After the explosions, everyone who didn’t die just wanted to have a good time. That’s why the government — a roving band of ex-military officials controlling all of the world’s tanks — decided to make the national currency smiles, as a way of cheering their subjects up.

At first everyone loved it. You could walk down to the grocery store, ask the cashier for a loaf of bread with a heartwarming grin, and then hopelessly receive your portion of gloop. There was no bread. Gloop was the only thing left on earth that wouldn’t kill you immediately if you ate it. Scientists weren’t sure if it actually filled you up or it just made you feel full, but economists knew that if you had a real nice smile, you could get away with two, maybe even three handfuls of gloop a week. It was basically paradise.

Breakdancing on street corners quickly became the dominant profession, and it became difficult to walk anywhere without handing out at least $40 worth of pity smiles. One performer in particular named Skee-ball Dave, who entertained the masses by playing skee-ball at an old arcade with his own severed testicles, was once rumored to be worth over 3 billion smiles. Like many of the greats, he died young after eating a particularly sharp rock during a hunger-induced hallucination. Gloop wasn’t for everybody.

Eventually, people got wise and realized that the problems of the old world still existed. Smiles in developing countries tended to be worth a lot less than smiles in Murderville (the new name for America). Every few years, your favorite store would increase the number of smiles it took to bathe in leftover windshield wiper fluid. Worst of all, your smart friends who had invested their smiles when they were young wouldn’t shut up about how if they withdrew everything they had, right now, it might be enough to make them experience true joy for one fleeting moment.

A few years later the government switched to a bone-based economy which made life better because it meant people could start eating leftover human flesh instead of gloop.