Blackout: Chapter 5

Previously

Excerpt from the Journal of Jason Forrrester

24 January 2013

They are calling this a near miss.  It's not far wrong.  Three minutes earlier and that storm would have hit us full on.  Hammerfest needs three new power substations, it will take them months to get power up and running fully.

I have seen what happens when civilizations die, I cannot allow that to happen to my family.  Not if I have any chance to stop it from happening.

Rebecca thinks I am crazy, but as I have been diagnosed with PTSD, she is letting it slide.

The irony abounds.

The Sun

19 January 2013

It began deep within the sun, far beneath the surface.  As the sun's magnetic field lines rotated around the core, the field at the equator rotated faster than those at the poles, creating disruptions in the field as loops formed in the equator.  These loops of magnetic energy bound plasma within, rotating it at higher and higher speeds.  These areas of increased magnetic and plasma energy manifested as darker spots on the corona. 

As the intact field lines piled up around the looped field lines, the charge built up higher and higher until the entire thing burst forth in a massive explosion of plasma and charged particles flying at a significant percentage of the speed of light.  Nine minutes later, and the storm would have missed the Earth entirely.

Hammefest, Norway

21 January 2013

It was a glancing blow, though you would not have known it from the way NASA reacted.  Nine minutes later, and the storm would have slammed into the Earth like an electromagnetic shotgun.  It was strong enough that it would have done far more damage if it had hit the planet full on.  Every orbiting satellite between 67 and 74 degrees north and 20 and 32 degrees east shut down, with high orbit satellites failing within four degrees on either side.

Torvald Raske was awoken by the dawn and rolled out of bed, groaning in annoyance.  It felt like he hadn't gotten any sleep at all, or so it felt to him.  He was happy to work in the sawmill, most of the time.  But other times he hated how tired it left him.  Even a normal eight hour shift.  And the dawn came to early this morning.

It wasn't until he blinked himself awake that he realized, there shouldn't be a dawn.  Not for another four hours or so.  Groggily, he stumbled over to the window and looked into the sky.  It was the most intense aurora he had ever seen, and it was blood red.  The ocean was bright red as well.

"Herregud!" he proclaimed.  It was like something out of the Book of Revelation.  He had seen auroras his entire life, but this was just insane.

When the sparks from the local transformer sub-station shot into the sky, Torvald ran out of the house and made his way to the source of the explosion.  The entire city was cast in an eerie bloody light.  It was creepy to say the least.

Upon reaching the area around the transformer, he wasn't shocked to discover that a number of houses had caught fire, but he was surprised to see the firecrew were not dousing the flames.

"Are they afraid of the electricity?" He asked.

"Nei, there is no power to the pumps.  They can't get water to put out the fire."

"Herregud!" Torvald exclaimed, "This entire city is so tightly packed, the fires could burn us all out!"

Torvald watched as the firecrews began to break out axes and attack the nearby buildings.  A shout rose up as the Fire Chief addressed the crowd, "We need you to grab axes and crowbars and help us build a firebreak until the harbor patrol can get here with their fire boat!"

Nodding, Torvald raced home to grab his heavy splitting maul from its place of honor over the mantle.  He was not about to let the fire burn down the entire city.

Lenexa, KS

23 January 2013

Jayce was still toweling off his hair when the alert popped up on his computer.  He had set a program he had found a couple days ago to keep track of national emergency sites, news feeds, twitter, the RSOE Emergency Disaster Information Service, the USGS, and dozens of other sites to track information on plagues, major seismic and vulcanic activity, technological disasters, large terrorist acts, radiological alerts, and dangerous space weather events.

He only ever checked it twice a day anymore, it was automatically forwarded to his phone if the algorithms programmed into it thought it was of immediate concern - which usually meant bad weather in the area or seismic events in the Yellowstone region or along the New Madrid fault line - but he liked having it up.  It was more of a security blanket, snapping to keep the tigers away, than anything else; but having it up and there to alert him should something happen which would affect him helped him to sleep at night.

So when he saw the information regarding the coronal mass ejection slapping the planet upside the head, he got the message.  Somehow, a prepper had gotten his hands on a DHS report which detailed the full extent of the coming solar maximum with cross-tabs to information from NASA's Goddard Institute detailing why they thought this cycle would have such a dangerous peak.

Nine coronal mass ejections a day.  That was a massive amount of mass the sun was shedding.  In the long run, it would mean the sun would shine a couple months longer; but in the short run it meant the Earth was a hummingbird in a shooting gallery.  Nine coronal mass ejections a day.  At that rate, impact was almost certain.

Walking over to his computer, he pulled up a shopping aggregate site, and put in an order for a year's worth of food for a family of seven; enough to feed his family along with Rebecca and her parents.  After what happened with Frankenstorm Sandy, he should have bought this kind of food months ago, and he cursed himself for waiting.  He was not going to allow the chaos of a post-collapse situation like what was happening in New York happen to his family.  He was not going to allow the collapse of civilization to affect his family as well.  They would survive.

Lenexa, Kansas

23 January 2012

Later that evening, as he and Rebecca returned to his apartment after catching a movie, Rebecca noticed large 50 pound bags of salt and sugar, along with several large bags of rice and crates of ramen noodles in his hallway.

"Jayce, what is all this?"

"Insurance, to make the people I care about are okay should the worst happen."

