A Distant Eden Page 0,2

rage within the sun with vast fields of magnetic lines that war with each other. Occasionally these storms explode from the sun’s surface in fiery arcs, roiling out like colossal bridges for hundreds of thousands of miles. These bursts eject, at millions of miles per hour, dense clouds of electrified gas weighing billions of tons. When they happen to be pointed at the earth they can reach it in as little as fourteen hours, hitting the earth’s magnetic fields like a sledgehammer crashing down on a walnut—blowing the magnetic shield out of its way and bombarding Earth with the dense storm of particles. These storms, on the sun’s scale, are frequent.

The storm particles cause damage to the earth and its occupants. Stroke and heart attack deaths double during solar storms. Human intelligent quotients can temporarily shrink by as much as twenty points. Metal structures have electrical currents induced into them. Radio waves are blocked. Electrical transformers overload and begin to make loud rattling sounds as they heat up and explode.

The earth’s magnetic shield has “cracks” in it that—when conditions are ripe—allow protons and ions to enter inside and build up. This “pre-loaded” condition, when subsequently hit by a strong coronal mass ejection from the sun, magnifies the initial blast. This extra shock can simulate the electro-magnetic-pulse from a nuclear blast, shutting down sensitive electronic equipment.

Chapter 1

December 21

When the power went off, shutting down Roman’s computer and the office lights, he didn’t expect he would be advising a fellow worker to murder his wife and commit suicide within a few hours. For now, however brief this “now” was, his world remained sane. Normal.

Dead silence rung for a second. Then there was a chorus of moaning and cursing from the cubicles as work was lost in the blink of an eye.

“Damn,” Roman groaned to himself. He looked out the window of his 20th floor cubicle, out across downtown Fort Worth. “Hey, Jim,” he said to the occupant of the adjacent cubicle, “look at that; all the cars have stopped on the interstate. Must be a big wreck somewhere.”

The words had barely left his mouth when he noticed a helicopter heading for the ground in a controlled crash, auto-rotating. The chopper disappeared behind a building, but he saw no smoke or signs of explosion. Roman sincerely hoped the pilot was uninjured. He looked again at the traffic. He could see the intersection of Interstate 20 and Interstate 35; all cars were stopped not just in one direction, but in all directions on all highways. The surface streets were just the same.

A glint in the sky, the sun reflecting off an airliner, caught his eye. Roman watched in growing horror as the jet liner plummeted straight into the ground, erupting into a fireball, two or three miles away. As he watched, another identical fireball erupted further away, just on the horizon. Then another.

Finally, the light bulb went on in his mind. “Jim,” he almost shouted, his voice choked with tension. “We’re in either a major solar storm or a nuclear EMP event. I’m out of here; I’m heading home right now.”

Thinking only of getting to Sarah, Roman quickly took the stairs down the twenty stories, and then with aching legs walked as fast as he could to the parking garage a block away. There was no longer any need to get his supervisor’s permission to leave; he was no longer employed—no one was. The city was silent, the quietest he had ever heard it. All the background noise, the traffic, sirens, jackhammers, train horns; everything had stopped.

His truck starting now was unlikely—but he’d thought on this for a long time and made the necessary preparations. In his glove compartment, wrapped in two heavy sheets of aluminum foil, were six sets of replacement fuses. If the truck’s computer brain hadn’t been fried, he had a chance.

Roman inserted the key and turned it; nothing, absolutely nothing. A shudder went through him, the feeling usually explained away as “someone stepped on my grave.” It took him twenty minutes to replace all the fuses, and then...it started! It wasn’t running completely normal; the engine would not exceed fifteen-hundred rpm. Apparently, the brain was partially damaged because it was in “limp mode,” a secondary setting that allowed the driver to cripple along until he got home. Slow, but a lot better than walking.

Roman’s home was eighty miles away; a drive that took an hour and a half. Best case scenario, it’d take three hours to get home. Worst case,