God didn't die.
That would have been simple. A story with an ending.
God resigned.
There was no announcement. No celestial silence. The universe did not halt to mourn or question. Reality—trained by eternity to obey momentum—continued forward, executing commands written so long ago that their purpose had eroded into habit.
Miracles still occurred. Just not when they were needed.
Prayers were received, indexed, and placed into queues that never emptied.
Karma delivered outcomes with mechanical precision—stripped of mercy, stripped of intent.
Most people adapted without realizing what they had lost.
Systems remained operational.
That was the problem.
Angels followed procedures they no longer believed in.
Fate ran projections without understanding meaning.
Death kept accepting arrivals, even as its boundaries collapsed inward.
No one was supervising the machine anymore.
---
Time advanced. Imperfectly.
Some individuals were skipped—quietly removed from history's accounting. Faces blurred in photographs. Names dissolved from records. Memories edited themselves clean, as if correcting typographical errors in reality. Time refused to acknowledge them.
Space did not.
Planets adjusted. Orbits bent. Distances responded. Gravity hesitated.
The universe remembered what time chose to forget.
Dreams began to malfunction.
They had always been simulations—test runs for existence. Disposable drafts of reality, spun up and discarded in the dark. But now the cleanup processes failed. Nightmares lingered. Failed universes looped. Some refused to terminate.
Occasionally, they leaked.
A scar that remained after waking.
A sound with no waking source.
A fear that remembered being real.
Reality coherence dipped below acceptable thresholds.
No one was notified.
---
Humanity noticed symptoms, not causes.
Stars flickered—not dying, but buffering.
Physics glitched. Déjà vu struck continents at once.
Scientists spoke of unfinished constants. Philosophers spoke of meaning. Governments prepared contingencies without names.
Cities formed where regret accumulated, traded like currency.
The dead did not vanish—they relocated. And the place they went to was overcrowded, unstable, pushing back.
Religions fractured. Prophets argued. Algorithms watched.
Everyone, it seemed, carried a future—an echo, faint but visible. A trajectory the universe could anticipate, model, and prepare for.
But not everyone.
Across the world, a small number of anomalies emerged.
Not powerful.
Not chosen.
Not special in any mythic sense.
Simply… unreadable.
No future-shadow.
No stable projection.
No predictable outcome.
The universe could not see past them.
And uncertainty, in a system built on inevitability, is a critical fault.
---
Error messages began appearing.
Not to everyone. Not publicly.
Just brief, clinical notices—experienced as intrusive thoughts, half-remembered dreams, moments of vertigo.
Reality coherence: 62%
Observer count unstable
Administrative oversight absent
Candidate evaluation initiated
The universe was not asking for help.
It was escalating an issue.
Across different cities, different lives, different circumstances, notifications appeared—subtle, almost polite.
You've been shortlisted for Divine Administrator.
There was no ceremony.
No divine light.
No promise of power.
Only access.
Responsibility.
Visibility.
Some would reject it.
Some would exploit it.
Some would break under its weight.
A few would recognize one another—not as enemies, not yet—but as fellow survivors of a reality that had stopped pretending to be fair.
The universe did not need a god.
It needed someone willing to stay.
And it had decided to test several candidates at once.
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