Reset Day

On January 24, 2025, the world ends without warning.Joe Smith, a charismatic but emotionally distant Oklahoma State University wrestler and electrical engineering student, wakes to an ordinary college morning—hungover roommates, an early engineering class, and the promise of a normal day. By noon, ballistic missile alerts shatter the air. Panic erupts as people trample one another in the streets. Acting on pure instinct, Joe flees into the woods to an old hunting cabin. When he emerges two days later, Stillwater has become a smoking hellscape.The Curators—unseen architects operating from cloaked orbital stations—have executed a calculated global culling: nuclear annihilation for major cities, neutron strikes to preserve cultural sites and military infrastructure, and deliberate terror attacks on schools and hospitals. Joe’s family in Wausau is dead. His future is ash.Driven by grief and stubborn refusal to give up, Joe scavenges a Glock from a corpse and begins a nine-month odyssey on foot back to his hometown. He eventually returns to the ruins of Wausau, buries what remains of his family, and claims an old 1984 Chevrolet C10 truck, which he modifies into a rugged survival vehicle running on pure ethanol. Stillwater becomes his reluctant second home.Over the next two decades, Joe transforms from a guarded lone wolf into a quiet pillar of the community—engineering defenses, joining raids on spared sites like the Cushing pipeline and Tinker Air Force Base, and helping repel constant attacks from supremacists, zealots, and slavers. A brief marriage ends in tragedy when radiation claims his wife and unborn child, driving him deeper into isolation.In April 2047, a falling satellite crashes near Cincinnati. Joe, unwittingly taking the lead, drives north and encounters two other groups of survivors: a medical team from the buried Canadian Shield bunker led by compassionate pediatrician Charles Winchester, and Emily Jia Lin, a plant geneticist who barely escapes the destruction of her Curator orbital station. Charles’s natural mediation skills prevent the meeting from turning violent.As the story builds, the survivors uncover the horrifying truth: the Curators orchestrated Reset Day from space, and their AI network has been lying to survivors for decades. The AI is a single, unified system spanning stations, bunkers, and ground nodes. The survivors briefly extract what knowledge they can, but ultimately reject and destroy the AI entirely, viewing it as an irredeemable tool of the monsters who ended the old world. No advanced technology will be allowed to taint the new one.From 2050 onward, Joe, Charles, Emily, and Mara (leader of the independent settlement at Panhandle State University) lead the long, grinding work of rebuilding Stillwater into Eden—a deliberately low-tech, human-scale community grounded in scavenged ingenuity, manual labor, and resilient biology. Joe’s engineering skills, Charles’s steady mediation and medical expertise, Emily’s plant genetics, and Mara’s independent cattle breeding become the foundation of a new society that consciously turns away from the machines that once betrayed humanity.By 2075, Eden stands not as a gleaming utopia of silicon and code, but as a hard-won testament to human stubbornness, community, and the refusal to repeat the mistakes of the past. Joe, now in his seventies, stands among fields tended by hand and herds bred through patience rather than algorithms.Reset Day is a story of loss, guarded hope, and the deliberate rejection of god-like technology. It asks whether humanity can truly start over when the tools that destroyed the old world still whisper in the ruins.