All three of us, Luke, Helen and I, stood there in the quiet hallway.
‘This guy…’ I said. ‘No matter what kind of person he is, we can’t just go knock on the door and ask to come in. If he’s prepped for this kind of event then he could be armed, and I’ve no doubt he’ll be a little jumpy.’
‘Knocking on the door is the only thing we can do,’ Helen said, shrugging.
‘So who’s gonna do it?’
‘Fuck that,’ Luke said, ‘I’m not getting shot again.’
‘I’ll go,’ I said.
‘No,’ Helen interrupted, shaking her head, ‘he knows me.’
I wasn’t some overprotective moron, even if we had travelled across half the city to get Helen back, but I really didn’t like the idea of getting this far only for her to get accidentally killed by some eccentric genius.
Still, I wasn’t gonna be like that.
She set off ahead of Luke and I, and we crossed slowly towards the door, every step bringing us dangerously closer. I felt like I was trying to put it off, but eventually we were there.
‘I can’t see anything,’ Helen said, peering through the window. ‘He must be on the other side of the room.’ She raised a hand, looking over at us, and knocked on the door.
An immediate clattering emerged from within the room in some reactionary movement.
‘Who’s that?!’ A gruff voice shouted from within. There was another brief flurry of noise, at which point Helen had to speak.
‘Professor Moody?’ Helen shouted, the pitch of her voice rising as she asked the question and stepped away from the door apprehensively. ‘It’s-’
‘I don’t give a fucking fuck who you are, or how you know my name. Get out of here!’
There was another clattering, much closer to the door this time. Luke almost jumped out of his skin, probably thinking that it was another bullet, but within seconds it occurred to me that something had been thrown, something metallic.
‘No, it’s me! It’s Helen! Helen Carson! Remember? I bring your lunch from the canteen every day!’
There was another series of movements from within, until everything went silent. I looked up and down the dark corridor and saw that we were still alone.
There was a flurry of quick, paced footsteps towards the door, and suddenly the half-image of a man with a bald head and wild flurries of hair arcing out from around his ears appeared. His eyes were dark and focused – he looked at Helen and nodded, before turning his head to look at myself and Luke.
‘Who are these assholes?’
‘Charming,’ Luke muttered, ‘I feel like we’re the only ones who haven’t started a fight in this city in the last five hours and we’re supposed to be the assholes.’
‘They’re with me,’ Helen said. ‘They’re okay. Trust me.’
Professor Moody looked between the two of us for a few more moments before nodding once again and moving the chair away from the door.
He opened it slowly, and we were finally greeted with a clear image of this man. He was perhaps 5”5, with a squat face, clad in an odd combination of cargo pants and a bomber jacket. On his feet were a pair of boots, similar to a pair that lurked in a shoe cupboard at my father’s house.
‘Names?’
‘Sam,’ I said. ‘And this is Luke.’
‘Sam and Luke, ehh? Knew a Sam once… Hand over your weapons, pretty boys,’ he said stoically. ‘You two, Carson. All three of you. No funny business. Try anything and I’ll burn this place to the ground.’
‘How do you plan on doing that?’ I asked.
‘How d’you think I’m keeping the lights on in here?’ He said, stepping aside and beckoning us in. Helen set off first, confirming that things would be safe, and we followed.
Immediately it became clear what he was talking about. On the other side of the room there was a range of gear designed to withhold in just such a situation as this. The beams emanating from several wind-up torches were the first thing that caught me, but on a desk on the other side was something that almost sent me running through the door.
A gas canister sat on the table top on the other side of the room, one side of its metal casing removed. Within, a fire burnt, and from the top there was a makeshift ventilation system composed of thick, heavy rubber tubing that led across the room to the open window, where the smoke took off into the sky.
That was what had been causing it.
‘Electricity might be off but the gas taps still function,’ Moody said calmly. ‘Don’t think I won’t light this place up.’
