The Disaster

In Year 0, a city's biotech lab released an engineered virus into the world. This virus was designed with one goal in mind: rapid induction of uncontrolled cell growth throughout the body, causing a relatively quick death in anyone unlucky enough to wind up contracting it. If you can imagine a contagious and aggressive cancer with high mortality rates, that's essentially what was released into the public. It only became more aggressive from there. Existing treatments for cancer soon failed to work, and the vast majority of humanity died in the following waves of infection. Of the survivors, some were lucky enough to be immune, while others were silent carriers. Very few people were unexposed.

Government reports claimed that the release was an accident, and as far as the government knew at first, this was true. Very few people knew that the release was planned by disgruntled lab workers. The lab had recently experienced budget cuts, and an enterprising manager decided that making their work more important to their benefactors would get them both funding and fame. They'd already begun work on a vaccine and cure for their own disease, so it would have been easy enough to "discover" a new virus and "develop" its cure before it ever became a serious concern, earning them more appreciation and funding. They didn't anticipate their virus mutating beyond their control, leaving their treatments and vaccines ineffective. They also didn't anticipate one of their own reporting their actions to the government.

While a quarantine was declared to try to limit spread, most people disregarded it after a few weeks of being cooped up. The virus spread exponentially from there. By the time people realized that they really should stay home, it was too late for that to be helpful. The virus had begun to spread out of its source city via silent carriers fleeing the area. Surrounding regions weren't aware that the virus could be carried without symptoms, so the refugees were admitted and the disease spread outwards. As soon as carriers were discovered, most regions locked down travel and hoped for the best.

By that point, the virus's own mutations changed how it affected people. Some victims began to survive, albeit with substantial changes to their bodies and minds. Many of these survivors were hostile and confused, leading them to attack others and spread their own strains of the virus. More concerningly, some strains became zoonotic after a few months passed, jumping to other species and picking up further mutations from there. Humans and wildlife alike were morphed into mockeries of themselves if their strains turned out to be survivable. Cities attempted to contain or even kill mutated people and wildlife, but this proved to be a losing battle. The virus persisted in the tissues of survivors and corpses alike, making it extremely contagious.

A few governments turned on their own citizens in a desperate last bid to control the virus's spread. Some areas were bombed. Others were attacked more personally by militaries and militias. Smaller cities often dealt with mobbings and mass paranoia. Critical infrastructure began to fall apart, both as a result of civil unrest and because of the deaths of the people that maintained it all. Eventually, governments were unable to sustain their own efforts to combat the virus due to lacking the necessary infrastructure, and everything began to fall apart in earnest.

By Year 20, the vast majority of humanity on Eona was infected or dead. Of the survivors, most were mutated. A small percentage were carriers or immune. It was these latter two groups that attempted to maintain some semblance of society in the wreckage of their homes. Surrounded by hostile wildlife, they rebuilt from the remains of cities, founding towns in the skeletons of skyscrapers and suburbs. As time went on and the upper levels of tall buildings weren't properly maintained, some structures began to fall apart, prompting many people to brave the wilds to build new towns.

Most post-industrial technology was lost in the Disaster. Information was primarily stored in computing systems that fell apart without proper maintenance, so advanced technologies died with the people that knew enough to care for them. A few areas with extensive libraries had enough information to potentially rebuild these systems, but they lacked the resources and infrastructure to do anything significant. With the world only growing more hostile, there was little they could do beyond preserving these books for as long as possible. Machines and factories weren't much luckier. A few people attempted to maintain them, but the lack of a proper supply chain soon left these places to rot. Most people were too focused on day-to-day survival to worry about anything else.

Some practical information did persist in libraries: food cultivation, metalworking, carpentry, weaving, and other traditional industries gradually established themselves in certain regions. This allowed some trade to develop. A handful of people were gutsy enough to brave uncivilized areas and bring goods from place to place, and these people are often credited with keeping humanity alive long-term. They were sometimes the only means of communication between areas.

These traders saw firsthand how the world had changed. The virus completely altered regional ecologies, replacing old-world animals with mutated variants. These variants turned out to pass the virus down to their young. As time went on, strains began to co-evolve with the mutated creatures inhabiting the world, oftentimes becoming an integral part of them. Mutation and change were the norm. Eona's ever-changing ecosystem began to move into abandoned cities, and the remains of the old human civilization began to vanish under invasive plant growths.

All the while, humanity continued on. Some died young from mutations, but other received their parents' immunity and grew up to raise their own kids. A rare few people mutated, survived, and managed to continue on in human society. These folks were called the Altered by most folks, and they became more common as time went on and the virus's strains began to mellow.