In North America, the volcano under Yellowstone Park blew in a blast that was double or triple any other eruption in its whole history.  Destruction was spread for a radius of over 900 miles, and the resultant collateral damage to dams and electrical infrastructure wreaked completely the whole American and Canadian electrical grid.  In Northern Europe the snow began to fall and did not stop for five years.  The resultant glaciation over the northern hemisphere effectively buried most of the nuclear weapons inventories of all the major powers.

In fact, the whole ring of fire around the Pacific rim let go like a long string of firecrackers, one after the other.  The sky all over the world turned dark with ash and soot, which helped the speed of glaciation accelerate.

A lot of survivors fled south, where they ran, in Africa and South America, into a lot of folks who didn't have much use for corporate types.  Money didn't do much good, even if you had a lot, and the private armies of many of the elites soon realized that they could do better on their own, and so turned against their masters, and then finally against themselves.

In a lot of places in the world, small groups of survivors found the Library, which had been successfully distributed into many corners and odd cracks.  The best of the wisdom of Western Civilization was preserved as well as all kinds of other traditional wisdoms, for the idea of the Library had spread over the Internet in the last months before the convulsion.  Different cultures, having different ideas of what to preserve, cherry picked what they thought should be in the Library, while the really smart ones copied into their own discs what everyone else had.   The New Revelation that the Priest thought was being kept away by the Church and which the Grays had killed him to stop, also found its way into this kind of electronic afterlife.  If you inherited one (and better yet several) of these computers with their physically powerable electric sources, and if the disc collectors had a truly eclectic collection, hard won knowledge in many spheres, and at the same time oriented toward the very practical, was yours.

When the cold weather hit Cerne, what was seeking incarnation via the singularity and the apparent artificial intelligence in the computers there, found more purchase in this world, because the effect of cold on electrical apparatus was to increase the speed of everything.  Creeping in from the other side of things, from the dark spiritual side of things, which the science of Western Civilization had dismissed as myth, a dark god known to a few as "the sun demon" found itself a body not to far from where its chief opponent, a philosopher-seer named Rudolf Steiner had once lived in Dornach Switzerland.

This kind of weird dark virus-like entity was able to propagate itself a bit, and infested a few computers world-wide, but all the needed infrastructure basically died during the Collapse.  The sun demon's propagation was then limited, although it did find a few homes among the computers of some of those who had been well prepared to survive, but basically did not get into the Library discs at all.  Open source communities were too deep into encryption and fire walls to be penetrated during the processes by which the Library discs were created.  The Dark God was here, but not everywhere, and knowledge of it was held by some.

The real battle between Good and Evil was now fully in play on the Earth.  Thing was though, some of the humans that survived the convulsion were not anymore asleep.  Too much had happened, and the discs of the Library had all kinds of information about what to do, or not, if you were still somehow inclined to not sell your soul to the devil.

A lot of others though, got caught up in events, taken into things and then were lost in a way.  Everything changed, and a lot of it was not for the better.