Medical technology had advanced to the point where genetic tinkering was as easy as plastic surgery used to be. As such, most diseases once known had been cured in some fashion or another, besides some notable exceptions, such as the common cold and influenza which had, naturally, adapted to everything we threw against them.

The problem is, there were new diseases. Mutations, birth defects and new or long forgotten diseases were rampant, and cropping up faster than we could react. Most of them were surprisingly resilient. No matter what we did, there were always more, always new ones, old ones, things we'd thought we'd already defeated. For a time, a career in the medical profession was akin to being surrounded by hordes of monsters, a new opponent the minute the last had fallen. We were fighting too slowly.

All these problems, all those problems with humanity, they could mutate and change from year to year, month to month. And we were fighting them with a process that took years, a few decades at the shortest. We weren't fast enough.

Something had changed somewhere, no one quite knew where exactly, but it wasn't an occasional strange defect, or undiscovered plague anymore. Now it happened to fast. It was almost like something horrid and cruel was watching our efforts and had grown bored with our slow victories and our minor successes, and wanted our end to come quicker. Some great godling had tired of his toys. In that time we truly thought the whole of everything was pitted against us.

But what were we to do, but continue our futile efforts to push against the tide? If we ceased it would only get worse, at least we were doing something, if we stopped we would only be swamped quicker, and we knew it.

By then humanity was no longer a strange and flawed whole, it was tens of thousands of splinter groups, separated by innumerable changes and flaws. After all, with each generation bringing new and greater oddities, it was still only those who had mutations too great to survive who died, if those who were left bred fast enough and smartly enough, and those in charge were quick enough in their battles against the waves and waves of terrible illnesses, maybe we could beat the world. We honestly felt like we could triumph. Strangely, the strife bred hope.

After a while, you sort of got the hang of it, you adapted. Humans are little engines of adaption really, we are so good at it.

Don't have children with those outside your group, Timmy, the children of two lines die in the womb. Oh, don't go near him, little Sarah, he looks like an ace but he's really a dud; see his eyes? They're the wrong color. Children of him will die slowly. I know she looks strange, Johnny, but I know her parents, she's a catch, where her line's going is a place you want to be.

If you worked it right, your children turned out alright. Not healthy, not by any means, but they were survivors. They would outlast this, reach that hateful, wondrous place beyond all this, that pitiful figment of our imagination, that time when this had all ended and the world was good again. The world was no longer a game for your success, but a game for your children's life. We thought if everyone lived long enough and survived well, then it'd all end some day.

And we were having to adapt to more and more. Soon it wasn't just all the illness and the pain and the strange changes from generation to generation. Everything was drying up, everything was hotter, the once fertile plains of North America withered and dried. Without it's main food source, the once great economic engine that was The United States, already quite fragile from years and years of economic disaster, finally gave in and collapsed. Those plains produced a lot of food, no one was doing well without them. And it wasn't just North America, once temperate regions around the world shriveled, deserts and wastelands grew everywhere. Coastlines became popular.

So, I was saying, there were many groups, clustered around the safe places in the world, varied and strange. Even when forced to deal with others every day to survive, somehow, we still managed to be isolated and alone. Then, you only dealt with your own, no one else was truly safe.

I was born into a strange radical group. They never really had a name, or rather, they had many and no one could really agree on one. My grandmother always called us the Mashers. 'Course, gran was always saying things about the leaders of us, none of the complimentary. I'm sure Pastor Henry had a much grander name for us all, but I wouldn't know. I never met him, except when I was small and mum was still alive. I always thought mum loved mister Henry, but I think now she was just brought in by his fancy talk.

Mister Henry and his compatriots all had great big ideas, we were a group brought together but bizarre notions we all shared, things society, as much as we had a society, deemed improper. Namely, that salvation could only come if we all sort of... blended together. If all the lines came together, something new and beautiful would come about. Stupid idea, really. All it got was a bunch of stillborns. Though, once in a blue moon a child survived, often not for long, but it was something. Occasionally one survived for longer than that, well into adulthood, they were weak, but they were heralded as great beings anyway, low-grade messiahs of a sort. My mother was one of those few, as was my father. My mum always believed all that tripe. My da didn't, he just liked all the attention. He was like that, he'd never been quite right in the head, always a little behind, mentally. He was nice enough, though, a good guy, just distracted by brightly colored objects. I'm surprised he focused long enough to conceive me.

He didn't live long past my birth, just got weaker and weaker until there was no weaker to be but dead. My mum lasted until I was five. She died strong though, none of this slow decline business. She died standing up, actually, acting perfectly normal, until boom, shudder, faint, and there was no more anyone could do. I should be sad, really, but I never saw her. I was too important.

Somehow, by some fluke of existence, I was strong, massively strong, and healthy to boot. The Mashers took this to mean that I was the result of their interbreeding, some sort of messiah, or second coming. Right. Don't believe it myself, I think it was just a fluke.

Anyway, my gran didn't like any of this, but my mum's wishes kept her from interfering, and when mum died, that was it. Gran wasn't going to leave me, her only grandchild, to become some self-important messiah, long away, where she couldn't reach me. She waltzed right up to pastor Henry, and waved her right as my gran in his face to get a visit with me. She was one of those strange normals, those people who somehow have nothing odd about them at all, 'cept her blindness, but that was only in one eye, and was because of an accident, anyway.

