Scott Williams: The Pulse

“I don’t know. I was just heading over to the library to find out if the lights are still on there when you asked. I sure hope so. I’ve got a ton of research to do.”

“Well, thanks,” Casey said. “I guess I freaked out for no reason over being late for Anthro.”

Casey walked back out to the sidewalk and glanced back at St. Charles Avenue out front. The entire street was still like one big parking lot. No vehicles were moving, not even the streetcar that was still stopped on the tracks right where it had been when she had entered the campus. Most of the cars in the street had their hoods raised now, their owners standing around looking helpless. Casey wondered if the strange power outage had anything to do with all these apparently stalled cars, but she couldn’t think of any reason why it would.

She turned and walked down the shaded sidewalks of Gibson Quad. Its park-like expanse was crowded with groups of students talking about the power outage and the strange lights during the night. Looking at the other surrounding buildings, she realized that the power probably was out all over campus. No one was in class, it seemed.

She decided to keep walking to the breezeway at the other end of the complex and see if PJ’s Coffee was open. She knew Jessica had a nine o’clock class and would normally be stopping by there about this time to get her morning caffeine fix first. Casey thought Jessica might have seen the lights if she and Joey had been out that late, but when she got there, despite her hopes that it would somehow not have been affected, PJ’s was closed. She sat on a park bench across the breezeway and opened her backpack to get out her MacBook. Usually, on the rare days she had time to stop for a vanilla latte, she would sit in the café and check her e-mail or post something to her Facebook wall. She didn’t really expect the campus WiFi to be working with everything else shut down the way it was, but the laptop was fully charged and she could think of no reason why it shouldn’t come out of hibernation when she opened it up. She pushed the power button repeatedly with no effect, and then noticed that the little green light that indicated that the battery was charged was not lit. It was just one more WTF moment in a morning that seemed to hold no end of new surprises.

“Hey, Casey!”

She looked up to see Grant Dyer walking her way at a brisk pace. His wavy blond hair was even more disheveled than usual this morning, and he looked as if he hadn’t slept all night. But like every other time he was near, she felt something come over her that was hard to describe, something between nervousness and excitement. She had met him only last semester, when she went on a field trip for extra credit in a freshman cultural anthropology class. A graduate student, he had been assisting her professor on a visit to an ancient Native American village site near the mouth of the Mississippi River. From the first day she met him she had experienced the same reaction when he spoke to her. Today was no different, and as she turned to greet him she felt herself blush a little.

“Hi, Grant! I didn’t see you in Dinwiddie Hall, but I was late getting there. I guess you left when the lights went out, huh?”

“Yeah, I wondered where you were this morning, Casey. I figured there was no use hanging around when I saw the whole building was shut down.”

“I overslept. My roommate was supposed to give me a wake-up call, but of course I didn’t know the cell phones were going to go out. Did you see those lights last night that everyone is talking about?”

“Oh, yeah, I saw them, Casey. You mean you missed them? It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. It was amazing. I had just walked out of the House of Blues with my friend Jeff and was about to go home. We just stood there in the parking lot tripping out. The whole sky lit up; then it just glowed, and waves of colored light ripped across the city like some kind of explosion, but there was no sound. It was just an eerie, silent, flashing light show. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What was it? Do you know?”

“No one knows for sure. But I’m hearing a lot of talk that it could have been some kind of mega solar flare. It disrupted every kind of radio communication, and no one seems to know how extensive the disruption was, because there’s no way to get any news.”

“My TV was out too. I didn’t check the radio, though. But now my MacBook won’t even power up. What’s up with that? I know the battery was charged because it was plugged in all night before the power went off.”

“Weird! I don’t have mine with me, but it should come on, even it you can’t get online.” Grant took his cell phone out of his pocket as he looked at Casey’s laptop to verify that there was no way to turn it on. “Hey, my phone’s completely dead now. Not only does it not have a signal, it won’t even come on.”

Casey reached for her iPhone and discovered that it was likewise shut down and would not come back on.

“This must have just happened at the same time as the electrical shutdown a little while ago. Wow! What kind of force would it take to do that?”

“Did you see all the stalled cars out on St. Charles?” Casey asked. “It looked like they had stopped just about the time I turned onto the street this morning on my way here. That would have been about the same time the lights went out, according to what everyone in Dinwiddie Hall said.”

“No, I haven’t been back off campus. If cars have gone dead because of this, then it was definitely worse than I thought. And the fact that our phones and your computer are stone dead confirms it.”

“How can the power going out affect things that were not plugged in?” Casey asked. “And what does any of that have to do with causing cars to stop?”

“Because it’s much more than just a power outage, Casey. First it was radio and satellite signals right when those lights flashed. Then the electricity went out this morning. That must have been a separate event. If it shut down cars, then it was one hell of a strong electromagnetic pulse that must have fried the computers in them.”

“I still don’t see what that has to do with cars. Surely most of them don’t have computers in them?”

“I don’t mean regular computers like your laptop… just the little ‘black boxes’ that control the ignition and other things that keep the engine running. Without those devices, most cars won’t even start.”

“Oh. I’m really stupid when it comes to cars, I guess.”

“You’re not stupid, Casey. I don’t know that much about them either. I don’t even own a car. I just read about that somewhere. Oh, and there was some documentary I saw about how the police were experimenting with some kind of pulse device on their cruisers that could be used to shut down the engine of a vehicle they’re chasing. It worked on the same principle.”

“I guess my car probably won’t start, then.”

“I don’t know. What is it? What year is it?”

“It’s an ’03 Camry. Why?”

“If it were an older car—no fancy electronics—it might still run. At least that’s what I read. But yours is much too new.”

“I tried to get Dad to buy me an old Volkswagen Beetle, but he insisted I needed something newer and ‘more reliable.’ So much for that, huh?”

“Who could have known this would happen? We still don’t know the full extent of it. This could be a lot bigger than we think. It could have affected the whole country, or even the entire planet.”

“I didn’t know the sun could do all this. Has it happened before?”

“Maybe it has, just not since people have had electricity. It wouldn’t have mattered before that.”

“Is this dangerous?” Casey asked. “I mean, can’t the sun, like, burn up the planet or something?