Cycle of Reincarnation - Bypassing the wait
Lets say for arguments sake, that a world, with maximum population of 5 billion, the common Joe gets reincarnated a few hundred times since the creation of humankind. This type of reincarnation is specific only to humans and didn't so much matter till record keeping was invented. The Old Soul doesn't have very many memories of their previous lives just things similar to what we have as deja vu. Looks, memories and more importantly the names, which are recorded at every birth determine what soul inhabits a baby. A child can grow, learn and have the childhood of any other without the thought that they have lived before. Only in strong instances can a memory surface. All they know is that there name is what ties them to where they grow up, their occupation, their role in the world of society.
The ether stores energy of converted souls (animals, dinos, insects, etc) to transfer the souls into bodies and every once in a long long time, create a new soul.
With that background knowledge, plausibly speaking, how would it be possible to keep the same group of souls continuously entering new bodies while others take longer? What could substitute the hiatus of a souls sleep to bypass decades and jump right into a new body after say, a week or so?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/135034. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
When they died matters
The universe likes to keep things in balance, but the universe - not being sapient - is quite dumb about it. So, a body that dies of old age at 80, 90, etc years old will take the normal time to re-birth. A child? They didn't even have a chance to have new experiences, so they get bumped up in line. This scales, in some fashion, so there is an "optimal" age to die at which you don't have a long wait, but you still live long enough to have an effect.
Someone in some power has discovered this. They discovered that if they commit some form of suicide at a specific age, they can maximize their time "living" with minimal wait.
In addition, there can be other things that affect the position in line. Number of children, chronic ilnesses, etc. Depending on what you go for, you could make it so even if the average joe finds out about the optimal age, they still have to work at things to make it happen.
It also has an interesting side effect of making capital punishment less appealing in some cases. Make the person sit in jail for a few decades, and then you don't have to deal with them for quite some time since the universe only saw a long life.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads