The Last Adults

The Quiet End

The world of The Last Adults didn’t end with nukes, aliens, or an asteroid. It ended with regression.

A virus now known as the Nursery Flu swept the globe and stripped away adult cognition instead of life. Careers, histories, and identities disappeared over the span of hours, leaving behind millions of functioning bodies with toddler-like minds.

Cities didn’t burn. They emptied. Institutions didn’t get overthrown. They just… stopped.

“The apocalypse isn’t that everyone died. It’s that almost everyone forgot who they were.”

The Toddlers

The infected adults are called Toddlers—not as an insult, but as an approximate description of their mental state.

They move with adult strength but think in simple patterns.
They are drawn to lights, sounds, and movement.
They can be joyful, curious, clingy, frightened, or easily distracted.
They don’t understand danger, ownership, or history.

They are not monsters. They are people who no longer understand what the world is.

The danger they pose isn’t violence by intent. It’s the virus they continue to carry on their skin, in their breath, and on everything they touch.

Only a scattered handful of adults remain mentally intact. They weren’t chosen. They were isolated—trapped in labs, remote postings, bunkers, ships, islands, or simple bad timing that happened to keep them out of the initial wave.

In this world, adulthood is now a rare and dangerous asset. If you are a true adult:

Every surface you touch could end your mind.
Every hour outside your safe zone is a calculated risk.
Every decision shapes not just your survival, but the future of whatever comes next.

Jim Keening is one of these rare survivors—a scientist with old pilot training and a stubborn refusal to accept anyone else’s blueprint for the future.

Danger Without Monsters

This world has no zombies, demons, or supernatural entities. Its horrors are entirely human and biological:

A virus that regresses the mind instead of killing the body.
Infrastructure failing not from sabotage, but simple neglect.
Power plants, water systems, and networks crumbling over weeks and months.
Survivors forced to treat every object as potentially contaminated.

The threat isn’t being eaten alive. The threat is being touched, exposed, and quietly erased.

Control, Escape, and the Lattice

In the vacuum left by the collapse, scattered adult minds begin carving out new orders.

One of the most dangerous is Ethan Cole, a survivor who looks at the Toddlers and sees not tragedy, but infrastructure. He builds a networked territory—a lattice—using regressed adults as unwitting components in a living surveillance system.

In Ethan’s world, the Toddlers are sensors, carriers, and levers. Their innocence is part of the design.

Caught inside this growing system, Jim Keening crosses paths with Bonnie, Ethan’s former partner, who now works in the shadows to sabotage his control and search for a way out.

What’s at Stake

With most of humanity mentally regressed, the argument about how people should live hasn’t ended—it’s simply been handed to a tiny minority of adults who still remember how to argue.

The questions they face are stark:

Are the Toddlers patients to be protected, components to be used, or a burden to be removed?
Is safety worth building a perfectly controlled world?
Is it moral to enforce adulthood on a world that no longer understands it?

The Last Adults is built on these tensions. Survival is only the first step. The harder part is deciding what kind of world the last adult minds are willing to create.

Why This World Feels Close

Beneath the viral fiction is a reflection of real fears: social fragmentation, eroding trust in institutions, and the sense that grown systems sometimes behave more like impulsive children than responsible adults.

This world asks:

What happens if responsibility becomes rare?
Who decides what “maturity” means when almost no one can model it?
And if you were one of the last adults left, what would you be willing to do with that power?

The apocalypse in The Last Adults isn’t just the virus. It’s the choices made by the people who survived it.