Sitting in the car, as the vents blow smoke in her face, Tracee reads, “As your heart beats faster and faster, your eyes close. You lose consciousness and black out . . .”
Eve's dad and Tracee, they'd met at the gym and started doing couples bodybuilding. They won a contest, posing together, and got married to celebrate. The only reason we didn't emigrate months ago is, they were still at their contest peak. Never had they looked so good, felt so strong. It broke their hearts to find out that having a body—even a body of ripped, defined muscle with only 2 percent body fat—was like riding a mule while the rest of humanity was zipping around in Lear jets. It was smoke signals compared to cell phones.
Most days, Tracee would still be pedaling her stationary bicycle, alone in the gym's big empty aerobics room, pedaling to disco music while she yelled encouragement to a spinning class not there anymore. In the weight room, Eve's dad would be lifting weights, but limited to machines or lighter free weights, since no one was around to spot him. Worse than that, there was nobody around for Dad and Tracee to compete against. Nobody for them to pose for. Nobody for them to beat.
Eve's dad used to tell this joke:
How many bodybuilders does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
It takes four. One bodybuilder to screw in the bulb, and three others to watch and say, “Really, dude, you look huge!”
With her dad and Tracee, it took hundreds of people applauding, watching them up onstage, pose and flex. Still, you couldn't deny it, no matter how perfected with vitamins and collagen and silicone, the human body was obsolete.
What's funny is, the other thing Eve's dad used to say was: “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?”
Experts advised this was the only point in history when we could make mass emigration happen. We'd needed the space program to give us proof of the next life. We needed the mass media to take this proof around the world. We needed our weapons of mass destruction to ensure full compliance.
If there were any future generations, they wouldn't know what we knew. They wouldn't have the tools we had to make this happen. They'd just live their horrible, miserable physical lives, eating rat turds, ignorant that we could all live in pleasure on Venus.
Of course, a lot of people pushed to just nuclear-blast the noncompliant, but vaporizing every little tribal island in the South Pacific, that left our missile silos empty. The radiation didn't migrate the way you would hope. A nuclear winter settled over Australia, only for a couple months. Rain fell, and there was a huge fish die-off, but the weather and the tides had a shitty way of cleaning up our poisoned mess. All this emigration potential wasted, since Australia was 100 percent compliant in the first six months.
All of our nerve gas and deadly viruses, all our nuclear and conventional bombs, they were all a disappointment. We weren't even close to erasing humanity. People hunkered in caves. People roamed on camels over vast, empty deserts. Any of these stupid, backward people could fuck. A sperm meets an egg, and your soul gets sucked back to live another tedious lifetime, eating, sleeping, getting sunburned. On Earth: Planet Hurt. Planet Conflict. Planet Pain.
For the Emigration Assistance Squads, with their clean white machine guns, the Top-A priority targets were noncompliant females between the ages of fourteen and thirty-five. All other females were Top-B priority targets for assistance. All noncompliant males were Top-C priority. If bullets were running out, a white-suited team might leave a whole village of men and old women alive to grow old and emigrate naturally.
Tracee always worried about being a Top-A priority target, about getting machine-gunned on her way to the gym. But most of the squads were in the countryside or the mountains, places where backward baby-having people might hide.
The stupidest stupid people could completely sidetrack your spiritual evolution. It just wasn't fair.
Everybody else, millions of souls, they were already at the party. On the Venus video, you could catch the faces of famous people who'd suffered enough on Earth and didn't have to come back for another life. You'd see Grace Kelly and Jim Morrison. Jackie Kennedy and John Lennon. Kurt Cobain. Those were ones Eve could recognize. They were all at the party, looking young and happy, forever.
Among the dead celebrities roamed animals extinct on Earth: passenger pigeons, duck-billed platypuses, giant dodos.
On the television news, big-name celebrities were applauded the moment they emigrated. If these people, movie stars and rock bands, could emigrate for the greater good of all humanity, these people with money and talent and fame, with everything to keep them here, if they could emigrate, everyone could.
In the last issue of People magazine, the feature story was the “Celebrity Cruise to Nowhere.” Thousands of the best-dressed, most beautiful people, fashion designers and supermodels, software moguls and professional athletes, they boarded the Queen Mary II and sailed off, drinking and dancing, racing north across the Atlantic Ocean, looking, full speed ahead, for an iceberg to ram.
Chartered jetliners slammed into mountaintops.
Tour buses careened off towering ocean cliffs.
Here in the United States, most people went to Wal-Mart or Rite Aid and bought the Going Away Kits. The first generation of kits were barbiturates packaged inside a head-sized plastic bag with a drawstring for around your neck. The next generation of kits were a cherry-flavored chewable cyanide pill. So many people were emigrating right there in the store aisle—emigrating without paying for their kits—that Wal-Mart put the kits behind the customer-service desk with the cigarettes and made you pay first before they'd hand one over. Every couple minutes, an announcment over the public-address speakers asked
