The day started normal, even mundane. The day of stillness. When the storm happened.
I was on the internet then. Looking at Boing-Boing, seeing what the smart people were talking about, reading the news. It's funny now, remembering how the news made me mad sometimes. That stuff doesn't matter anymore.
There was a power failure. No big deal in these parts. "Great" I'm thinking, "Fucking Phil is taking a nap at the plant". No big deal. "It'll be on in a few minutes..." Yea, right.
After 10 minutes I began to wonder and wandered outside. There were cars stopped on the road where traffic goes from here to there, just cars pulled over and not running. Cell phones didn't work either.
The street lights never came on that night.
#2
It didn't take long after that to realize what had happened. People said there had been a nuclear war... with those EMP weapons. Whatta crock...
The aurora freaked a lot of people out, they said it was a sign from heaven and those people were the scariest. They split into different factions each according to their own. Funny thing about them, they still argued over words in their Bible though the time for that had passed, they were now the living gospel. Their written words were dust blown into the past, their actions were now the word of their God. Too many didn't realize that and that made the circumstances worse. There were many false prophets and much pain inflicted in the name of Jesus as time passed.
#3
The new world order was born that day. Some nations ceased to exist. The fragile ones, the countries which lacked the cohesiveness of a strong national identity. They became what they once were, isolated factions according to natural boundaries and shared traditions.
Surviving infrastructure determined the new world order, the ability to produce electricity determined the rank of nations.
Casualties of the storm were the micro chips, the satellites, the power grids. Our modern civilization. It's as if the world had returned to 1800, save we know what we now know.
With the instantaneous end of world trade and communication came panic. We'd forgotten how the world is without electricity, without micro chips. Just those two things are the mainstay of modern civilization, and they were gone.
The world's electronic wealth ceased to exist.
#4
The cities, the large cities, became hell on earth. That it could have been different is given, but the nature of man is not to be denied. Bad things happen when any action is justified for food and water. Looters stealing appliances without realizing that they are never to function, perhaps in a need to believe that they will someday work. That life would return to normal.
The storm started fires in many places, electrical fires, too many to control. Backup pumps and generators don't work when their chips are fried. Whole cities burned. The fires caused by overloaded transmission lines passing through forests could not be fought, resources could not be brought to bear. The helicopters would not fly.
