The world in its entirety had been very different since the Happening, in that for the first time ever, it wasn’t. Whatever “God” had been in the first place was still uncertain — the number of fragments that scattered across the Earth were too numerous and incomprehensible to be pieced back together — but on a metaphysical level, contemporary physicists and philosophers concurred that he had been some sort of calibrating force in the mechanism of time, and the instant he died, existence seemed to enter a vortex of stasis. Time passed, colors changed, but the shapes remained the same, suspended in space. Technology stopped evolving; humankind had just made its way onto Mars when the Happening occurred, and they hadn’t made it an inch further since. Even one hundred and ten years later, cars remained clunky and inefficient, phones remained simple black bricks, newspapers remained sheets of inked tree skin.

It was a fact acknowledged among the intellectually mediocre that God was, in fact, dead, that he had been for quite some time, and that he wasn’t coming back. Not this time. Anyone who claimed otherwise was understood to be suffering from some degree of stupidity, insanity, or corruption. Sometimes a painfully predictable mixture of all three. But it was an effective means of controlling the masses; the less-than-mediocre intellectuals, so to speak. All that remained of God in the After were the creatures he left behind. Most populous were the demons, though many of them were little more than pests that fed off fear and unease and rotting flesh; haunting old attics and basements, spooking people who walked past the bushes late at night, scavenging from animal carcasses in the woods. Tearing the occasional hole in a passerby’s pants, or knocking the occasional coffee from the hands of a busy woman rushing to her next appointment. Others were a little more vindictive.