Billionaire Rapture

The Caribbean sun shone brightly overhead as Mark Zuckerberg’s toes left the deck of his 387’ yacht, “The Launchpad”. As he floated skyward, “Zuck” felt a sense of quiet satisfaction. He was vindicated. He was special. And he had totally nailed the name of the boat.

The crew was unsure how to respond. His pilot, blinding in her pristine starched white uniform with the Meta logo bold and blue on each shoulder, raced to her helicopter. By the time she got there, the small crack as her boss broke the sound barrier set the water around the yacht rippling, placing Zuck beyond earthly help. The yacht itself remained placid and unmoved by the sound.

Still accelerating, Zuck left the atmosphere at Mach 7, barely heating up at all from the thinning atmosphere as he felt the Sun’s full force begin to flake the skin from his body. Even the Sun’s fierce gravity couldn’t bleed off all the orbital velocity Zuck had gained during his forty years on the planet, and his path to the Sun turned into a long elliptical orbit that intersected the next planet inward, Venus.

Venus’ thick, acidic atmosphere did little to slow Zuck’s descent as his body streaked brightly through the smoggy skies of Earth’s sister planet. No Venus probes were in a good position to capture images of the small crater made as he impacted the rocky, dry, lifeless terrain.

The sky was dark and stormy. Zuck, long since passed any point of sanity, could barely feel as the acid dissolved what was left of his scorched, desiccated skin. Zuck’s slow thoughts reminded him that Venus took 243 Earth days to complete one revolution. It took 87 Earth days for the Sun to rise high enough above Venus’ distant horizon to somewhat illuminate the spot where Zuck rested. He was dimly aware of the crushing atmospheric pressure lessening as he rose into the sky, bursting through Venus’ omnipresent cloud cover to continue his Sunward journey. Zuck considered himself lucky; he’d managed to avoid colliding with tiny Mercury on his journey. If he’d hit Mercury, he would’ve been trapped there forever.

Not forever, mused Zhong Shanshan, whose Mercury sojourn was broken after only 4.7 billion years, when the Sun expanded to take its closest three planets into its loving embrace and the Chinese entrepreneur finally joined his brethren in the Sun’s cooling core.

Billionaires were thrown off the Earth like a wet dog shaking itself dry, no longer confined by Earth’s gravity, pulled toward the Sun. The first wave stripped the Earth of 75% of its billionaires; the rest found themselves indoors, and were able to accommodate being pinned against the walls and ceilings as the Sun crossed the sky unless a carelessly opened window or unlocked door sent them flying through space.

As the heirs to the billionaires received their inheritances and became themselves free of Earth’s pull, a second wave of next generation tycoons made their ways to the heart of the Sun. The cleverest of them refused the lump sum payment in favor of an annuity.

Jake Smalley only learned he’d won the richest lottery jackpot in history when he found himself rising swiftly above the low cloud layer above his modest Columbus, Ohio ranch house. He loved that house. Just a couple of years until it would have been paid off. His children found the signed lottery ticket in his top dresser drawer. They judiciously ran from the house and had themselves removed from their father’s will. Jake’s daughter later went back to the house. She was tracked by local air traffic controllers for thirty miles before her small radar profile grew too faint to detect.

A cohort of small African nations hatched a plan to create a multinational non-profit that could gift anyone in the world with a name and address a billion dollars, said funds to be returned to the non-profit if not claimed before one’s death. They’d managed to enrich and rapture most of the politicians and head of state of the European Union before the USA’s crashing economy and runaway inflation made everyone in the nation a paper billionaire, and the currency worthless.

The skies above New York City took hours to clear. As the bodies of newly-minted trillionaires collided with the various satellites, space stations and random junk orbiting the Earth, they inadvertently destroyed Earth’s communication network.

“That figures,” said Zhong Shanshan to himself (in Chinese) as he watched the millions pass by from the bottom of his crater prison. Not one of the trillionaires hit Mercury near enough to talk to.

Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, and the journey to the center of the Solar System takes months. USA’s currency had continued its crash; on the long trip to the Sun, the clouds of Americans had actually become deca-trillionaires.