch defender of the population control system and views himself as a rational humanitarian protecting the planet's resources.

Leora works as a hostess for the Service Division of the Federal Bureau of Termination, tasked with making citizens comfortable when they report to the municipal gas chambers. She wears an all-purple uniform including shoes, stockings, trench coat, and cap. She sports a distinct mustache, a trait said to develop on all hostesses after five years of service.

A hospital orderly who passes through the waiting room while cheerfully singing a popular tune about voluntary suicide. He is a casual participant in the utopian society, blindly accepting its rules and finding the Painter's cynical perspective unappealing and messy.

Edward K. Wehling Jr.'s wife is currently in the hospital delivering their children. Her pregnancy with triplets initiates the central crisis of the narrative due to the society's strict population control laws.

Edward's aging grandfather is slated to be taken to the municipal gas chambers. In the society's rigid exchange system, his scheduled death is intended to make room for one of his newly born great-grandchildren.