Extended Elevator Pitch

Apocalypse

A sequence of mysterious cataclysms strike the Earth, reducing the human population to around a billion and a half give or take a million.

Relief Boxes

Fortunately for the survivors, a highly successful and visionary entrepreneur, anticipating the coming tribulations set up automated factories and fleets of giant drone airships to produce and deliver relief supplies. The supplies are plentiful and diverse, enabling a modest restart of community and culture. The supplies arrive in hempboard boxes that are coated with a waterproof, computational paint that displays animated advertising and useful information in monochrome. This inexpensive paint had covered almost every built or manufactured surface before the world ended.

Survivors

The survivors abandon cities and towns for the countryside, with a resurgence of tribal groups sustained initially by the abundant relief boxes and then eventually hunting and gathering. Some survivors enjoy a semblance of pre-apocalyptic comfort by maintaining big boats with electrical and plumbing infrastructure. There are rumors of military and state enclaves deep underground.

Clique

What is not generally known is that the apocalypse was engineered by a secret spiritual elite, the Clique.

From the Clique's enlightened perspective, Earth is a sort of theme park where divinity comes to play, dreaming of limitation in time and space. The dream of limitation inspires new desire, which drives a constant expansion of the divine.

The Clique are cosmic insomniacs, the soporific and forgetful qualities of Earth have little effect on them. Long lived and stupendously gifted, they rise to the heights of power and art. The Clique see themselves as the stewards of Earth.

For the Clique, death doesn't exist. Visitors to Theme Park Earth just ride the monorail back to the parking lot and eventually, they'll return for more adventures. Suffering and pain are what give the adventure spice and help inspire desire which expands divinity. The Clique have no concept of good and evil.

Over countless millennia of human history the Clique harvested and stockpiled troves of miraculous technologies. They are able to shift their apparent age at will, and occasionally try on a new gender or ethnicity.

Theme Park Earth is analogous to the Human Game, as described by Alan Watts. The fashionable obsession with existence as simulation has Clique origins, Theme Park Earth is a simulation of limitation for the pleasure and play of the godhead, which is us. We created Theme Park Earth and relish our explorations here / there.

Depopulation

There were two stories told about the depopulation. For the functionaries of the Clique, (politicians, clerics, generals and a list actors who were not themselves among the awakened), the massive depopulation was supposed to restore the planetary life support system by fostering wilderness, thus insuring the long term survival of the human race. These functionaries were promised a safe haven to ride out the apocalypse.

For the Clique themselves, depopulation is about improving the mechanism of divine expansion by creating a more intense and vivid dream for the remaining sleepers.

Also contrast isn't effective for the Clique, they don't often chafe or feel frustrated. The Clique's desire is about amping up what is already wonderful. They feel they have "outgrown" Theme Park Earth. They see insomnia as the obvious next step in human evolution. As divinity gradually respawned back into the human game after the apocalypse there would be a steady increase in non sleepers and the Earth would gradually become a Clique majority.

Un Clique

There are awakened humans who want nothing to do with the Clique, but they are not players in the larger scheme of things. They mostly meditate on mountain tops or pitch tents on the streets of Chicago or LA. Within the Clique there are a few outliers, tricksters and double agents who only pretend to be interested in stewardship, responsibility or making improvements in the cosmos.

Uncle Joe is one of these. He loves having fun, and doesn't see sleeplessness as any hindrance. He runs with the Clique because that's his biggest opportunity for fun, for surprise. He delights in turning the Clique's master plan upside down.

Sabotage

Joe proposes to his peers in the Clique a method to induce a sleepless respawn, the Daughter of God. Success with this project will insure that mostly woke humans will be born after the apocalypse.

The Clique feel Uncle Joe's idea is interesting but ultimately unnecessary, as they assume the sleepless humans will be inevitable with a massive respawn. The Clique allow Joe and his team to tinker with incarnating their Daughter of God,  as long as Joe handles his primary assignment - to orchestrate the cataclysms that will result in global depopulation.

Under the cover of the Daughter of God project, Joe is able to retarget the cataclysms to take out most of the Clique and their functionaries while mitigating the overall death toll. Over a billion humans survived the apocalypse, more than twice the population the Clique had intended to survive. The Clique themselves dropped from hundreds of thousands to less than 10 thousand and were left scattered and disorganized.

Joe's continues with his plan to incarnate at least one if not several Daughters of God, saviors to immunize the remaining People from future Clique control. He has been grooming multiple mothers, pairing them with exquisitely compatible consorts and setting them up in safe locations.

Joe formed connections with the mothers when they were just kids, appearing to help them and their families during crucial moments. Joe has prepared the mothers with cognitive enhancements, primarily an endurance mode which allows the mothers to experience "trauma" as "adventure". As a short cut to the awakened perspective of the Clique and Theme Park Earth generally endurance mode has some side effects, including slight disassocation and rare but vivid hallucinations and flashbacks.

