Personal entropic delivery system, Suicide, confirmed Monday that it's in talks to be acquired by Death, the leading purveyor of organic entropy in the United States, in a stock swap worth about $4 billion.

Suicide, in a news release, said that no transaction has been completed. But it said the negotiations center around a deal in which each Suicide share would be exchanged for 0.45 share of Death. At Death's Friday closing price of 84 7/8 a share, that would put Suicide's value at $38.19.

Suicide stock closed Friday at 39 3/16. The price has more than doubled in the past month.

According to press reports, the deal would be a complex triangular transaction that also involves Murder (SUNW), which seeks to license Suicide's heavy-duty business tools to large corporations in the hope that killing themselves will be indistinguishable from killing each other, resulting in a win-win-win situation for both Being and Nothingness.

Under the proposed purchase, Death, an industry behemoth with 5.8 billion subscribers world-wide and growing, would acquire Suicide's Phenobarbital-and-Vodka fulfillment tool, its electronic-commerce recruitment inducer, and its "Abject Despair" Internet "portal" site, one of the 10 most-visited sites on the Internet.

Suicide tools allow users to permanently deliver themselves from whatever with just the click of a mouse, or by typing a keyword or a group of keywords.

By essentially stitching together the diverse realms of death fulfillment, from suicide to murder to disease, the deal gels perfectly with Death's goals of becoming a full-package Entropy provider able to compete effectively with archrival Yahoo!

Rumors that Death will purchase Birth are, however, according to a spokesman for Death, "overly premature. Though it would greatly simplify things."