Humanity forever changed on August 25th, 2002. On that day, Super Monkey Ball 2 released for the Nintendo GameCube.

Now, you might be thinking, “Well, Super Monkey Ball 2 is a fine game, although not necessarily as good as its predecessor, but surely it wasn’t that important in the grand scheme of things?”

And you’d be right; the original Super Monkey Ball is superior to its sequel. Also, Super Monkey Ball 2’s release itself wasn’t the event that changed humanity.

So now you’re probably wondering why I even mentioned Super Monkey Ball 2 in the first place. Well, I want you to picture the summer of 2002. The reason for that is simple; I was merely two years old at that point, so whatever description of that era I could come up with would be inadequate.

Instead, let me use a video game to set the scene. Super Monkey Ball 2 released not even a year after its predecessor, likely leading its development team to have to crunch to complete the project on time. Imagine working on that game, struggling to get it out in time, only for its release to be overshadowed by the downfall of humanity.

Additionally, you might look back on Super Monkey Ball 2 as the last good original Monkey Ball game—a tall task considering there have been seven games with a Wikipedia page released after it. And well, if you don’t, then maybe one of your friends. Or someone you follow on social media. If nothing else, the girlfriend of the author certainly does.

So imagine that feeling, that yearning for better times. Going back to the feelings this game from 2002 created when you first played it. And then watching SEGA fail time and time again trying to chase that glory.

And if you just can’t relate to those feelings because Super Monkey Ball: Step & Roll for the Wii Balance Board is your favorite game ever, I’m sure you can find something you feel this nostalgia for. Maybe imagine the last good Sonic game—no, that’s clearly Sonic Mania; imagine the last good 3D Sonic game instead. So if you love the Sonic Adventure games and hate how they turned 3D Sonic into a linear boostfest, well, there’s your reason to be mad at SEGA. Just bear in mind, if you do use your 3D Sonic opinions as a comparison, make sure to divide the amount of anger by about a hundred. After all, we’re just talking about the downfall of humanity here, not Sonic Forces.

Now that you’ve got the right mindset, let me reveal that this is how the inhabitants of the Last Bastion of Humanity (just the Bastion for short) feel about August 25th, 2002. It was the last day of proper humanity, just as it was the last day of proper Monkey Ball.

So now that I’ve gone on and on about video games, attracting a large gamer crowd and controversial Sonic opinions in the process, it is time to unveil just what exactly happened on August 25th, 2002.

I have to admit, pinpointing August 25th, 2002 as the one day that this happened on is just the tiniest bit disingenuous. It’s like pinpointing a certain date for when summer starts.

Except, of course, there is a set date for that, it’s June 21st. Or June 1st, if you’re pedantic and love being a smartass. And according to Google, the Summer Solstice in Europe this year is on the 20th at 11.44 pm, creating at least three different days for the start of summer, so really it’s not that conclusive at all.

However, that really wasn’t what I was getting at with the summer comparison. Instead, consider when it really starts to feel like summer. The temperatures slowly rise during spring, maybe they drop a bit for a weekend and at some point when it’s warm enough or maybe just very sunny outside, you go, “Yup, it’s summer now.” and nothing can take that away, except when autumn starts on September 23rd. Or September 1st.

What I’m getting at here is that the event happened gradually. August 25th, 2002 is merely when patient zero was recorded, and it slowly spread out from there, slowly overtaking humanity. So really, with a scenario like this, who can really pinpoint the most crucial date of the event?

Well, I can. And I say it was August 25th, 2002. On that day, a person was admitted to a hospital that was woefully underprepared to handle what exactly was wrong with them. They reported growths on their forehead and were scared it was some form of cancer. In addition, they claimed that all of their bones were aching. Now, normally that would be a clear exaggeration, but even after being asked multiple times to clarify, they insisted that it was indeed all of their bones that were hurting.

After an x-ray scan, doctors realized that the nubs weren’t some kind of cancerous growth or tumor. They were merely bits of bone-adjacent material.

I will spare you the rest of the medical analysis. All you should know comes from the fact that I talked about this epidemic slowly overtaking all of humanity, so it’s clear that the doctors handling patient zero—as well as many, many other professionals all over the globe—failed to contain this anomaly.

At this point, you might be asking, “Is this going to be a post-apocalyptic story?

 It sure looks like it with some of the words you used like ‘epidemic,’ but also you’ve spent like 95% of this story so far being mad at Monkey Ball and clowning on Sonic fans.” Well, the answer is yes and no, and I say this being fully aware that this is something that authors who think they are being deep by deconstructing some old genre would say. And, well, if that’s what you’re thinking, then that’s fair actually.

For this story, we’re going to be focusing on the “yes” side of the “Is this post-apocalyptic?” coin. The main reason for this is simply that our main character has grown up firmly on that side. If you’re an avid reader with a critical eye, you might notice that this is actually not very much of a reason I should tell the story this way. After all, I decide who the main character is and how they’ve lived their life. You could even argue that it’s akin to making a female character dress up in only their underwear, and then justifying it by claiming that you’re forced to make her dress like this because “she breathes through her skin” or whatever. That is, of course, not how anything works, since it’s not as if the story is holding the writer at gunpoint, saying “make her dress in nothing but the bare minimum.” So, yes, dear reader, you’ve got me. I merely thought this was the more interesting story to tell, so that’s the story I’m going to present to you.

