It has been five years since the Voice spoke to every living human and said, “I’m done.”

  It was a warm, sunny morning in Los Angeles, a gloomy rainy evening in London, an utterly mild night in Hong Kong, and, characteristically, dark and freezing in Antarctica. Most describe it as a bolt of lightning striking their vision, save for the blind, who, for just a single moment, could see completely unhindered.

  “I’m done.” Shouted the Voice into 17 billion ears. “I quit. Three thousand years of civilization and you humans can't get your shit together. Worse, you convince yourself you have, with made up titles and the symbol of my dead son. That’s weird, even for humans, and I’ve seen a lot of humans. All of them. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. This is my letter of resignation. I’m handing over the reigns. The Gift of Claiming is yours; claim your domain, enjoy godhood and its associated futility.”

  Then, life resumed. The Message was heard by billions in a single instant, no longer than a millisecond. Afterwards, everyone went back to brewing their morning coffees, sitting in traffic, clacking away at keyboards.

  News stations covered the story. MSNBC covered it in a 3 minute table talk stuffed together between a feature of a three legged dog giving birth to a five legged puppy, and a piece on student loans. The phenomenon was summed up in 2 minutes on Fox before cutting to two white men discussing abortion rights.

  Younger generations called it a meme. Conspiracy theorists called it a straight-to-neural advertisement. Each of the world’s religions claimed it was another’s attempt at subterfuge. Only one person understood the harsh truth at the time of the Message, but that is another story.

  Despite the inexplicable nature of the phenomenon, none gave any heed to the Message. In a similar, inexplicable way, all felt like something had changed. A presence of security within all people had vanished. That Voice that had talked so many down from the darkest ledges of their mind’s highest towers, shone lantern light in the darkest of nights, or urged them to speak openly the love they felt for another. It was gone. An unknown, all-knowing ally to humankind. Vanished.

  In the first year, the rates of natural disasters increased exponentially. The small subtleties that seemed to keep us safe had left along with the Voice. Our cosmic supply of luck had ran out and humankind was rolling snake eyes on every turn. MSNBC ignored what was going on and kept speaking on student loans; Fox took the opportunity to showcase every gruesome death they could manage on the hour, every hour. Domestic pets turned ravenous and mad, killing owners in their sleep. Deaths by lightning strikes increased twenty fold in the first month after the Message. Pianos fell from second story buildings and didn’t land beside the happy-go-lucky passersby.

  It was a pandemic of ill omen.

  Animals became wild and ravenous,, both domesticated and non, their minds wrought with furious hysteria. All rain had become acid and strange new strains of influenza threatened the greater populace. The unfortunate past had already taught us to live disconnected by face, yet connected by screen, so we returned to it. It wasn’t pleasant, but we persisted. Against the Voice’s warning and aftereffect, we carried on, hosting zoom meetings and ordering our groceries to the door.

  Then, the first known Claiming took place.

  As with most new discoveries, the general populace discovered the first Claiming in a viral video.

  “Ahaha!” Said a frat boy in a backwards cap and University of California Santa Babara hoodie. Chaz Mack was his name, and a blurry video of him drinking at a frat party was the catalyst for an entirely new world. “I’m so drunk right now! Who wants some? Who wants this? Ahaha, I’m wasted. This is great! I feel great! I’m a king! A god! I’m the God of Drinking!”

  After claiming that he was the, “God of Drinking,” alcohol began spraying from Chaz’ fingertips. The crowd in the video grows utterly silent, as does Chaz. He stares in wonder at his hands, then stops the spray. He starts the spout again from his index finger, picking up a nearby red solo cup and filling it. When he takes a drink, he shouts, “Beer!” and the music resumes.

  In the immediate days following, Chaz Mack continued to showcase his supernatural abilities via 15-second clips on social media. These stunts included turning water to wine, Wine to Coor’s Light, and Coor’s light to Peach Schnapps. A physical analysis from the UCSB health department discovered his sweat had become whiskey, his blood, scotch, and his saliva, tequila. He could refill empty glasses from across a room, produce fountains of various alcohols from his body, and even induce inebriation upon another by a single touch of his hand. After claiming his domain, Chaz Mack, the twenty two year old English major from UCSB, had become the true god of drinking.

  Forty days after the Message, the world began to understand what the Voice had told us.

  Claim your domain.

  That understanding marked the beginning of the end of humanity. On the horizon, we could only see a distant visage of the next stage in our evolution. After Chaz Mack, a stream of viral videos poured out. The youngest were the first to discover the act of Claiming, mimicking Chaz’s drunken declaration.

  We began to call ourselves demigods, but there was a universal feeling of fraudulence in the title. Demigods in traditional mythology were half-gods, born of gods and non. We were but humans given an inheritance. Inherited-Gods, Inherited-Goddesses, Inherited-Goddex. These terms felt more natural, if the virality of their use is to be accepted as such. The wordiness, however, was not found colloquially useful, and thus, any who have claimed a domain and taken godhood are now called, Heirs.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  An early example of a well-known Heir is Sabrina Lemley, who Claimed the domain of TikTok. In the TikTok where she Claimed herself Goddess of TikTok, her three viewers watched as she was absorbed into her phone. No trace of her physical body would ever be seen again. 3 billion phones around the world updated instantly, the familiar shape of the app’s logo morphing into a blue and purple silhouette of Sabrina’s face. Every instance of the name “TikTok” ever written, typed or printed became, “LemTok.” To this day, Sabrina lives as a being of pure data within cyberspace. She can be seen and interacted with on the Lem-You page, though, because of creative directions she made with LemTok, the vast majority of users have deleted it in favor of alternative platforms.

