Aurora(3)

“Perry,” Fitz said with rising urgency, “how long do we have?”

From the phone, Norman’s voice was squawking, distorting the speaker. Murtagh reached down, turned the phone over, and hit the speaker button. Norman’s voice burst out, too loud.

“—not wrong! This shit is not wrong!”

Heads turned all over the room. Others started to filter over, and Norman’s voice distorted through the speaker. Perry held up a hand, silencing the argument behind him for a moment while he hit enter, telling the computer to run his final simulation. They all shut up, waiting for it. The computer pinged with a conclusion.

Perry looked down at his cell phone, on the desktop. “Norman? You still there?”

“Yeah.”

“You ran it?”

“Three times, with Convac’s new transformer specs. You?”

“Same.” Perry cleared his throat. “It’s Carrington-level, isn’t it?” The seven men and women who were now assembled behind him stared down at the phone, waiting for a response from someone on the other end whom none of them knew. But for some reason, everything relied on that unknown man’s reply.

From the speaker, Norman’s voice was raspy. “In the thirtieth year, in the fifth day of the fourth month, as I was among the exiles on the banks of the river Chebar—”

Murtagh interrupted, like a man who suddenly realizes he is the butt of a joke. “Excuse me, who the hell are you and what exactly are we doing here?”

Undeterred, Norman finished the quote. “—heaven opened and I saw visions from God.”

Perry looked up at Murtagh. “It’s the Bible.”

“No shit it’s the Bible. Why is that old man quoting the Bible?”

“Ezekiel’s vision, 593 B.C.,” Perry said. “Some people think it was earth’s first recorded auroral event.”

Fitz put a hand on Perry’s shoulder. “How long ’til it hits, Perry?”

“Between seven and twelve hours. Give or take. Solar winds are highly variable.”

Fitz stood up and looked at Murtagh, whose already pale face was several shades whiter than it had been a few minutes ago.

“So we’re islanding?” Fitz asked.

“I’m not calling that. Are you calling that?”

“Ken, it’s a worldwide black-sky event.”

“I’ll call a stepdown,” Murtagh said.

“A stepdown? Why not just put on a pair of sunglasses? How many plus-1,000 amps on the grid are pre-1972?”

“Top of my head? At least two thousand.”

Fitz nodded, thinking. “Start with those. I’ll call around and try to get a handle on how many of the other ten thousand have winding hot spots likely to blow with thirty DC amps per phase.”

Perry shook his head. “You’d better figure fifty.”

“OK, fifty.” Fitz was activated now, his fatigue forgotten.

But Murtagh was frozen in place. “I don’t even know where to start.”

Fitz looked at him. “Start?” he asked. “We gotta silo the whole fucking country.”



In Aurora, Norman put the cordless phone down on his desk and let their argument play out over the tinny speaker. He pushed himself up out of his chair, regarding for a moment the complex home radio setup that crowded the far end of his desk. Soon enough, he thought, that’s going to be the only way to communicate.

He went to the window, the big one that looked out over the cul-de-sac on which he lived. The sun was just breaking up the pre-dawn sky but hadn’t come over the horizon. Nearly all the houses were dark, except for the occasional porch light still on from the night before. As Norman watched, the mercury-vapor streetlights winked out as they did every morning, their sensors picking up that they were no longer needed. He looked up at the sky, where the sun’s light still reflected off the surface of Venus. As he watched, the first fuzzy edge of the sun’s corona crested the trees on the far side of the street and Norman stared into its wavering hot edge until his eyes watered and he had to turn away.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it all meant for the world, but it was impossible. The planet was too vast, its systems too complex, and his mind couldn’t hold it all. Everything, everything was about to become local. All that would matter in his life was what would happen on this block, what would become of these people and the ones they loved, what choices they would make, and the unpredictable skein of consequences that would be spun from them.

Norman closed his eyes and tried to prepare for the coming storm.





2.





Aurora

11:43 a.m.

Aubrey Wheeler looked down at the chipped paint on her fingernails and wondered when the last time was that she considered a man attractive. It certainly wasn’t now, and it definitely wasn’t either of these two guys.

The conference had been in Kansas City, but not even the good Kansas City, whichever one that was supposed to be. Whichever-the-hell Kansas City she’d had to go to was five hundred inconvenient miles from Aurora, a distance that translated into either an eight-hour drive for a six-hour conference or an overcrowded flight on a shit airline. She’d chosen the flight, on a no-frills carrier that didn’t assign seats, and after a free-for-all at boarding, she’d ended up in a middle spot between two ex-high-school-football types whose concept of personal space was that her space was for their person. Having no intention of staying stressed and angry for the whole ninety-minute flight, Aubrey had popped a Xanax far too early in the day and was now driving home from O’Hare foggy, crabby, and vaguely depressed.