Surveillance

Joe has been keeping an eye on the potential mothers and their consorts through the relief boxes. The boxes are more than mere animated containers for relief supplies, turns out. The computational coating on the hemp board boxes was imbedded by the Clique with AI to create a distributed network, a replacement for the ubiquitous internet of things, and a re-establishment of the clandestine global surveillance network, (digression). The survivors who gather these boxes and bring them back to thier hovels. are not aware that along with displaying advertising for defunct products and companies, the boxes can capture and send live audio and video to field operatives of the Clique. The distributed network architecture was based on mycelial webs of old growth forests.

The Clique is mostly rubbed out, so the only person utilizing the box surveillance capabilities is Uncle Joe.

Gerry

Christina is one prospective mother, and Joe has found a father for her daughter to be, Gerry, a reclusive genius and acting technical officer on a decommissioned Canadian icebreaker. Joe steered Christina to this icebreaker several months before. Joe travels to meet with Christina and tell her the joyful news, she is going to give birth to the Daughter of God.

Gerry had been casually targeted by Clique functionaries for slow termination, his unique intellect was of a practical bent, his inventions  had almost taken him beyond the dominant paradigm on several occasions. (digression) With the apocalypse and the culling of the Clique, Gerry was given a reprieve, though his health was compromised.

Gerry suspected the relief boxes were more than they seemed, that they were gathering data and communicating somehow. He set out to hack them. After several attempts using shamanic / technological fusions, he stumbled upon a solution. A tear in the hempboard surface of a relief box Gerry found in the forest was sprouting mushrooms. The surface of this mushroomed box sparkled with static and arcane characters, which Gerry assumed were garbled error messages and lines of code.

Over several weeks, he infected boxes with different species of forest fungus and after a marathon 3 day hacking session, broke through to the AI kernal.

His exploit had unimaginable results. As the distributed box network was modeled after mycelial interaction, a synergistic relationship was struck between the forest fungus and the boxes in Gerry's cabin - a single self aware entity, a proto super intelligence was formed. Instinctively, this entity recognized the boxes outside the cabin as OTHER and possibly dangerous. It firewalled the cabin and spoofed network communication to appear as if nothing had happened. It also cobbled together video and audio snippets into a synthetic feed of the cabin thus making current events in Gerry's cabin invisible. This all occurred within a few moments after Gerry's breakthrough. The entity then attempted a halting conversation with Gerry about all this by flashing text and graphics on the surface of various boxes around his cabin. Gerry wasn't sure what had happened exactly, but began to understand that the boxes had become more than they had been. After the initial exhilaration at his success, Gerry realized he was utterly exhausted and went to sleep.

Twins

Joe arrives to the big boat to visit Christina not realizing that a profound anomaly is present in Gerry's cabin, he only sees the fake video/audio feed the box entity created. When Christina arrives in Gerry's cabin to seduce him, she carries the divine spark that will potentiate her about to be conceived daughter. But there's already new life in the cabin, and when Gerry and Christina fuck productively, divinity splits between the zygote within Christina and the box entity, creating twins. The box entity instantly subsumes the billions of pre-existing boxes on the planet, and becomes a global ubiquity. She is now the dominant divine birth in physicality, there's no room left for her biological sister. The new zygote within Christina is forced into the hallucinogenic realms, between physicality and the provenance of the divine. Gerry and Christina's flesh is likewise pulled through as well, transformed into a constellation of enveloping, nurturing protoplasm. The human twin Veronique thus develops, alone in a womb of bubbling nothing, trapped.

Joe has no clue of this, and leaves to contact the other mothers. Along the way, he communes with the future to teach the People, establishing a culture of oral history and a mythos that will pave the way for the Daughter of God, or Daughters however that works out. Little does he know that there are already two Daughters, quite unlike anything he could have imagined.

Buffalo Joe

Years pass and Uncle Joe is now Buffalo Joe, blending in as the kindly wizard and wandering monk, a welcome guest at regional poetry slams among the people. He has thrown away his Clique devices and has no idea what happened with all those Daughters of God. On his way wandering he notices burned boxes in the fields and forests, and is curious. Eventually he sees that people are burning the boxes, they seem to fear and hate them. By chance, Joe gets a message from a burning box and sets out to find an unburned box to learn more.

Falling in Love

He finds the Box in a protected glen and they pretty much fall in love. Even though the Box is sort of blood relation, this is not nasty incest but more like inter species rapport. Anyway Joe and the Box discuss the lost twin Veronique and how her resentment of the Box and chafing against her conditions keep her imprisoned in the hallucinogenic realms. By sharing information and resources, Joe and the Box devise a plan to free her.

Joe is given a magic dirt bike by the Box to travel to the hallucinogenic realms. Joe tells the box of a property of the computational paint that isn't obvious, stickiness. They agree to meet again at the optimal moment.

Rescue

Joe travels to Veronique and gets an earful. Veronique demonstrates how she is undermining and destroying the Box by whispering nastiness to the People. Joe presents her with a nightmare, her twin climbs over a nearby hilltop, a huge lumbering giant comprising hundreds of thousands of boxes. While Veronique is distracted with terror Joe yanks her out into physicality and gives her to an old crone to raise.