So, she saw me, finagled a little alone time, and used a gun to my head to force her way out of there. No one would stop her with my life on the line. When she got out she ran like the dickens, and somehow managed to outrun the lot of them. We moved far away, into the deserts outside the edges of old Washington state. It was hard to search anywhere with no real unified society, too much land, too few people, so we slipped by right nicely. I grew up in her care, plain and proper. She tried hard to beat any delusions outta me, and it seems to have worked.

We lived like that for a long while, until I was well into my teens, fourteen, fifteen, or thereabouts. We never kept track. Frankly, though, my gran was old, we don't know how old, she'd never bothered to time herself, and she wasn't the hardiest in the first place, stubborn though she was. She just sort of slept longer and longer, and stayed in bed more, claiming weariness, though I think she was in pain, from how she moved. I gathered most of the food, and took over pretty much all the other work. Gran still made all the clothes, she was good at that, could make scraps into gowns.

One day she called me over and taught me how to sew, because that's something everyone needs to know. I already knew how to make cloth, not like there are any sheep around here, but it was something, and tanning wasn't so hard. Mostly we didn't bother to wear much clothing, 'cept at night, solved that problem nicely. Oddly, I never tanned, just seemed to absorb the light. Gran always said sleeping in the same room with me was better than a nightlight.

Once I knew how to sew and hem and such she didn't need to do it anymore, so she stopped being so stubborn about staying alive.

With gran's death I no longer had a proper purpose in life. I wandered, and that was good enough for me. You'd be surprised how easy it is to travel deserts when you never sunburn, and with little clothing and a good wind, sweat actually worked as a proper cooling system. 'Course I knew where to find water, I'd lived there for a good long while and gran picked bits of information like that up from nowhere just from walking through a big crowd with a wish to know. I bundled up tight at night with the blankets I was using to hold my few possessions, and usually managed to find shelter.

After a while, I couldn't help but feel I had someplace to be. Strange that, considering I hadn't had an appointment since I was five.

South felt like a good direction to me, so that was to way I went. I wasn't being tugged exactly, but south felt more important right then. I shifted in that direction, sometimes straight west, sometimes north and then east or south a bit. It was like I was following a path, somehow avoiding all these hazards and troubles just following what felt important every morning. It even led me to a bridge once, one I couldn't see beforehand.

So, I moved from burning hot wasteland into burning hot dunes and tried not to die. Oddly easy, actually. Strange how all those lizards and wee mammals kept wandering smack dab into my hands.

The citizens of Chance, some commune made by some lucky wanderers what stumbled onto an oasis near where Nevada and California used to meet, must of thought me quite strange. There I was strolling up, out of the dusk, glowing like the sun, with this bundle of blankets and such bound tight to this strange Y-shaped walking stick contraption, wearing nothing but a pair of patched shorts. Well, and sandals. They thought I was some angry sun god. It only took a little convincing for them to believe I was a new breed from the heathen cities, where everyone bred with everyone else. Stopped for a bit, had my first taste of (mostly) clean water not from some bizarre succulent or probably unhealthy pond in a good long while. Picked up a waterskin, because southerly the desert becomes a proper desert, nothing but dunes, and south is where I needed to go.

Five days of carefully rationed water and franticly dredging up what knowledge I had about protecting oneself from a sandstorm, I found it. Whatever needed me to find it so bad.

It was large. The largest building I had ever seen, which probably wasn't saying much considering I've never seen the cities, not really, and I hear they got quite big there, what old ones they still kept in good shape, at least. But it was still huge, looked to have been just uncovered by that godsdamned sandstorm. One half was sticking out of a dune, there didn't seem to be any foundations, it was just sitting there. Well, stuck there, half covered with sand. But there was a ledge I could get to by picking my way up the dune, and if I sort of shuffled along I could get to this great big doorway in front, too high out of the sand to reach.

The inside was dusted in sand, naturally, though it was probably saved by the general lack of windows. What sand had got in had apparently got out again, because there wasn't more than a little piled against the walls.

It was cool and lovely, its lack of decoration on the outside made up for on the inside where everything was worn etchings and carvings. There was fluting and columns and what must of once been quite colorful murals. There were even a few piled up and worn old tapestries, or throw rugs, or mats. I couldn't tell by this point.

There wasn't much of a floorplan to navigate, one large foyer with two wee hallways on either side with a few small side rooms branching off of them. The main attraction, though, was obviously this great big main room. It was dolled up like a temple. It's closed and barred doors must of saved it. Though, strangely, it was barred on the outside. Inside you could still see all the murals, like they was new, the floor was one great winding pattern, done up in tiles and carvings, and the tapestries on the walls and the mats on the floor were mostly still in their places, only slightly worn.

And in the back, between two more wee doors, there's this great big inset thing. Starting on the level of the wall, in a circle with nice big stones, it goes back two steps, like it was a pool in the ground and those were the steps into it. I think to myself, it's like there's this great big wading pool in the wall. Except it was covered in wee, delicate, intricate patterns, all but for the very middle, different but complimenting the carvings covering the walls. And the middle bit's made entirely out of this brilliant blue glass, some sort of precious stone, all ultramarine blue.

And, well, there's these seats, and some rugs, and a couple nicely sized, convenient little firepits set in the wall, still with soot in them, and this nice basket full of old, dry wood. And a fountain by the side, even, though I don't know where all this water's coming from. Plus, there's all these little lizards what've made a colony here, already, and they breed like no tommorrow.

And, it's weird, but all these birds and things keep flying smack straight in the wall above where I cook. Convienient.

So this's where I stay, 'cause I feel like this is where I should be.

Or at least, until you walked through that glass circle, mister, and asked me why I'm here. Perhaps I'll have to move.