With that, he crossed to the other side of the room without acknowledging us further and seated himself down at the workbench, facing us. I say workbench – it was a modern lab, although it was filled with all manner of personalised equipment. There were pots and pans for cooking, which seemed odd considering the fact that Helen brought him his lunch, as well as papers, books, computer stations, a range of monitors and equipment that I couldn’t pin a name to or identify, and what looked like a closet on the far right wall.
‘Let me do the talking,’ Helen muttered to Luke and I.
‘Yes, the talking,’ Moody muttered, looking over the range of scattered papers on the desk before him. ‘Wouldn’t want Professor Moody to react rashly to any newcomers… That’s what the college board would say, wouldn’t they? Pity that they’re probably dead or crying in their homes right about now! Hahaha!’
His laughter was indulgent and booming – a small part of him was revelling in all of this, I realised.
‘Nobody ever listens to that kook upstairs…’ He continued, ‘He talks a load of trash, all this bull about the failure of the grid and the end of western civilisation. Complete lunatic, huh? Huh?! Well, what am I now? You? Any of you? Answer me, what am I now?’
‘I don’t know, Professor,’ Helen said calmly. ‘What are you?’
Moody exhaled deeply, calming himself down to match Helen’s tone, and said;
‘Right. That’s what I am. Right.’
I had no interest in bolstering the cliché of glancing over at Luke and Helen, as if to clarify that we were all thinking the same thing – this guy was fucking crazy, even if he was a professor at the college and one of the only people that had prepared for this.
‘So…’ He continued, several long moments later. ‘You’re here. Why might that be?’
‘Do you need me to spell it out for you?’ Helen asked.
‘I’d love that.’
‘Fine,’ she said apprehensively. ‘Do you have any idea what has caused all of this?’
‘That’s the first thing you’re asking me?’
‘Of course it is!’ She said loudly, ‘Have you looked outside?!’
‘Come on, Ms Carson. Have you looked at these two buffoons? What’s your name,’ he said, nodding over at me. ‘Tom?’
‘Sam,’ I said.
‘Right. You, Sam. Now, aside from somebody who’s right, what else do you see when you look at me?’
‘I… My father always told me not to say anything at all to a stranger if I didn’t have anything good to say.’
‘Go on.’
‘Somebody who’s insane.’
‘What question have you got on your mind, though?’
I stood there across from him, my mind racing for something feasible to ask. Of course, I didn’t need to think about it at all, because the honest question was already there.
‘How does somebody of your nature end up working at a professional education institute?’ I asked, trying to sound as formal as possible.
‘Bingo,’ he smiled. ‘There’s the damn good question I’ve been looking for. The answer… The college has let me stay here as long as I continue to publish the physics-based astrophysical research that I carry out… It seems to make some waves in the academic community and it’s landed the institute with a lot of subsidies. Always comes back to money, you see… The problem is, when it actually came to something based on real life, nobody listened to me. That’s the th
ing with these academics. It’s all fine and well to study things in a safe space – don’t worry, I’m totally for studying the terrible and abhorrent, because it needs to be done. But when it comes to applying it to the real world outside of these offices, these damned people don’t know where to start. Studies, forums, conferences… I felt like I was the only one who was preparing for this, the only one who didn’t turn a blind eye to what was going on…’
‘So you do know what caused this,’ Helen said, nodding at him. ‘You do know what’s happening.’
For the first time since we had arrived, Professor Moody looked like he was actually considering his words carefully.
‘I do know what is happening,’ he said slowly, quietly. ‘The cause, on the other hand… Well, how certain can we students of science be of anything?’
After that things went very quiet. I didn’t know whether Luke and Helen were taking in the implications of this silence or dwelling on it or whatever, but only one thing was on my mind.
‘So… What is it?’ I asked, gesturing my open hands forward as if I was begging for an answer – which I sort of was. ‘Yesterday we were watching the news and heard that a solar flare was going to miss the Earth… That’s what I thought this was.’
