There were lights in the sky again. Not the common kind that drone-fed dullards mistake for UFOs or Elon’s vanity necklaces. No, these were older — the kind that made shepherds drop their staffs and poets forget their rhymes. They swirled like stained glass liquefied, like God had just learned about tie-dye and was showing off.
Kansas went half-mad. Radio preachers shouted about Nephilim, farmers loaded shotguns, and every Walmart parking lot became a cathedral of the confused.
Meanwhile, Ezekiel Carmichael — veteran, mystic, janitor, and part-time existentialist — sat in his rust-bitten lawn chair behind a trailer that leaned like it was tired of believing in gravity. His coffee was cold, his eyes were warm, and his faith… well, it had taken some detours through the desert.
They called him “Zeke the Freak” at Area 54 ½ — the government’s unacknowledged funhouse of secrets and soda machines. But Zeke knew something the rest didn’t: truth and madness often drink from the same thermos.
He had seen the lights before. April 11, 2023 — Monument Valley. The sky split open like a cosmic piñata, and something vast and geometrically impossible came sliding through, humming like a Tibetan monk with a hangover. The Nephilim emerged, tall and radiant, tattooed in alphabets too holy for the tongue. Humanity gasped.
But the joke — and God loves a good joke — was on the audience.
They weren’t angels. They weren’t even from space. They were holographic puppets whipped up by the U.S. Department of Directed Narrative and Planetary Calibration (motto: “We Edit Reality So You Don’t Have To”). Some bureaucrat decided the world needed new gods to keep the markets steady.
Dr. Helga Finch, rogue technomancer and caffeine addict, had discovered that the human brain could be tuned like a radio. Hit the right frequency, and you could sell someone Armageddon as easily as a used car.
So, by 2025, America was baptized in neon prophecy. The Nephilim beamed sermons about “purification” and “ascension,” and humanity — ever eager to worship something with good branding — obeyed.
But Ezekiel? He’d met the real ones once — back in the ‘80s, at a Utah truck stop that doubled as a cosmic rest area. They weren’t interested in domination or DNA. They just wanted waffles.
So now, with his Soviet radio guts and angelic intuition, Ezekiel built a transmitter — part transistor, part prayer — and decided to send one last broadcast into the howling void. Lila, his niece (equal parts punk and prophetess), helped him twist the knobs.
His message crackled through static and stars:
“Wake up, children of carbon. The Nephilim are actors. The Pulse is propaganda. The only true Light doesn’t flicker — it forgives. The Kingdom isn’t coming from the sky. It’s already here, waiting inside you.”
They sent it. And the world — dear, trembling world — began to blink.
Screens froze. Drones fell. Holograms dissolved like dew.
And in that naked silence, the real Light came. Not digital, not government-issued — just the sunrise wearing the face of a man who once died on a cross and didn’t stay dead. His presence was gentle and electric all at once, like mercy with a guitar.
Ezekiel wept. Lila laughed. The stars sang hallelujah in twelve-part harmony.
The fake sky burned away. The true one shimmered through.
And somewhere between Nebraska and Eternity, the world remembered its Savior.