The afterward's past is a bit of a mystery, and for good reason. I wanted to keep the surrealist, dreamlike tone of the story throughout, and giving the place a lot of past and history would ground it too much in some form of history, I thought. That said, there are some clues scattered about, and it's partly possible to assemble a sort of crude backstory. If you're ready to kill the magic and mystery, I have compiled a sort of complete history on the afterward below. This is a bit of a special case as it's spoilers for New Infinity and many other works I've producedas well as afterward, so I am going to urge you very strongly to consider if you're cool with that. Either way, here's the history of the afterward, as I wrote it and only vaguely implied:
The story of afterward takes place initially following a near extinction of the Earth that occurred between 2020 and 2035. By the 2040s, humanity is on the rise, and at this time we enter the stories of Calvin and Scott Riddick. Scott has been accepted to a college in Chicago, IL under the assistance of Horizon Solutions, an omnicorporation approaching owning the concept of capitalism and media on the post-war Earth. Calvin is the more critical of the two brothers, especially with Horizon's CEO running for President. He rigs the elections to ensure he wins and wipes his opposition from the world's law-making bodies, and continues his reign for multiple decades. Some time later, Scott is killed somewhere in the suburbs of Chicago, and Calvin feels personally responsible. Cal, who has been working towards a law enforcement degree, opts out of the Kennewick PD's training program and becomes a vigilante out of a skewed desire to get personal revenge. However, Cal at the time isn't in a good financial position, and has to take local jobs.
This leads him to James Baker, a man who was released from prison shortly before the war and befriended Felix, the owner of New Infinity, a digitized civilization, a city that exists within a computer in the Pacific Northwest. . James attempted to rekindle life with his family, but felt unwelcome and thus took to helping Felix run the digitized civilization. During the war, Felix, fearing capture or death, flees to an alternate reality. James, now the head of New Infinity as his daughter begins to find work in a post-war Pacific Northwest, ends up dealing with a bit of a data incident. Horizon sends the civilization a form of malware in an attempt to take over or shut down New Infinity, but it escapes, taking sentient form. The malware leaks into the outside world and collects Blight, a dangerous material left over from the war. James believes the beast to be part-human and offers Calvin money to kill it, which fails and causes Calvin to become blighted. As he begins to perish, the malware continues to run free, gradually tearing the world apart around it. Its prolonged existence creates a tear into a new branch of reality, taking many of its inhabitants with it. These inhabitants are just barely saved from another cataclysmic event on the earth that would cause a mass exodus. Calvin, and many humans become the first inhabitants of what will become Afterward, named in part because these are the people who will carry on after the end of the world. Following this tear, what remained of the area in our world has quickly become an abandoned ghost town, and the people who were once a part of it were forgotten about, as they no longer had existed.
The Afterward initially takes the form of a string of small islands in a vast ocean, but beneath it lies some form of core, the heart of the operation. A man becomes obsessed with its existence and the fragmented reality surrounding him, and paired with senility and isolation begins to dub himself Linus Linoleum. Linus, in a past life (so to say) was a conman and conspiracy theorist, which is what leads to him attempting to spearhead the Afterward in the way he does. Calvin is the first “fatality” in the Afterward, having been in a terrible coma for months after his run-in with Blight.
It's at this time that we enter the story of Marc Wilson, a former doctor who finds himself surrounded by the vast, unreal expanse of the Afterward. When Linus approaches the doctor about the blighted mass that created this pocket dimension, he refers to it as the Nexus, a conglomeration of code, man, machine, and blight. Marc sees what needs to be done, and works with many of the other townspeople to bunker down for surviving the Nexus once more. It is at this time that he invents the food packets, a sort of ration that can theoretically keep good indefinitely. Their strange, exaggerated side-effects are caused mostly by the instability of the pocket dimension, though people begin to accept them as part of the experience. It is around this time that Marc and his wife have a daughter, Tammy. Soon thereafter, the Nexus quickly approaches and their plans to bunker down begin to fall through. Linus, beginning to hone his powers as a “metamancer” by studying the distortion rampant in the pocket dimension, quickly gets to work on a second Afterward on top of the first one, finishing by running a train to the old one to the new, sealing up the gaps around the floating islands, and then pumping the ocean's water up to the new surface. The strain of both the old, abandoned Afterward and the new one begins to tax the core heavily, but Linus sees no significant downsides at the moment.