  Some used the gift of Claiming as an answer to the vast issues that had erupted after the Message. Hiroto Fukuma pronounced himself the God of Pets, with the intention of curing the pandemic of hysteria that had plagued the world’s animals. In a viral video, he is seen approaching a pack of dogs in an empty street. As he walks toward them palm skyward and inviting, their vicious demeanor does not change. The LemTok video ends just before Hiroto is torn apart piece by piece and devoured. Later, a fellow LemToker and friend of Hiroto, Kazuko Matsumoto, theorizes that Hiroto claimed the incorrect domain for his godhood. Kazuko then pronounces herself the Goddess of Wild Animals. Her LemTok gains 3.2 millions followers over night as the new heir posts videos communicating with wild packs of former family-pets, and tells them all to go home.

  Claiming became a trending hash tag in less than a week. The phrase could be seen in graffiti along countless walls in every city around the world. It became evidently clear to all that the Message was more than a shared hallucination. It was the final word of a true deity. A creator abandoning its creations. Further, it left open the doors to its ultimate workshop.

  Countless Claimings took please in the first months. Mack’s TikTok was a precursor for the true horrors to come. One of the most well documented cases of the early Claimings, and the first known instance of a theoretical domain, was in the tragic case of Dr Sofia Rivas, a professor at Yale University.

  “Each possible mental process has become active in my mind. I am innately conscious of my mood, even as I sleep. My subconscious can not be kept at rest. It has melded with my conscious wakefulness. I do not sleep any more. I can not. Nightmares now infest my thoughts each moment. Every movement I make is analyzed without my desire; each motive is unavoidably clear and explored and can not be made without my mind deducing reason. To pick up a fork is to eat a meal is to metabolize the meal is to excrete the waste is to fertilize the soil is to grow the grain is to prepare the meal is to place the meal beside the fork. I am afraid, and yet I can not be as I also feel the joy of each present moment and thought and action and decision in my life that has all lead me to why I fear each present moment and thought and action and decision in my life which--”

  Dr Sofia Rivas Ph.D Neuropsychology

  Former Heir of Psychology

  In an excerpt of a Dr. Rivas’ personal journal in which she was documenting her journey after Claiming the domain of Psychology, her declining mental state could be seen clearly. The letter continues on in the same repetitive manner of the final four lines of the excerpt for 17 pages. The night after this passage, Dr. Sofia Rivas ended her life. When her body was discovered, it had the words, “Why us?” written in sharpie across her skin three hundred times.

  Soon, the entire world knew of the act of Claiming. In what some called the, “New Age of Exploration,” the entirety of planet’s resources were devoted, and at the behest, of anyone who claimed a domain. We had discovered what it meant to claim things like drinking or a social media app, but what cataclysmic power would be afforded to the soul who claimed water? Earth? The elements all together? Or the domains of life and death? With all humans able to claim freely, what chance did humanity have against the minds of those heirs that wielded power? Was Dr. Sofia Rivas’ death a precursor of the truth we would face? The truth that certain powers are beyond the capacity of the human mind to wield? The human soul?

  In an attempt to gather answers, Dr. Frieda Zopf and a research team led by her led an experiment to harness the very power we sought questions for to gather answers. Her team devoted their time to creating Domainology, a field of study surrounding Claimings and domains, with the hope of fabricating a domain of domains, in order to utilize the gift of Claiming to reveal its own secrets.

  “—it was a shared effort by the team. We drew sticks to decide who would claim the domain of Domainology. When I pronounced myself the Goddess of Domainology, a surge of comprehension struck me. It is akin to a new sense. Our goal was to discover the reason behind the Voice and its Message, and to discern the boundaries of Claiming. Ultimately, I was granted neither. I possess a comprehension of how it works, yet I can’t place it into words. I can say this: there are restrictions, which I presume, were set by the Voice. Each domain can only be possessed by one heir at a time, and each human may only claim one domain in their life. Another power I have been granted is a mental catalog of sorts: I can sense each domain that has been claimed, though I do not know the individuals who have claimed them…”

  Dr Frieda Zopf Ph.D Sociology

  Former Heir of Domainology

  Through their ingenious work of founding Domainology as a field of study, Dr Zopf and her team provided invaluable information surrounding the phenomenon of Claiming. Most importantly, Dr. Zopf gave us the foundation of our current knowledge in what is now referred to as the Rule of 1’s: 1 domain, 1 person, 1 life. Though we have learned much since the first days after the Message, there is still more we do not know.

  The new era of humanity had begun. A new resource had been uncovered, more valuable than gold, more powerful than any empire. We were not prepared. Human desire is not meant for the limitless powers of creation.

  I fear humankind will not last. Many grasp for godhood, abandoning what we were. A rare few cling to their humanity, reserving what once was, but each day draws them further behind as we are carried down the intractable wave of evolution.

  I have joined the tide. I have Claimed archives as my domain. These stories I share bear not the burden of lesson. They will not be given the task to teach. As a nameless Heir of Archives, human with inherited godhood, I cast these words into the future, so that humanity may be preserved as it passes forward into a new state of Godomachy.