Hi, I'm Andy. I was conceived a few hours after the Rapture. That made me the something-thousandth-oldest kid in the world, I guess. With 300k births per day any given day, back when there were six billion people on Earth, it had to be somebody.

In a few days it'll be the 17th anniversary of Armageddon. There will be a small ceremony at the site, I'm told. I attended for the 10th and will attend for the 20th, but not this year. Anyway, yep, I'm 25. The Rapture; one year and a half of upheaval; seven years of Tribulation; Armageddon. That's a lot of history to cram into eight years and a half, but I suspect my grandparents said the same about the second world war.

All I know is, I feel a lot older. Maybe that's a good thing; I may need to think like an old man. The parents of the girl I want to formally date - excuse me, court - are Christians, big surprise, right? and it was her father who asked me to write about my experience, all but saying that it was a prerequisite for me even being seen around the house.

She's a few weeks younger than me, so she's legally an adult, but theirs is a very traditional household. Despite everything else, it blows my mind that there are people alive today who remember when a woman of twenty-five was, culturally, an old maid. Well, people live a lot longer now. I've heard talks of raising the age of majority to one hundred. Can you imagine that? Veterans, people with doctorates - treated by the law like children?

So, I'm going to write this down, leave it alone for a few days, and then my girlfriend will redact it so that it's an acceptable read for her Dad. This version is probably going up on my blog, after any drama is over. You'll excuse me if I don't name her, or him for that matter, but you may have heard the family name somewhere.

Anyway. My parents married young, and my mom found a good job at a local manufacturer in town, Zevo Toys. Moscow, Idaho, USA, North America, Terra, if you care. Sometimes I tell people I'm from Moscow and I'm told I don't look Russian, but as per the International Astronomical Union, Moscow is a state of mind.

My dad was going back to school to be a computer programmer; after all, it was the 1990s, computers were getting faster and uglier every year, it made sense. So he quit his job at the car shop, applied to Zevo as well, and worked there part-time on the second shift while taking classes - the idea was for him to take the core classes at the local community college and then start commuting to State U for the things that needed actual decent computing hardware. It was a good plan. It'd have let me grow up comfortably middle class at America's zenith, I think. Of course Like almost every other plan of mice and men, the Rapture put a stop to it.

At least for us it wasn't a hard stop, or a sudden stop. There were a few train and airline crashes, many more car accidents, especially in the Midwest, and I think a cargo ship hit a destroyer, or vice versa. Of course, that paled in comparison to every single child on earth having disappeared. That sent the entire human race into shock. People sort of kept moving on autopilot for days, stretching to weeks and months for some.

Much later than this, just before Armageddon, my mom showed me a magazine that came out the week after the Rapture. It didn't mention the First Event other than in passing. There was something about a religious conference, something about a personnel reshuffle at the UN. It read like it was written by robots. I've lived through the Tribulation, of course, but I'm not going to pretend I grok - excuse me, understand - the sheer magnitude of the shock that the Rapture's survivors experienced. By the time I was old enough to understand, the supernatural was already a part of everyone's lives - the plagues kept coming, and we weathered them, as we could. The sudden changing of the very rules of the universe, I can't imagine. Nobody of my generation truly can.

For the first days, the stunned people of Terra either curled up in a ball or kept reporting to their jobs. Except for the sociopaths, of course. I know there was at least two palace coups in Russia, and one each in about four dozen countries. States of emergency declared, power grabbed, that sort of thing. The non-sociopaths very much had other things on their mind. For example, a friend of my Dad who was an elementary school teacher kept walking into an empty classroom for eight days - including a weekend - and reading names from the logbook, taking attendance over and over. On day nine he went to the teachers' lounge, stripped naked, neatly folded his clothes on the floor, and walked out of the window.

When the dust had settled, the sociopath in charge was Nicolae Carpatescu, the man who took over the world with less than six shots fired, the god-emperor of humanity, the Antichrist. My mom tells me that the people on the streets at the time flat out didn't care. All they knew was that one dollar was now worth one British pound, which meant their savings would stretch out farther somehow - it's called deflation -, and that he didn't want to force people to learn Romanian, or take people's guns, or anything like that. Deflation was exactly what my parents needed at the time. You see, one of the very many economic effects of the Rapture is that toy factories, well, they go under, because there's no kids anymore. Recall that both my parents were working for Zevo Toys, my mother full time, my father three hours a day.

I have to make a digression here. Zevo Toys was already struggling to keep up with competition from Japan and Taiwan, so much so that four years before I even exsted, one of the brothers owning the factory - a recently retired lieutenant general - tried to land a military contract for production of weaponized remote controlled vehicles, what we today call drones. It was too far ahead of its time. There was also the operator controversy, but I get ahead of myself.

The bottom line here is, the factory's bottom line had hit rock bottom. Teenagers wanted videogames, not toy trains. I think my parents were one of the last couples to be awarded the generous baby bonus that the company's paternalistic founder had established - when they turned in my ecography, at a plant buildding with full warehouses and desolate loading bay, there was joy in knowing that the human species was not doomed, and envy in my parents' colleagues who had lost a child by sheer rape of the laws of physics.

The factory closed down two weeks later. I know one of the brothers, Leslie, the one who'd worked there all his life, had effectively committed suicide; he and his wife had been trying for a baby for years, and five months after it had finally happened - the baby was gone, like all others, vanished from her womb. She'd died of shock, as did many pregnant people who were in that stage, and the two losses were too much or him. He kept walking Terra like a ghost for a few more weeks before disappearing. The brother who was ex-military, Leland, hid inside a bottle.