Aurora(29)

He stood there silently, Murtagh and Fitz on either side of him, and the other dozen researchers, some of whom had been there in the morning when it started, and others who had poured in as the day had worn on. None of them spoke, because none of them could think of a single word that could capture the beauty in the sky above them.

Nor could they find words to express the completeness of their failure over the course of the day. They had rung society’s alarm bells as they had never been rung before; they had called every government official all the way up and down the line, from the lowliest O&M manager at a tiny power plant in Christine, Texas, all the way up to the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, and their increasingly desperate entreaties had been largely greeted with skepticism, hostility, and a strong desire to get off the phone. As the day wore on and the anticipated impact was delayed and delayed, they were met with outright anger, and their successes, such as they were, became fewer and further between. A tiny relay station in Wichita agreed to go offline. They cheered wildly. Ethos Energy said they’d get back to them, actually did, and said they were “seriously looking into” taking all transformers in Central California off the grid. They cheered, less wildly. And a plant manager in Tallahassee saw immediately the peril of the situation and swore he’d call back in five minutes but had been sent home for the day by the time they reached the facility again, three hours later.

By the time the CME breached the earth’s magnetosphere, the crew inside the NOAA station had given up and braced themselves for the worst. Their power was among the first to go out, within sixty seconds of contact, connected as they were to the massive Eastern Seaboard supply grid. Reports of fires and explosions at towers all up and down the coast popped up on their cell phones, which beeped with strange alerts and evacuation orders they’d never heard before, until they stopped working completely, the cell networks collapsing minutes after the electrical towers failed. At one point, an “Incoming Nuclear Missile” alert popped up on the phones of all Verizon customers but was just as quickly replaced by a “Recall Alert” message, just before that network went dead.

With their computer screens blank, their cell phones dead, and the land lines fried, there was nothing left for the staff to do but go outside and watch the show. The black-sky event had begun.

In that moment, Perry felt only wonderment. Suddenly, it was magnetic midnight everywhere on earth. His eyes scanned the heavens; his brain digested the details. At the higher altitudes, the charged particles moved rapidly in the thin atmosphere and excited the oxygen atoms, giving the sky a deep crimson aura; moving down, he saw that more frequent collisions were suppressing the red and allowing nitrogen to dominate, hence the powerful green; still lower down, the nitrogen was ionizing rapidly, radiating at a large number of wavelengths, splashing red, blue, and purple across the skies. Perry closed his eyes—which took a force of will—and listened. High above, he could hear the auroral noise, a hissing and cracking sound, two hundred feet above him as the charged particles of the inversion layer dissipated in the night sky.

Everything about the contact was so utterly, so precisely as it should have been.

Perry took a deep breath and forced himself to look away.

He looked down at his watch, an analog model that had been his grandfather’s. It was still ticking, and said it was 5:26 a.m. He thought for a moment. There was nothing more he could do here, he realized. There was nothing anyone could do. Prediction, preparation, and warning—those times were all past. Now there was only survival and recovery. The Northeast Corridor, that stretch of the East Coast running from Boston, through New York City, and down to Washington, DC, was home to fifty million people. Perry knew if he wasn’t out of that urbanized megalopolis within the next three hours, there was a very good chance he would die there.

Without a word of goodbye, he walked quickly across the parking lot, digging in his pocket for his car keys.



Thom Banning stood in the living room of his house and looked out at the mind-bending light show that lit up the desert floor for hundreds of miles in every direction. In Utah, it was just after 3 a.m., and he was the only one awake. Ann-Sophie and the kids, asleep behind motorized blackout shades, had been undisturbed by the coronal event, their white-noise machines pleasantly whirring, generating the soothing sound of an air conditioner, a spring rainfall, and ocean waves, sound-mixed to Thom’s personal specifications. The other residents of Sanctuary, all of whom had arrived over the course of the evening, were presumably asleep in their subterranean beds, unaffected, the LED “windows” in their apartments still projecting whatever soothing view they had personalized for their sleeping areas.

Thom himself had been awakened by a dull thrumming sound six floors beneath him. He was a light sleeper anyway, but he had spent enough trial-run nights in the silo to recognize the sound of the liquid-cooled Generac Protector diesel generators kicking to life. That could mean only one thing—the expected thing, that the underground power lines that fed the silo from the main generating complex in Jericho had gone dead and Sanctuary’s auxiliary power supply had engaged, according to plan.

Nothing was changed, nothing was interrupted. Not so much as one digital clock would need to be reset. The facility had shifted seamlessly to backup power.

Looking out the windows, Thom noticed a tiny smudge on his glasses. He took them off, cleaned them on his T-shirt, and realized the smudge was a scratch. He knew his need for eyeglasses was a weakness and a dependency. He’d explored Lasik surgery but had been told his eyeball was of a shape that was inconsistent with surgical success. Irritating, but he’d adapted accordingly. He had twelve pairs of spare prescription glasses, neatly lined up in the second drawer of his bedside table here at Sanctuary, an idea he’d had while watching an old Twilight Zone episode. He’d swap the scratched ones out for a fresh pair in the morning.