Corona Virus
To the naked eye, it began as simply a bright and sunny day. Brighter, perhaps, than usual for this time of year, but not extraordinarily so. Warm. Pleasant even.
When cell reception dropped out, little was made of it. To those on the ground, it was, at first, just a network problem. But then the power went out. Hmmm. The car wouldn’t start. Strange. Must be the battery.
Not until the first plane hit the ground a few minutes later, did people really start to worry.
Cameron Quinn, age 36, was asleep at the time. 12,000 km away from ‘first contact’, on holiday in the Pacific. On holiday, in the sense that he was working remotely for a few days and trying to catch up on sleep. It wasn’t working. At 3 o’clock in the morning and only a few degrees south of the equator, he could have been forgiven for thinking it was a fever dream, brought on by a sudden bought of food poisoning. Dreary eyed and not entirely sober, he opened his eyes to an emerald sky, blazing through the open windows.
This, he decided promptly, desperately fusing the few functioning brain cells at his disposal, was not normal. Perhaps he had ingested something by accident and instead of a green sky, what he was seeing was simply a delayed hallucinogenic experience. This early hypothesis may have been sufficient explanation to slip back off to sleep, had it not been for the very loud and very real explosion moments later. Scouring everything with glass and soil and debris, the shock wave passed and Cameron now lay confused, bleeding and sore on the ground behind an upturned bed, in what remained of his accommodations.
“Ow” he thought rather obviously to himself, before being gripped by an appropriate level of fear. “What the fuck?”.
Not unfairly, although quite unexpectedly, “What the fuck?” was precisely the thought on the mind of most people across the world during those moments. For some it was more of a “آها”. For others “干”. But generally, everywhere, the sentiment was the same. Profoundly annoyed and startled.
But the startling was just getting started.
Without so much as a tweet, the whole situation was beginning to get serious. Like, in a way that threatened the very heart of ones now largely digital identity. The first inclination for many was to race outside and see what all the fuss was about. So this is what Karen Mathews of Long Beach California did. She had been simultaneously twittering and face-timing when it all seemingly went down. But then her phone had given her a mild electric shock and a 737 had crashed into the neighbors. So she did what any rational person would do under the circumstances and died promptly as a result.
Several blocks away, largely outside of any immediate blast radius or impact crater, Mary and her brother Kevin were peering out of their upstairs bedroom window frame. Mary, the elder and taller of the two, had a slightly better view and so was altogether better positioned to witness the next few minutes of activity. We will therefore switch to her perspective for the intervening time.
“Wow, what are those things?” she thought.
“Shooting stars?” she continued, inaccurately.
“Pretty!”
What Mary was in fact witnessing, were satellites, space debris and good old fashioned solar radiation, energized by an unprecedented and previously thought impossible coronal mass ejection, and propelled into the Earth’s atmosphere, which really wasn’t built for this kind of shit and just kind of gave up.
But to be fair to Mary, it was very pretty.
Across the planet, the remaining 87% of the population, remained in whatever doors they could find, for whatever length of time they could manage.
The stages of grief progressed quite rapidly under the circumstances.
During the denial phase a group of spring breakers in Miami briefly got the best tan of their lives.
Anger, resulted in widespread destruction and chaos the likes of which hadn’t been seen since earlier in the day when the Earth was all but destroyed.
Bargaining perhaps would have been more prolific if the telecommunications systems had still been functioning. Instead most folks simply prayed, which turned out about as effectively as it always had.
As depression settled in, it was rapidly deprived of oxygen. This was primarily due to the diminishing supply of oxygen.
Finally, acceptance. Unavoidable in most cases. With what little time, energy, resources and bodily fluids people had left, they sang and drank, ate and made love. They thought of all the things they probably could have done better. And for a brief period, better was exactly what they did. They cared for one another. They supported one another. They wondered together what may have caused all this chaos and contemplated their existence in a vast, wondrous and often unforgiving cosmos.
But mostly, they died.
Fairly certain that the world was now over, Amrita Prasad, a physicist living in Bangalore, poured over her notes. Nodding with a conviction and self satisfaction usually reserved for the newly religious or moderately wealthy, she found the page she was looking for. Yes. This was it. That was why. Just like the Carrington event in 1859. She was right all along. Everyone would be so pleased. At that moment and with what can only be described as a sudden burst of flashy lights and sci-fi noises, she disappeared into thin air.
Meanwhile, roughly 150 million kilometers away, a swollen and not entirely classifiable package of radioactive material, protected by a rather puzzling membrane of something or other, had evidently had its fill. Without any particular regard for anything, it and several trillion others like it, farted a stream of ionized gas and collectively detached themselves from the surface of their doomed host, at which point they inexplicably oriented themselves in the direction of 47 Ursae Majoris, farted again and were gone.
