[ WP ] The rest of the population forgets the previous day each night . Welcome to the Alzheimer 's loop .

The human mind is surprisingly resilient and fragile at the same time. Apply stress or pressure one way and it would n't give one inch for a thousand years. But apply even a fraction of that pressure in a completely different way and the mind can break like an egg hit with a sledgehammer. But the true wonder is that even the shattered mind might adapt over time, as if it were drawing on that resilience which was absent previously. 
 
 Of course in the case of a virus infecting an overwhelming majority of the world's inhabitants and crippling the areas of the brain that work on short-term memory proved to be a great test of the human mind's resilience and ability to adapt. As luck would have it, the sheer scale of all human kind being infected did mean that a percentage was latently immune to the affects on memory. 
 
 But this genetic quirk proved to be its own great test of human resilience. Because in the days that followed the spread of this virus, those left unaffected became caretakers for thousands, even millions. There was very little information on what exactly on the genetic level lead to the immunity, or even how a virus was able to span the globe in a matter of months. Governments collapsed overnight, though there was no one to impeach them or armies to invade now vunerable nations. Turns out you ca n't conduct a dawn raid if your soldiers forget their training once they sleep. Even then they would forget the issue of sleeping. And so the issues piled up. 
 
 If memory serves right ( no pun intended ), it was at least a month before those unaffected began making contact with one another and pieced together what had happened. In that month and many more to follow the human population was reduced quite quickly. Urban areas were centers of chaos, so much of the infrastructure relied on constant maintenance and supervision; water stopped flowing as there were insufficient numbers to work the utilities. To put it simply; imagine all the things that must be done to keep young children safe from the dangers of the average household. This was n't the same but there were a great number of tragically simple accidental deaths that occured after'The Reset'. Or at least the first of many. 
 
 After that the fatal accidents were less frequent, but soon after, those with serious chronic health issues slowly and painfully fell to their illnesses, unaware of how limited their time was. As'keepers' met up across the planet, they tried to reorganise, build infrastructure, some semblence of the old world. But each morning they would have to wake to screams of panic, fires burining, even the occasional gunshot or explosion. Turns out it's difficult to rebuild society and keep it's forgetful inhabitants intact at the same time. 
 
 But human beings are stubborn, and resourceful. Day by day, night by night, the keepers tended to the'flocks'. Some objected to using a term reserved for sheep to label rational human beings, but as time dragged on, they felt the strain of repeating each day like the infected, only to bear the scars and trauma that this new world created in it's cyclical nightmare. 
 
 One such keeper was Tom, he had volunteered to watch over the'flock' that was still imprisoned at a supermax facility nearby to the surprisingly busy town he and other keepers had adopted in Texas. Each morning he would be tasked with getting on the prison's PA system to inform the prisoners of the current issue. It was in a way cruel, but the keepers had decided to review the prisoner logs to see who could be let out and who had to stay. From it's pre-Reset numbers the prison was pratically empty, only a dozen inmates remained. Tom spent a portion of his day checking up on them and, from time to time, talking to them. He found that he got along very well with Harold, a bespectacled man in his 50s, who enjoyed trying to solve the rubik's cube Tom had given to him one day. 
 
 Each day Harold lamented at his situation, but with boredom he turned his attention to the cube. For weeks Tom watched as Harold repeated the same strategy, never quite solving it before succumbing to sleep. You could set your watch by the patterns in Harolds attempts to solve the cube. He would begin twisting and turning at 9:43AM, by 5:12PM he would have nearly solved four sides and was beaming with happiness at his progress. He would finally give in to sleep at 1:22AM, blissfully unaware of how he might dread the call to slumber had he known. 
 
 One day, Tom stopped by, it was a particularly stressful day; last week a prisoner had nicked themselves on a loose screw, which turned to tetnus after a few days. On the fourth they lay shaking with fever and terror as Tom and the resident medic frantically tried to search for a sign of infection. They spotted the cause too late to administer antibiotics and instead had to help with the man's passing. He drifted into his final sleep having been sedated just before dawn. Tom walked the halls of the prison with the weight of guilt on his shoulders, the prisoner had been the architect of one of the bloodiest home invasions in recent history, but still Tom felt that he should have saved the man. 
 
 He stopped by Harold's cell as if craving normalcy again, but what he found was anything but. There sat Harold with the cube like any other day, but instead of the familar scattering of coloured squares, was five sides of uniform order. It was 07:05 AM and Harold should n't even be looking at the cube, much less solving it. Tom stared at Harold, who himself stared back at this stranger peering into his cell. After a minute he returned to the cube. Tom ran back to the medic and brought him to witness. 
 
 In the following days they watched with rapt fascination as Harold picked up the cube earlier and earlier after waking. This was not mear muscle-memory, there was something different. Here, sat before them in a barren cell, a once infamous child serial killer, showed the glimmer of hope for humanity.