‘What was your name again?’ Moody asked curiously.
‘Sam.’
‘Well, Sam, I don’t really believe in coincidence, and with the current chain of events that is indeed the narrative that is being pushed. We have been struck by the after-effects of a solar flare. I’m not gonna give you some Wikipedia introductory paragraph on all of this… If Wikipedia is even a thing anymore… But our sun was scheduled to spurt out what we refer to as a coronal mass ejection. It interferes with magnetism – you might have heard before that you should never place magnets near a laptop because it can completely fuck up its inner workings? Well, imagine that but with absolutely everything.
‘That’s the perceived story, anyway. That was the story being broadcast by every major news outlet on the planet, but with the common consensus that it was going to miss us…’
‘So we were right?’ I asked.
‘Perhaps… If you can place trust in the notion that every major solar observance lab on the planet misjudged the course of the flare, with absolutely no outliers. I’ve been watching them all, and they all said the same thing. The amount of money that’s poured into these institutions, you wouldn’t believe how much it was if I told you… And they all just get it wrong? What are the chances of that happening?’
‘Sometimes these things happen, Professor,’ Helen said.
‘But an event of this magnitude? How can that be miscalculated? When you spend as much time considering all of these things as I do you can start to consider what the alternative possibilities might be.’
‘How can something like this have been caused by anything else?’ I said.
‘Good God, you damned people,’ Moody muttered in an exasperated tone, ‘You’ve really no idea about how all of this works, do you? No internet, no electricity, and you turn into cavemen-’
‘Hey, fuck you!’ Luke suddenly shouted from my side. ‘Everything was fine last night and in the last six hours we’ve been attacked, shot at, beaten up and almost killed by an eight-storey fall. I think we’re doing okay in comparison to everybody else considering the fact that we managed to make it here.’
‘Luke, just let him speak,’ Helen said, holding a facing down palm out to say wait.
Moody went silent for several long moments, looking about the room, as if he hadn’t reacted to Luke’ words in the slightest.
Then:
‘An electromagnetic pulse is not only caused by a solar flare. Specially made devices can be put together and set off. They interfere with magnetic waves, and you wouldn’t even know one had passed you by… Unless you had a pacemaker, that is, or some other form of electrical implant upon your person. They can also come about as an end-result of the shockwave from nuclear bombs. Consider that.’
‘Bullshit,’ Luke said. ‘If that was the case then we would have heard something by now…’
‘Heard something from who? From where? The radio? The news? The internet? Who is there to tell us anything anymore? Where do we get our information from?’
‘Why bother doing this, though?’ Helen asked. ‘Why go to the trouble of putting something like this together? And who would do it?’
‘Another excellent question,’ Moody continued. ‘Who would do such a thing? Who has access to a fantastic multitude of weaponry and gadgetry that could potentially bring about the collapse of the technological civilisation that is this modern world of ours? Who? Hmm?’
All of us fell quiet as he looked at us expectantly, and then:
‘The government,’ I said quietly, simply.
‘Taxpayer funded, bought and paid for, and easily accessible to the top 0.0001% of society. Over a thousand nuclear bombs, and that’s just in the US alone. Imagine if this was a concerted, connected effort by the most powerful governments on the planet. Every leading party coming together to shut down the grid, to plunge our over-populated world into chaos so that they can take refuge in their ivory towers…’
‘You’re insane,’ Luke said. ‘Somebody would have said something by now. It would have gotten out.’
‘Would it? Military technology is ten years ahead of what the public is aware of. Just imagine what they have under their belts… Picture this. 1970s, midst of the cold war. Our usual perceptions of what a nuclear bomb is revolve around something the size of a small car. Several tonnes, at the least. Reports were declassified some years ago under the radar that display the records of a 20kg bomb – that’s twenty bags of sugar – that could fit into a rucksack. Could have laid waste to a square mile of city if it were set off.
