Death of the Future

INCOMING SOLAR STORM

Turn off all your electronics. Do not touch any electrical appliance for the next five days.

5 minutes to contact.

Every radio and TV in Europe suddenly blares the same message across the world. Three minutes are wasted worldwide as chaos reigns. Politicians are pulled out of bed in East Asia and the Americas. Engineers are called back to work as they leave for home in Russia and India. Afternoon in Europe explodes from lazy Saturday to frantic crowds rushing home before the end.

With no time to explain more, media begins to turn off every camera, microphone and transmitter across the globe. Desperate to save sensitive equipment, news centres shut, leaving the world in radio silence. Cast into panic, those awake scramble to turn off computers and phones, TVs and lightswitches. Fridges are mostly forgotten, for who thinks of a fridge when all data could be lost? A clever few break fuses to the whole house. Those who understand what is coming spend all the time left escaping as far from any wires as possible. Astronomers and space engineers leave facilities en masse, leaving vehicles abandoned in car parks as they flee.

In the last 5 minutes of the Space Age, astronauts in orbit watch the end come closer as the world below them flickers into darkness. They know nothing can save them, but are the people on Earth any luckier?

The invisible storm hits, battering the world with magnetic pulses. Lightbulbs explode in a wave around the world, heralding blinding auroras that will light up the sky for four days. The screams come soon after. Having carefully tapestried the Earth with miles of wire, humanity has crafted its own doom.

In the first few minutes, the greatest number of deaths occur. Unplugged machines come to life on their own, each wire magnetically creating its own current until electric friction heats them to spark and snap. Hospitals explode, crowded as they are with electrical equipment, killing all within. Overhead wires spark and heat, some melting enough to break and fall onto houses. Fires start everywhere.

Telephone cables have burst; mobiles turn themselves on only to fizzle off. Screens flicker and die repeatedly, speakers blaring random noises. Satellites in orbit short circuit as voltages hundreds of times stronger than they can withstand shoot through their systems. No longer self-correcting their orbit, they plummet to Earth bombarding land and sea. Communications are lost. Planes fall out of the air and the metal bodies of cars and lorries heat up enough to explode engines in giant petrol bombs. Ships at sea zap their crews and electricity disperses into the ocean, killing tons of marine life. Within an hour, most people left alive are in deep countryside or without access to electricity. A lucky few living on the outskirts of cities escape on foot, dodging fire and sparking metal. The next 24 hours pass in shocked silence.

When night refuses to fall at the end of Day 1, survivors creep back into cities under an incandescent sky to scavenge food and shelter. Food is hard to find as supermarket fridges have exploded and metal shelves hum with energy, melting plastic packets into sticky puddles. Expired food in huge skips behind shops are similarly cooked beyond recognition. Without any other option, people pick through the exploded remains of houses, stepping over charred bodies as fires continue to rage. Dried food is the best bet to avoid fridges and freezers that still spark occasionally. Other than food, rubber gloves are the most salvaged object from kitchens.

By Day 2 the atmosphere is obviously heating up. Between the raging fires and electricity humming constantly through every conductive material, survivors are able to sleep outside as far North as Scandinavia. Auroras dance through bright skies across the globe, casting strange colours on upturned faces. A moment of peace before the heat becomes unbearable for forests at the equator. More fires light and the ice caps seep meltwater into the oceans at a pace no climate change scientist would have forecast. Tsunamis hit coasts all over the world, submerging some cities and even countries completely. Holland is lost, as are swathes of India and the Philippines. Night still doesn’t come.

Day 3 sees the heat and pressure from the geomagnetic storm warp metal beyond recognition. Bridges twist out of shape. Pipes burst mixing precious fresh water with sewage, gas and electricity. Steel dams break to pour boiling water over the countryside. Nuclear power stations leak. Reactors explode like so many Chenobyls. Most wildlife is purged along with humanity, innocent victims of our obsession with electricity. Rivers are infected and hundreds of survivors around the world will slowly die from organic and nuclear poisoning. They wait, watching the sky for a darkness that still won’t fall.

The constant magnetic force vibrates and superheats Earth’s metal core on Day 4, changing the world’s landscape beyond recognition. With currents of magma and molten rock rushing under the Earth’s surface at higher speeds, the magnetic poles flip back and forth. Compasses in the hands of survivors spin like racing car wheels. Migrating birds, desperately escaping fires hang in great clouds with a cacophony of panicked squawking. Fish swim in seething vortexes, fighting against broken sea currents, decimated by rising sea levels and boiling water around electric lines.

Magnetic friction built up by the storm pulls at molten metals underground, yanking tectonic plates apart. Volcanoes sprout in minutes. Where plates are crushed together with the force of giants, huge mountain ranges are formed, sweeping forests and the devastated remains of cities up into the sky, only to crumble sideways for many hundred of miles to the ground below. The solar storm passes and night finally envelopes Day 5 in darkness. The world gasps in relief.

Short lived relief. As people scramble to contact loved ones, the realisation that no salvaged phone or computer will turn on sinks in. Bank accounts have blanked, government records gone, research data extinguished and the internet has died a final death. Leftover pockets of humanity must fight over food and resources. The glorious Information Age has come to an end and the world sinks into ruin.

But a solar storm of this scale hasn't hit Earth in the Information Age. Yet.