You would think, wouldn't you, that you'd want as little bad stuff in the previous lives as possible? Most people think that what employers are looking for is the most basic, milquetoast person they can find - means they won't commit a crime again, right? Not so.

See, what they're looking for is a pattern. Your last five lives, have things been getting better or worse? Reincarnation is a massive cycle, a rolling wheel of death and rebirth - but some scientist at a fancy university said that you could tell with 70% accuracy which way the wind was blowing for a person. There were two kinds of people - those going up towards heaven and those going down towards hell.

I rubbed the card in my pocket with my thumb. The lamination had already begun to peel from its surface from my constant worrying. Maybe soon I could rub it all the way off, and I'd finally get a job.

... Not likely. They'd print me a new one. The last five lives were on my birth certificate anyways, divined from putting the placenta through some machine. I sighed, and headed in through the door.

"Mr. Patel," the lady at the counter said, flashing me a brilliant smile. You only got a smile that good from years of customer service, plastering a smile on even when you wanted to bash someone's head in. "Please, take a seat."

I took a seat across from the lady, watching as she shuffled her papers. There was a bit of a tell to these HR types - I knew I'd already lost the job.

"L1 was a businessman, I see. A lot of donations to charity," she said. L1 - your first past life. He must have been trying to drag our collective karma up as much as he could with the money he'd made. I didn't think it'd worked.

"L2, a firefighter, L3, a war hero," she continued, the same spiel I'd heard a hundred times before. I braced myself for the next two.

"Then an orphanage caretaker... And our first president," she said, delicately.

She couldn't say she was disqualifying me because of it. But she was. Of course she was. It should have been an honour to be reincarnated from him, but no - these people were convinced that these things would even out in time. That some equally horrendous crime would occur in my lifetime before the cycle could put itself back into sync.

"We regret to inform you that due to the morality quotas placed upon all multinational corporations..." she began. I tuned out. I'd heard it all before.

"Perhaps we'll meet again in the next cycle," she said, cheerily.

"Yeah. Of course," I said, numb to her words. I left the office behind me, shaking my head.

"Could've left some luck for me, Henil," I murmured to the statue in the city square. Of course, he just stood there. Silent, unmoving, as he had for decades.

I shook my head and kept moving. There had to be some other place that'd hire me. And if not, well, there was always next cycle.