This was no normal outage either; I recall sparks jumping out of some of my wall sockets and a few of the homes up the street burned down completely. We had already been living with the idea that something like this could happen for at least a few days by this point, so many of us started to filter outside from our houses (usually you’d just stay inside, light a candle, and wait for your WIFI to come back). It was evening, and I was standing around outside discussing the possibility of a block-wide BBQ with a neighbor when we all started hearing the crashing of the cars up and down the highway. Later on, some of us figured out that it probably wasn’t every car that started crashing; just the newer, fancier ones that had fully electronic braking systems. Turns out those few were enough to create a massive pile-up for miles on the overcrowded California freeways.
It was a little after that when planes started falling out of the sky; again, not all of them—just the really unlucky ones with electrically controlled hydraulic systems. Sometime later (once the news slowly started coming back online and being distributed through old-fashioned means—in many cases military personnel in old-school jeeps), we learned that the Flare, as it was being called, was the single greatest solar flare/CME ever encountered in history with a magnitude several times greater than the event recorded in the mid 1800s (I don’t recall what that one’s name was anymore or when it was, exactly).
All in all, it was a massive, crippling blow to an overburdened power grid running at capacity. This wasn’t just localized to North America either; apparently, the only countries that hadn’t been greatly affected were those of the third world with little to no infrastructure to speak of. Slowly over the next few days, chaos bled quickly into mass insanity. At first, when everything went down, it was a nice change of pace. Many of us commented on how nice it was to unplug from the stupid TV for a few hours. By the second day, it was less like a nice little diversion and more like an unplanned camping trip; still not so bad. After a week, water and sewage began to be a serious problem. The Flare had effectively killed all of the satellites (which we were informed were now also on a slow, plodding collision course with the planet) so all but the slowest, courier-based communication was offline. Supplies and relief were non-existent. You may or may not be old enough to remember Hurricane Katrina but if you are, picture that times ten, only spread out across twenty or thirty percent of the planet. We were informed that we were collectively looking at about a six month recovery period just before the riots broke out and Martial Law was declared. This was also the same time that all news just stopped coming. It isn’t that they weren’t trying to get us information; the military in our area and the military couriers remained friendly with those of us who weren’t behaving like fools. There just wasn’t any new information to speak of.
Life became very different over the next couple of months. We adapted to it (you’d be amazed what you can adapt to when you have no choice). One of the things we had going for us was that the Flare really only affected large electrical systems spread out over a great distance. Basically, the generation plants, the distribution systems, and the structures connected to them. Instances where smaller, self-contained systems were destroyed (such as airplanes, autos, boats, and personal electronics) were the rare exception and not the rule. Smaller scale electronics that were either not connected to the grid or behind circuit breakers were still functional, which meant that a lot of our gadgetry could still be used provided a backup generator was available. In the meantime, work crews scrambled to replace the blown components of the underlying grid. Over time it seemed as though we were making some traction towards clawing our way back to dominance over the planet. All of the riots had been put down. Those of us who were still lucky enough to have homes, worked with the military to set them up as supply distribution points or other critical facilities (it was very much in our interest to do this as it resulted in a Strategic Importance designation, which basically meant your house got its own detachment of armed guards—not a bad deal). I remember tent cities set up all along the streets, fenced off between checkpoints and so forth. It seemed a little off-putting at first, but you got the idea real quick that it was just what it had to be. Once things had calmed down, we heard some rumors here and there via the border of how things were going on down in Mexico and the rest of South America. Just those rumors were enough to make us grateful for what we had at home, tent cities and all.
It seems the world has a way of delivering the second part of a two-punch combo at the time when you can afford it the least. For us, that second punch was the Plague.
It’s been some years since that time, and I still don’t know if anyone figured out where the Plague came from. We’re not even sure what species of virus it was. There was some word that it came out of Arkansas, but the lines of communication were so confused by that point that it might as well have come from Mars for all the good that info would do. We learned plenty about it over time through experience and exposure. It started out acting like a common cold, only it held on a lot longer. You could operate anywhere from three weeks to a month with nothing more than an annoying cough or sniffle. At some point, depending on how strong you were I guess, the virus would turn the heat up on you, and you spent the next three days or so going from cold to flu to super flu. After that, you eventually suffocated and died.
The most discouraging aspect of that time (for me) is I’m almost certain that if it had just taken us a little longer to start recovering from the Flare, the virus (a lot of us were calling it the Plague by then) might have stayed local to wherever it came from and burned out like Ebola would tend to do. Instead, the military was making some real progress into getting air travel back online. When you consider that the virus would just sit and gestate inside you for weeks until it finally ramped up to kill you (combined with its high communicability rate), it’s easy to understand how a localized epidemic quickly blossomed into a pandemic the likes of which we had never seen.
We know it was airborne. We at least managed to figure that out before it killed most of us.
We also learned that even the Plague doesn’t have a one hundred percent communicability rate or a one hundred percent mortality rate (even though both numbers were so close to one hundred percent that it didn’t matter on the macro scale). We figured out that immunity could be hereditary; if a mother was immune, it always meant that any of her offspring were immune. If the father was immune, offspring had maybe a fifty-fifty chance of being immune. I’m not sure if there have been any instances of offspring being immune while both of their parents contracted the Plague; there have been so few cases of intact families beyond two or three people that we just can’t say for sure. Anything is possible, I guess. I think I heard that a handful of people actually survived contracting the Plague, but their respiratory systems never recovered; think emphysema symptoms for the rest of your life.
I can’t really give you a percentage of people who died due to the Plague (because the Flare/Plague one-two combo killed all statistics too), but out of my whole neighborhood, I’m the only…
