After that, the astronauts refuse to deploy parachutes. They dove straight down, pow, into the flowers and sweet lakes of Venus. All that was left was this grainy, hazy few minutes of video they sent back. What looked like fashion models wearing tunics in a science-fiction future. Men and women with long legs and hair, sprawled, eating grapes on the marble temples.

It was heaven, but with sex and booze and God’s complete permission. It was a world where the Ten Commandments were: Party. Party. Party…

…Then death got to become mainstream. Only it wasn’t suicide anymore, now it was called “emigration”. People’s dead, rotting bodies aren’t corpses, not anymore. The stinking, bloated piles of them, heaped around the base of each tall building, or poisoned and sprawled on bus stop benches, now these were called luggage. Just left-behind luggage.

The way people had always looked at New Years Eve as some kind of line drawn in the sand. Some kind of new beginning that didn’t ever really happen. That’s how people saw emigration, but only if /everyone/ emigrated.

Here was actual proof of life after life. According to government estimates, as many as 1,760,042 human souls were already freed and living a party lifestyle on the planet Venus. The rest of humanity would have to live on through a series of lifetimes, of suffering, before they were refined enough to emigrate. Going around, eroding in the Big Rock Tumbler.

Then the government had it’s big brainstorm:

If all humanity died at once, then there would be no wombs and no way to reincarnate souls here on earth. If humanity went extinct, then we’d all emigrate to Venus, enlightened or not. But…If only one breeding couple was left behind, the birth of a child could call back a soul. From just a handful of people, the whole process could start again.

Until a couple days ago, you could watch on television as the emigration movement dealt with people who were still noncompliant. You could watch the backward populations that weren’t enrolled in the movement, you could see them being forced to emigrate by Emigration Assistance Squads, dressed all in white, carrying clean white machine guns. Whole screaming villages, carpet-bombed to relocate them to the next step in the process. Nobody was going to let a pack of Bible-waving hillbillies keep the rest of us here, here on dirty old planet Earth, the less-than-hip planet, not when we could all hurry up to the next step in our spiritual evolution. So the hillbillies were poisoned to save them. The African savaged were nerve-gassed. The Chinese hordes were nuked.