text: It started with stories of a girl born in Mumbai. Soon after she was born, the doctors noticed her cries were different from the usual “baby noises.” They thought she might be trying to form words and sentences. Eventually, one doctor recognized the speech as Mandarin, and called in a translator. The baby claimed to be an 87-year-old Chinese man, who had just suffered a massive heart attack in his home. The chinese authorities checked the address the baby had given, and found the corpse of an 87-year-old man, who had died at the same time as the baby’s birth. More stories like this popped up all over the world, of babies born speaking random languages, claiming to be people who had died just before their birth. Eventually, people started connecting the dots. Every single person who had died after the First Rebirth had also been reborn. The Buddhists and Hindus rejoiced, because their religious afterlife had been proven correct. All other religions began to crumble at their foundations, as people began to accept that they, too, would be reborn when they died. Of course, no one knew when or if the Rebirths would ever end, so they were cautious at first. It would be a long time until everyone trusted in their own immortality. New government organizations were formed in the wake of the Rebirths. One to validate rebirths and one to help those who had died reclaim their property, and arrange travel back to their place of residence. Before your death, you could set a 10-digit alphanumeric password and a set of security questions with the organization, with the idea that only you would remember them, and take them into your next life. The Last Will and Testament became a thing of the past; everyone’s will would have just left everything to themselves. No one would ever inherit their parents’ fortune, as no one could ever die or even retire. This meant everyone just got richer and richer, saving up money for a retirement that would never come. Heavy inflation would follow; when everyone is rich, no one is. One year after the First Rebirth, the rate of pregnancy had hit a record low. No one wanted to give birth to a fully-formed adult in a child’s body. This caused a problem for those who did get pregnant, intentionally or not, as death rates were increasing as birth rates decreased. This meant that each person would give birth to twins, triplets or more. Eventually, government organizations would pay those born as women 5-figure salaries to get pregnant, raising the birth rate so each person would only have to deliver one or two babies. People started to take advantage of the Rebirths. The rich paid fortunes to synchronize their death with a birth from a surrogate mother and sperm donor of their choice. Those in the trans community that could afford to use these services did so, in order to be reborn in the body they felt most comfortable in. Those who couldn’t afford it either stayed on hormones or decided to re-roll the dice. In the years after the First Rebirth, the education system ceased to exist, year by year. As the youngest “real children” graduated each year of schooling, that year was no longer necessary, so it was abandoned. After another decade or so, people were experiencing what it was like to grow up as other genders. Men began to understand menstruation when they experienced it firsthand. Gradually, genetic attributes like race and gender lost all meaning. Occasionally, people’s sexualities would change after a Rebirth, proving that one’s sexual preference is not a choice. One month after the First Rebirth, anti-LGBT right wing Senator James Wright was reborn as a gay man. As soon as he hit puberty and realized his “taste” had changed, Wright resigned from his position and refused to speak to the press. No one knew why he had suddenly decided to cut himself off from all contact with the outside world, but they had suspicions. Soon after this, more and more people started to hit puberty, realizing that their sexual preferences had changed. Once this phenomenon became common knowledge, people started to suspect that Wright was hiding something. Something that would contradict everything he had spent his career defending. The LGBT community was already stronger than ever, but when Wright finally came out, it was like a revolution never before seen in history. Wright’s fellow right-wing senators, almost unanimously, finally understood. Marriage equality was just the beginning. New laws were passed worldwide to prevent discrimination of any kind based on any genetic qualities. While this was all great for equality, it wasn’t great for couples. When someone is reborn as the opposite gender, their partner may not be attracted to them anymore. When they come back with different sexual preferences, they may not be attracted to their partner. Not to mention age differences, having to wait for their next puberty, and not looking at all similar to their previous body. “‘Til death do us part” took on a new meaning. Being a child again was great for the elderly, as well as the disabled and otherwise genetically disadvantaged. It did have its downsides, though. Being a reborn baby was treated as a new, temporary form of disability. New wheelchairs and other mobility devices were invented to help the babies rejoin society, but extensive use of these would cause the muscles to not develop properly, so they were rarely used. Having to relearn to walk, eating only liquids, teething, re-losing your baby teeth, puberty and growing pains all over again was highly uncomfortable. A big question for the Reborn was what to do with their old bodies. Most sold their organs for a tidy profit and cremated the rest. Some held fake funerals and buried themselves out of nostalgia, but this wasn’t enough for the funeral home, coffin and tombstone industries to stay afloat. Some eccentric billionaires preserved their old selves in resin, building macabre museums of their previous lives and deaths. After many decades, war, poverty and discrimination having been solved, we turned our attention to the stars. The number of people with degrees in the sciences was 10 times what it was before the First Rebirth, so it didn’t take long to develop interplanetary travel. We built a Dyson Sphere around our sun and used it to power near-lightspeed engines, and take us to other habitable systems in the galaxy. We colonized and terraformed other planets, bringing teams of pregnant people along. If the deaths of colonists on earth were synchronized with births on other planets, we could essentially “teleport” our minds and travel faster than light. We began to expand the human race’s empire in the cosmos, knowing that we could accomplish anything in our lifetimes. Our race would grow to possess infinite wisdom, maturity and experience. One century after the First Rebirth, the average “physical age” of the human population was 12 years. The average “mental age” was 130. The last human being alive to have never died was Anzu Takahashi, a Japanese woman, born just before the First Rebirth. Anzu was 101 years old. She could not bear the thought of eternal life without end, forever imprisoned on Earth with nothing after. Knowing that she had experienced all she could ever experience, she let her mind deteriorate with Dementia and Alzheimer’s, and by the time she died, Anzu Takahashi was a blank slate, ready to begin again.