Tammy, who has dreams of an ambiguous nature (I personally saw her as being a roaming photojournalist hence the coupons and picture of her dog, but that much is entirely up to you!) quickly finds herself needing to continue the legacy of Marc Wilson, producing rations. Linus at this point has gone full-tilt into believing in Metamancy and deems himself to be the author of afterward, a story about the people living in the Afterward. He's written off as possibly just crazy, but Linus ventures deep into the past Afterward to obtain a bunch of blight to investigate. Over the course of about five years, he begins to become a recluse, becoming increasingly deranged and angry, and by the time that they are building the fourth afterward, he has begun to drop the capital from the name, his speech sounds more like text being read in one's head, and less like spoken dialogue. He's presenting more and more insane theories to the world through massive books he keeps in a library all to himself, and by the time that the next wave of blight, the next arrival of the Nexus, Linus has become blind to the world, and carelessly lets several people die, including Marc and Tammy Wilson, their bodies lost to the Nexus.
Linus continues to order new afterwards built to keep up with the Nexus's growth, and the extra layers tax the core of the pocket dimension to the point that new people, new concepts are becoming esoteric, not helped by Linus reaching the point where he can become the storyteller to afterward. afters, puppet-like characters with an innate understanding of metamancing arrive about five years after the loss of the Wilsons, and their arrival is heralded with confusion. To keep the future straight, books of the people who are missing, presumed dead after each afterward begin to get more in-depth, containing full biographies as well as pictures of those people. The intent is so that who was an after and who was a human won't be lost to time. Shortly following that, on the rocky shores of a nearby part of the afterward arrive the first Lizi, a race able to communicate in their own font. Robot-like characters begin to exist shortly thereafter, and some of them take the form of characters like Ambledon or Percy, and others are more like Constantine. Nephim are the most recent addition to the afterward, about twenty years after the Lizi and ten years before the start of afterward as you read it. They're a rare race, but have the most potential to become a storyteller, though at the cost of their powers being drained as they use them, and if they vanish then so do they.
Finally, at last, the soul of Calvin Riddick, unable to ascend being locked away in the pocket dimension and tied to the earth with blight poisoning, finds its way into the thought long-gone body of Tammy, rushed through a water pump into a new afterward, and left to wash up on a beach, a great many afterwards after the loss of Tammy. Due to the various confounding variables surrounding the body and soul's shared existence, and due to Calvin's soul spending years in purgatory only able to witness the world around it, they awaken with little to no memory of themselves, but with a strong sense of metamancy. This is evidenced in the first chapter alone, where Tammy/Cal (I just stick to calling them Tammy and using female pronouns despite the surrounding circumstances, mostly because that's how you know her for most of the story and how you're introduced to her) calls out an after for speaking with a lowercase a, which would require reading the page, not just listening. By this point, Shim and a few other Lizi have moved towards the “city” in the afterward, which has conspicuously grown to contain several thousand people, afters, Lizi, Nephim, robots, and more. Linus, now fully blighted and mounted to the wall decades later, is moved upwards with each new afterward and continues to oversee the story as simply an empty narrator, with no physical vessel to go anywhere anymore, simply a skeleton, blight, and a voice for storytelling.
Do note though that almost the entirety of this past is not canon within afterward, I only consider what I explicitly wrote for the story “canon” and while this is what I have for the afterward's past, much of the place's history has been lost to the modern day afterward, and so things like the afterward being a pocket dimension, or characters who arrived in the afterward from our earth are no longer thought about, but if you ever just really needed answers, I have them.
ns 15.158.61.42da2