‘That was almost 50 years ago. Just think about the technological progressions that we’ve made since then. What do you think our government might be capable of now? All of the governments put together, even?’
I shuddered at the thought, trying to keep the reaction in my mind under wraps. A large part of me refused to accept the possibility of any of this. It wasn’t possible – some internal attempt by people within the US, maybe even the government as a whole, to bring down the entire planet’s infrastructure. How could something like this even happen? And what Luke had said, too – how could it be kept quiet?
But then there was this small part of me that had latched onto this conspiracy, because that was what this theory was. Right now I would accept any theory, because I had seen enough craziness in the past few hours that it would drive me to accept any answer… Right now, though, we had several answers. The solar flare, a device, the detonation of a nuclear bomb…
‘A nuclear bomb, though?’ I asked, the questions pacing through my mind, appearing before me faster than I could ask them. Surely we would have seen that?’
‘Perhaps… Unless it was set off in the sky. High up enough and we wouldn’t see much, especially at this time of night. And as for the flare… Well, suppose they had knowledge of it and decided to put this plan into action right around the time the flare was a problem. Then the powers at be can blame it on that. True, we could start wondering about all of the governmental electrical devices, their tanks, their weapons, their planes. Maybe we could even be under the impression that their stuff has gone down, too. But what if it’s safe? What if they’re keeping it hidden in giant faraday cages, away from the effects of the flare?’
‘Faraday cages?’ Luke asked.
‘Honestly, who are these two you’ve brought me, Ms Carson?’
‘They haven’t spent their lives studying these things, Professor.’
‘Lives? Ha! This is 8th grade Science material,’ he sighed. I felt patronised to say the least, but in the end he honoured us with a little elaboration. ‘A faraday cage is a device – it can be any size, from a few centimetres to the size of a building, that shields whatever is inside from electromagnetic forces. They’r
e earthed to the ground, like an enclosure. To put things simply, whatever’s inside a faraday cage will be protected from the effects of an EMP.’
I shifted uncomfortably where I stood, piecing the information together.
‘So you’re saying-’
‘Anything electrical that has remained inside a well-built faraday cage, in theory, should still be functioning. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s where the US armed forces keep all of their major equipment, the vast majority of it at least. So I ask again – considering the many hours that have passed, where are all of these American birds that should be swooping in to save us all?’
We all fell silent as Moody looked between the three of us. I had no conceivable answer, but with the fury that Luke was feeling – likely spurred on by the pain still present in his shoulder – he broke in.
‘Are you actually serious about all of this?’
‘What other answer is there?’ The Professor said. ‘Arthur Conan Doyle said it best. Remove all of the impossible notions, and the final thing remaining, no matter how insane the idea may seem, must be the correct one.’
I felt a chill run through me at the prospect of all of this being true. Hours ago I had been sleeping soundly in my bed, looking forward to the weekend ahead.
‘So what do you believe?’ I asked
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you think caused this?’
Moody let out a hysterical laugh, throwing his head back, before finally settling and looking me in the eye.
‘The solar flare, of course. The pulse it gave out… A solar pulse, if you can call it that. Of course it was that. The eggheads just got their estimations wrong. These things happen.’
So here we were at the powered out skeleton of the college, shot, exhausted, assaulted after a night of hellish experiences, talking to the strangest man I had ever met about the possibility of a governmental attack on their own citizens.
Then something simple but profound struck me.
‘I think we should go,’ I said. Luke and Helen both looked over at me.
‘Now?’ Luke asked.
‘Yeah. We can stand here and talk all day about who’s responsible for this, or what happened, or why it happened, but with everything said and done this is the way things are. This still happened, and the reason for it isn’t going to change anything. All I do know is that we’ve got to protect ourselves and deal with this in our own way.’
The Solar Pulse (Book 1): Beyond The Pulse Page 11
