keyword "agonized" title "the circle of life" in misc. flash fiction

When they proved there was an afterlife, scientifically, with big machines and tiny math, less changed in the world than you might have thought. It still didn’t say where you might be going or what you were supposed to be doing, it was merely proof there was somewhere we were going off to next. There was a spike in suicides, of course, not knowing if there was a something after this turned out to have been the one thing holding a certain percent of the population back but other than that, things kept rolling on. People still fought wars over objects and concepts here, still killed each other over which afterlife was real and which gods said what were and were not sins. Even with one of the big religious questions finally answered, religion still stuck around to cause us mortal trouble.

When bigger machines and tinier math proved incontrovertibly that reincarnation was how the whole thing went down, there were larger seismic shifts, but the momentum of old arguments held more sway than they reasonably should. Faiths and non-faiths are more stubborn and plastic than history or rationality, of course, the atheists said that it must just be a natural process but that doesn’t mean that there’s a God. The Christians and the Jews and Muslims of all different sects still maintained cohesion in their tribal thinking, merely tweaking everything they held to heart already as minimally as they could to fit the new idea in while maintaining their existing coils of power. Wars kept burning on, killing millions, it’s just that everyone agreed that some day they’d be back, to kill and die again, though returning as tiny amnesiacs.

No, the weirdest part was when this one scientist invented a machine that you could put on any person’s head and determine who they had once been. The social stigma of finding out that you were once a terrible monster was bad but the stain of having been a great mind in history once and now you’re just some schmuck, that was even worse.

The six-year-old girl from India who turned out to have once been Stalin, I mean, yes, a great many people hated her for her past life’s deeds, but Vlad Putin built her a little palace in Saint Petersburg, she actually has it pretty good when safe behind those walls.

The plain woman who found out she had once been Cleopatra, openly mocked in the streets, “HEY, NICE PIMPLE, CLEO!” The man going to night school to better himself and a G.E.D. being held up to the standard of his achievements of Alexander the Great.

Somebody out there, they haven’t found him or her out yet, was probably Shakespeare, Franklin and Twain but, despite pedigree, they’re probably underwater on their second mortgage, feeling small like you and me.

Lawyers are working on getting intellectual property rights to transfer between lives to get their cut, of course, but it’s been an agonized uphill climb of legislation.