"Seriously, Jayce?  When did you become a survivalist?"

"After Frankenstorm Sandy knocked power out in New York and the areas without power lost all sense of civilization once the food ran out.  And that was just the awakening."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, let's take a look at the threats we are facing, starting with an economic collapse.  Right now, the government is printing $85 Billion dollars a month.  That comes out to a 6% devaluation of the dollar every year.  A Tripling of the current inflation rate.  It's not as bad as in many historical nations, but with the last downgrade it certainly doesn't look good."

"Right now, the only thing really propping up the Dollar - the only thing keeping it strong - is the two-fold fact that it is a reserve currency for over a hundred nations and that OPEC will only accept US Dollars for the purchase of oil."

"With the Germans trying to return the Euro to a Gold Standard, this makes us look much weaker.  The Germans are notoriously paranoid about inflation of any kind, and for a rather good and obvious reason.  With them pulling out of the Dollar and swapping over to the Gold Standard, many other nations will be wondering what the Germans know which they don't.  Once it happens, once the Euro goes to the Gold Standard for the first time in history, OPEC will almost certainly start pricing their oil in Euros as well as, if not in replacement of, Dollars.  Once that happens, our economy is dead."

"And that is not considering the increase in food prices we are expecting this summer.  Between the natural drought in the Mid-West and South, the Federal imposed drought imposed on California's San Joaquin Valley, and the 3% inflation from the start of QE 3 last year, we are looking at a minimum increase of food prices between 3 and 10%.  Staple foods are going to be hit the worst here, with poor families and those on a fixed income  facing the prospect of buying food and filling their car with gasoline in order to go to work.  How do you think they are going to react to having their income cut by 10%?"

"Meanwhile, China and Japan are about this close," he held his finger and thumb together as close as he could, "to a shooting war over the Senkakus thanks to a sudden burst of Imperialism in Beijing to compensate for the fact their entire country is about 15 years away from imploding due to a massive demographic crisis."

Rebecca looked confused, "What do you mean?"

"The PRC has a generation of the only children of only children which will be coming of age in fifteen years.  All of these spoiled kids will grow up to discover that the nation has somewhere between a 2:1 and a 3:1 gender disparity between men and women.  Include the fact that the vast majority of the population are little more than serfs working for the government with little in the way of social mobility outside the party structure, and you have a volatile mix.  Imperialism is their only viable solution as it bleeds their own people away and creates a large population of single, eligible women while reducing the number of men in both China and the nations they conquer who have to compete for the attention of those women."

"Considering the only other option is a polyandrous marriage, and that is so far outside the Maoist Ideal as to be impossible, they have no other option.  Any war they engage in will drag the rest of Asia into it, and that will have serious repercussions for the Global Economy.  And if South Korea and Japan are involved, it will only be a matter of time before I have to don a Marine Corps uniform once again."

"Then you have the continued unrest in the Middle East with the Secularists and Christians fighting the Hardline Islamists for control over their home countries.  And the Secularists are losing right now."

"If the hardline Islamists win, they might decide to hasten the return of the Mahdi, a Messianic warrior who is believed to usher in the end of days by marching on Mecca as stones burn, and plunge the world into chaos.  There is always the very real possibility they will turn on each other and the Sunnis and Shias will kill each other in nuclear fire due to epoch old racial hatred, but that is unlikely  at best, and the damage it would do to the global economy and to the ecology of the world is almost unthinkable."

"And with Iran still weak after that shooting war with Israel…"

"Exactly, the Saudis might declare war on them just to appease the hardliners and keep their family in power."

"And that's not even getting into the sheer number of natural disasters which could occur.  Even regional problems in the UK could escalate in the current highly tense atmosphere.  When it comes to being ready for a collapse, anything could be the rock that starts the avalanche."

Rebecca looked at him with skepticism, "Avalanche?"

"It’s a line from a show I watched as a kid.  Something along the lines of 'the pebbles no longer get to vote once the avalanche has begun.'  It always stuck with me due to the accuracy of the comment."

"I don't know exactly how I know that something is about to happen, but I do know this much; something is about to happen.  And when it does, it will have dire consequences for the entire world.  I want to make sure my family is able to survive when it does happen."

"And so you are taking the necessary steps?  By buying salt?"

"Hey, salt is a vital trade commodity when civilization collapses.  Your body needs it to be able to function properly, you can use it to preserve meat which can't be smoked for whatever reason, mix it with water and you can pickle some vegetables to preserve them.  There are dozens of uses for salt, and they require massive amounts of it.  When civilization collapses, if it does so during our life, salt will go from being one of the cheapest and most forgettable item at on the shelf to one of the most valuable.  Hell, the Romans considered it to be more valuable ounce for ounce than gold."

"You have really thought this through, haven't you?"

"Yeah, I have.  I was a Marine once, we are all about the details…"

The "was" caught Rebecca's attention.  Marines never described themselves as ex or former Marines, only as retired Marines.  She had only ever heard one other actual Marine refer to himself as a former Marine, and he had led his men into an ambush that killed many of them.  The only actual Marines who referred to themselves as ex-Marines where those who felt they had failed their brothers and drummed themselves out of the Corps.  Jayce certainly fit the mold.  It only further confirmed what she had guessed about him and the ambush the 8th Marines had been caught in during his time in Afghanistan.

Chapter 6