Desolation

How our world ended

^{10 Days After Event (A.E.)}

In a matter of minutes, for most of us, the world changed from one of privileged ambivalence to one of daily survival of the fittest or the luckiest. A few of us even expected this apocalyptic replay. History treated the giant solar storm known as the Carrington Flare of 1859 as an unnoticeable blip, largely ignored on its lengthy timeline of misery: the earth lost only a few lives and most telegraph lines. History now bears witness to what is simply known as The Event, when ten days ago a similar sized solar storm changed everything. In an instant, the entire world’s technology was zapped out of existence. All our knowledge is but a fading memory, once stored in physical books, later transferred to servers and democratized for every person through the likes of Wikipedia, but now erased forever. Computers and other internet devices have been rendered as lifeless as the corpses that are piling up in every city. There is no power running to our homes, and likely will never be again in our lifetimes. Without power, we are cut off from life-giving water; hope for a few may bubble up from the ground’s natural streams, but will probably shrivel up in time. All vehicles, except the rare antique coaxed into temporary service, are dead; transportation for those who survive in the coming days will be as it was for our earliest ancestors, on foot. Our global communications and instant access to information have been reduced to the distance our voices will carry through the air’s random currents. The world’s losses have already been enormous; my fear is it will get worse.

The story that history will likely never fully remember is the rapid deterioration of the earth’s magnetosphere, our only defense from the sun’s invading army of solar storms. Like the Spartans who succumbed to the short spears and arrows of Xerxes’ Persian horde at Thermopylae, we too will be no match for the sun’s infinite volleys from her unending quiver. Solar flares are her arrow’s poison tip, assailing the earth’s dwindling inhabitants with ten times her normal radiation, bringing with it a slow extinction to all who draw breath. The shafts of each arrow are her coronal mass ejections of plasma and electromagnetic material that continue to produce electrical discharges to anything conductive, making even the seemingly benign deadly.

Yesterday, one of my captors was electrocuted simply by sticking his head into a metal trough filled with water. His herky-jerky death throes generated laughter from men who wear machismo and lust for murder like old clothes.

In spite of three generations of Thompsons prepping for the end, I wasn’t fully prepared. This has put in jeopardy my future and that of my friends, Bill and Lisa King, and their kids. My heart breaks at the sadness they must feel upon realizing the permanence of their separation from their youngest daughter, Darla, or their only son, Danny. Assuming they are not already dead, realistically, there is too much distance and too much violence separating them in the Midwest from their parents and older sister, stuck in Rocky Point, Mexico during a family vacation. I am tortured daily by the King family’s desolation and my inability to uphold a three-generation-old vow to protect them. How could I be so foolish to think the other cartels wouldn’t find out I was dealing guns to El Gordo’s Ochoa cartel? El Gordo’s men abducted me—I guess for my protection—and have treated me well, but I am still a prisoner here, indentured to fix and post-prep his ranch against the sun for as long as he wishes. But, the longer I am here, the more my prospects for continued survival, and those of the Kings, diminish.

The prospects for the rest of the world are bleaker. Unless the sun abates her war on us, our entire environment will completely change. Certainly, this is a world-wide calamity that will kill most of the world’s population within a generation.

But there is Cicada. Started almost 150 years ago by my great-grandfather, Russell Thompson, it may offer earth its only hope for survival, assuming it is able to endure the desolation of the collapsing world around it.

These are the new realities of our existence. The quicker we come to terms with them, the quicker we can focus on living… or on dying.

Maxwell J. Thompson