America closed its last church in 2052. Most of the Republicans who, as Obama famously put it, had been clinging to their guns and Bibles had died off by that point. Still, America had maintained a place of worship for longer than any other country in the world.
It was after the second wave of COVID – the real COVID, the deadly virus released by the U.N. after the trial run of 2020, which reduced the world's population to half in 2027 – that people had just slowly stopped believing. It wasn't the massive die-off that had done it; it's that a few rogue doctors had figured out how to resurrect COVID victims – by injecting them with the new mRNA vaccines AFTER they had died – that put the final nail in the coffin of faith.
No one who came back reported anything on the other side, at least not anything like heaven or hell.
Instead, the COVID resurrectees reported a big space vessel hung in a colorless void. When the COVID dead peered inside the vessel's windows – and as disembodied consciousness floating in a void, that's what one did, it was the ONLY thing to do, after all – they discovered the black vastness of space, filled with all the galaxies known to man – and more.
It looked like a microcosm of the cosmos inside the spaceship.
But no pearly gates or fiery pit to be found. Just a big spaceship, piloted by an unknown force – some speculated it was guided by a blockchain-based algorithm – hanging in the void.
@cliffagreen