the-sparrow-project

[the-sparrow-project]

It's been nine days, give or take, since what most people are dubbing Sun Day. A solar flare so massive I could see the aurora it created from my home in Texas.

The news had talked about such a possible event days before it happened. They mentioned The Carrington event, whatever that is, and how this storm might trump all solar storms in history. How much damage can some sunshine do?

Well, a lot, apparently.

The flare hit and it was like an invisible wave ripped through the planet. I watched as telephone lines exploded, phones overloaded and died, their batteries sizzling. Anything electric was affected, from modern cars to bluetooth headphones. So much for electric cars being the future.

It was the world's most silent apocalypse. Overnight, every home in the community lost power. No trees fell, no buildings were swept away by flood or wind, if you stood in the street, for the most part nothing had changed.

But at night, if you looked up, you could see the stars again.

All the light pollution that we had grown accustomed to seeing? Gone, with a snap of the fingers, with a rush of air. A cosmic hand had reached down and turned off the lights.

People were shaken, as always following a natural disaster, but something was different. It wasn't just a little power outage, a little mistake in the electrical grid. I heard that the storm fried the power grid beyond repair.

It would need to be reconstructed, which would require power and resources, both of which were in short supply already. And in all this, no one had any idea if the nearby towns had made it through, since all our communications had gone down with the electricity.

First order, for the next morning, was to send some people to head to nearby towns and see what had become of them, if they had power.

Well, they still haven't come back.

We're getting on alright, even with the local government in shambles. Only seven stores had been raided for supplies so far, so at least we're staving off that apocalypse.

There are only four radios that still work in the whole town. They've been piled together with some generators in the town square, someone is trying to send a radio broadcast. We only hope that anyone can hear us.