They say the sky didn't fall in a blaze of fire or a shower of bombs.
No.
The world ended quietly.
With a hum.
Not even a violent one. Just… an irregular pulse.
Some called it a flare. Others said it was a frequency spike in the global net.
The "Pulse," as it came to be known, was neither — or maybe it was both.
No one really agreed, because no one really survived it in one piece.
All that's known is this: One day, everything changed.
Satellites stopped transmitting.
Power grids shut down in waves.
Air traffic vanished.
Cities went dark like candles snuffed by a sudden gust.
Emergency signals went unanswered, military bases stopped reporting, and communication lines fell silent — not jammed, not destroyed, just… muted.
Like the planet exhaled and forgot to inhale again.
In the silence that followed, the first wave of them appeared.
People — still breathing, still thinking, still human, technically — but altered.
Something in their cells had been rewritten, either during or immediately after the Pulse. Some developed abnormal reflexes. Others could generate heat, move faster than light should allow, regenerate from wounds that should have been fatal.
And some… simply didn't stay human at all.
No one knows if the Pulse was an accident or a weapon, or maybe the long-rumored awakening of some ancient tech we never should've touched.
All they know is that it changed people. And not just biologically.
It changed the rules.
The first weeks were chaos.
Governments collapsed under their own weight.
Entire cities went dark or fell into infighting. The people in power either disappeared or turned on each other, desperate to hold onto something — wealth, information, fear — anything that could keep the chaos from swallowing them.
They failed.
Military strongholds became dead zones.
Hospitals overflowed and were eventually abandoned.
Food chains snapped like brittle string.
For a while, it became impossible to tell who was hunting who — beasts, people, or the things in between.
And those who didn't change? The unlucky ones?
They died.
Or ran.
Or learned to survive in the Drift.
That's what the wasteland is called now. The shattered remains of the old world — scorched cities, dried-up riverbeds, overgrown ruins, and radiation-pickled forests where the sunlight doesn't reach.
The Drift isn't a place. It's everything that's left.
And within it are the Unmarked.
That's us. The ones who weren't registered.
The ones who never got into the safe zones before the walls closed. We don't have access to the rations, the clean water, the last real medicine, or the vaults full of pre-Pulse tech.
We scrape by on rusted tools and hollowed-out memories. We learn to make tents out of billboard canvas.
We drink from cracked filters and pray the water's not poison.
We dig up bones to build barriers, sleep under the watch of rifles and old blood.
And every time we move camps, someone gets left behind.
Sometimes it's the kids. Sometimes it's the ones who've gone quiet inside — the ones whose minds never came back from the things they saw.
Sometimes it's people who get touched.
Because not all Altereds are stable.
Not all of them are even aware they've changed — until it's too late.
We've seen bodies twitch and stretch as if something inside was rewriting the bones. We've seen mothers turn on their own families in the middle of the night.
We've seen men wake up blind, but suddenly able to hear through walls.
Some still keep their sanity. Those are rare.
Most become monsters. Not out of malice — out of survival.
The more power you use, the more you burn.
You eat. You take. You drain.
Until there's nothing human left.
There's no cure. No handbook. No council. Just guesses and weapons.
And the people who still believe they're in control — the ones behind the curtain, if they're still alive — they don't help. If anything, it was probably their fault.
Whispers say the Pulse was an activation switch for something they built.
Some hyper-advanced DNA framework. A bloodline enhancement device. A parasite. A trigger for genetic elitism.
Nobody knows.
Whether that's true or not doesn't matter.
Because no one lasts long out here chasing truths.
Out in the Drift, we don't chase anything. We run. We hide. We survive.
Because the rules are simple now:
Don't stay in one place too long.
Don't trust anything that moves too quietly.
Don't look at the sky when it pulses.
Don't answer the voice in your head.
And never, ever bond with anything you can't understand.
In the end, the world didn't end with fire.
It ended with a frequency.
And in that silence, we started to forget what we used to be.