We are the last Men

I didn’t know what to expect, but it definitely wasn’t this. When I signed the contract, essentially signing my life away for the entertainment of the masses and elites, I didn’t expect living underground with 99 other guys to be my future. But what can you do? This was my future, and I was going to make the most of it.

On the first day, the people in charge explained what will happen and revealed that they will also be with us. We have all the supplies to survive and should have had a way to message the outside world. Looking back at it now, that was the luckiest moment for all of us.

By the second day, we all started to actually understand the reality of our situation: We were the show, our loneliness was the entertainment, and the disproportionately large number of gay lads was intentional - this was a Vault-tech experiment, a YouTube video AND a Hunger Games/squid game-styled horror. I got through everything by keeping my head down.

On day 10, I found my new best friend, Cyrus. Turned out he was also in the same dire circumstances as I was. We found great comforts in hanging out and chilling together while talking about everything, and letting all the other guys be obnoxious to each other.

On day 14, people started getting worried. We should have had at least a message - yet there was total radio silence. We started losing our sense of time, it felt like covid was only the little brother to This.

The atmosphere on what we thought was day 28 was tense, there was an uneasy silence from our expectations. It was an awfully nothing day, even more nothing than I ever thought could be.

By the end of our first month, the underground bunker, instead of its futuristic cleanliness, was a disaster - a waste zone. There were already people trying to break out, people formed their own gangs, my old memories of playing Fallout made me know how this would turn out.

On the 6-month anniversary, there was a truce. There was a celebration, sweets taken out of storage for this day, the day of thankfulness, for the online billionaires that made fucked up situation a reality.

On day 365, there was another hope. The people thought that 1 year would mark the end of this challenge, there was an answer to the question “Can 100 MEN survive a YEAR without ****!?”, and the answer was yes, barely. Yet even after a year, there was just nothing. The outside world just forgot about us.

By the time most of us gave up, mercy shined down on us - on our digital equipment, we saw new messages, they couldn’t fit much text, but they were the best news I ever had in my life, we weren’t forgotten.

After actually reading the text, anxiety and fear controlled all of us. It was sparked by only a few pixelated letters on the screen of a small portable pager: “**** outside you safe stay”