Back to our poor patient zero. Tests proved inconclusive on them, which simply meant that nobody had any idea what was going on. In a fatal error, they assumed this to be some localized mutation. This was not the case, of course, but they actually had a decent reason to think that it was, believe it or not. You see, this outbreak was so tricky to handle in that it has absolutely no effect on roughly 90% of the human population. However, even if you show no symptoms, you can still spread it further. That, in turn, means that our patient zero could very well have not been the first person afflicted. In actuality, they could have been patient one, or patient two, or even patient ten, and doctors would’ve had no way to tell.

As such, I would like to apologize for my slandering of all the medical personnel involved in this event. While it’s true that their efforts contributed practically nothing, it’s hard to blame them when this virus was, frankly, a real tricky bitch to catch and contain. It could spread just from being in vicinity with someone who’s been infected—and once again, they could show absolutely no signs of being infected and still be contagious. That’s how many of the doctors contracted the anomaly and continued to spread it on to colleagues, family members and friends. And they spread it further, and some of them were affected and most were not.

So, what did this virus actually do? Well, the growths on the forehead of patient zero started growing day by day, eventually piercing skin and revealing two small horns. One could even say they looked somewhat demonic. Naturally, Christians went absolutely hog-wild. Even if, like me, you weren’t around for the Pokémon craze around the turn of the millenium, you certainly heard stories of them just preaching how dangerous it was and whatnot. Imagine that, but with something that actually had some cause for concern.

Now consider that this all happened in 2002. The main Pokémon craze might have been over, and with it most of the protests, but many still had their “Pokémon is Demonic!” signs lying around or angry letters to send in to newspaper agencies. You can imagine how those could easily be edited to say “The Demon is Demonic!” and other such interesting and thoughtful lines. You might think that edited sign was just something I exaggerated, but I promise you by my authority as the author of this story that it actually happened. Images of it spread all over early internet forums, and phrases like that or “Fun things are fun” became inside jokes in many separate places. So, really, it wasn’t that much of an inside joke, after all, if so many unrelated groups shared them.

In what really feels like a weirdly worship-adjacent act for Christians, they began calling patient zero “The First One,” which honestly sounds a lot cooler, so I’m going to use that name in the future. They probably intended that name to inspire fear in anyone who heard it, but soon enough it just became something that most people called patient zero by that name.

As the days went on, The First One began developing more and more demonic features. It started with a tail slowly sprouting out of their back, their skin slowly turning a dark red in what doctors first assumed was an allergic reaction. I’d hate to agree with the Christians here but they did kinda get ahead of you with that one, but then again it might have looked like a rash early on, who knows. Well, I do, and in this case I will not clear it up, simply because having a little intrigue can be a lot of fun, too.

Of course, as I was alluding to, people all over the world soon became infected without even knowing it, and about a week after The First One became public knowledge, they started showing signs of their transformation. Some of them developed beast-like features perfect for a predator like sharp claws and agile limbs, others’ skin slowly turned to goo and they became vile, shapeshifting oozes.

All in all, it was a lot to take in. Naturally, some people went, “Hey, it’s a little worrying how after only a week there’s already over a hundred cases in the US alone, maybe we should do something about this.” Except sprinkle some religious zeal in and realize that you messed up turning the spice shaker correctly so the zeal just starts overflowing and ruins the taste and for some reason there’s also some racism that found its way in.

As you might remember from the whole Monkey Ball analogy from earlier, the Last Bastion of Humanity was one such place that felt nostalgic for back when the world was normal. Knowing what you do now about the infection, that means they must have found some cure, or some way around it, right? Well, yes and no.

Except when you really think about it, it’s more of a no, really. Unfortunately, “yes and no” is not a cure-all to any question a reader might ask. However, the Bastion did discover a cure-all to the virus. Depending on both your definitions of “cure” and “all,” that is.

Their solution was as simple as it was surprisingly functional. They simply locked themselves in, putting up barbed wire fences around a relatively large district of Huntsville, Alabama. Nobody comes in from the outside. In fact, nothing came in from the outside. They managed to build a fully self-sustained society.

Now, you might ask yourself how they actually sustained themselves. Well, in addition to fencing off their living areas, they split off large parts of a nearby forest. This ensured that they could hunt wild animals that were guaranteed to not be infected. As for electricity, they did manage to generate it through water energy. That was also their source for clean water, since the whole river running through their safe haven was blocked off.

So imagine this small society of around a thousand people, completely cut off from the outside world. Cut off from all of the technological advances people had made in the last eighteen years since then.

It wasn’t as if they were under direct attack from the infected outside world or anything. However, none of the scouts they sent out to look for ways to expand their area ever returned—a clear proof of the hostility the outside world showed towards them.

In spite of their name proclaiming this society “The Last Bastion of Humanity,” they were in fact not the only people to have had the idea of isolating themselves to dodge the virus. Around the globe, there were many hundreds of such communes. But of course, none of them knew of the others’ existence, so they all had to assume the worst-case scenario: That they were the last humans alive.

underFlorence

Thanks for checking this out! This is a very experimental thing I threw together and really requires me to be in a specific mindset to write on it, so it may update somewhat irregularly. This is me trying out a way more present author, and while this is definitely overshooting it, I'm having fun just trying this out and seeing where it takes me. Sheep and Magic is still my main project at the moment, a new chapter of that should be out in the coming days.