Sunfall Read online

  Ben Maitlin was an intelligent man who tried hard to keep abreast of scientific developments. Sarah sometimes found it frustrating that many other journalists, scientifically illiterate hacks, now regarded themselves as experts on coronal mass ejections. Their interest was certainly understandable given the very real threat CMEs were beginning to pose, and at least they were reporting on them. And that at least meant that the politicians might now finally do something.

  Over the last two years, Sarah’s work had taken on an urgency that was in stark contrast to the sedate, curiosity-driven research she had enjoyed ever since her PhD. The most recent measurement of the strength and distribution of the Earth’s magnetic field was terrifying. It was now down to just half the strength it had been when she was born and the implications of this were only too clear to her.

  Of course, governments around the world had avoided engendering widespread panic by simply downplaying the risks. This policy created its own problems for many scientists, who could see what was coming but found their warnings falling on deaf political ears, exactly as had happened a generation earlier with climate change. It was beyond short-sighted that there was still no coordinated international response to the crisis that was beginning to unfold. The science couldn’t be any simpler: the Earth’s magnetic field, which for billions of years had protected the planet’s fragile biosphere from dangerous radiation from space, was now no longer up to the task. And that meant humanity had some serious problems.

  She examined the images and streams of scrolling data hanging like ghosts in the air in front of her. Like the conductor of an orchestra, she manipulated the data, saving the information in a virtual folder. This coronal ejection would hit the Earth in less than forty-eight hours and it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  ‘Hey, Miguel, come and take a look at this.’

  Replacing the holo of the Sun with one of the Earth, she highlighted all the data collated on the CME – its energy, spread, and the all-important SAT, the Shock Arrival Time.

  Miguel wandered across and peered over her shoulder. ‘Well, that’s going to knock out some power grids. Where will it hit?’

  ‘Looks like the Indian Ocean mostly. Almost definitely central and south-east Asia too.’

  ‘We might get lucky if it arrives a few hours early. Then most of the flux would hit—’

  ‘—the South Pacific, yes. But, that’s just wishful thinking. Anyway, I’m not sure it’d be much comfort. It’s still going to knock out a stack of comm sats.’

  Sarah closed her eyes and rubbed them with thumb and forefinger. She decided to run her simulations again. No need to panic the authorities in those countries unless she was sure. If she’d got her calculations wrong and the CME ended up missing the Earth entirely then she would be accused of crying wolf.

  ‘Do me a quick favour, Miguel? Run a check on paths of all medium- and low-orbit sats above a five-thousand-kilometre radius centred on, um …’ She stared at the slowly spinning globe. ‘… Centred on Nepal, I think.’

  ‘Then correlate it with SAT, right?’

  Sarah knew that the SAT was the big uncertainty. No one could accurately predict the variation in the speed of an approaching CME, or the extension of the pulse. ‘Yes, and assume the usual eight- to ten-hour window.’

  Feeling stiff, she extended her legs and arched her back, lifting her body off the seat, stretching cramped muscles. Another late night beckoned. In mid-stretch, she suddenly became aware that she hadn’t heard Miguel walking back to his desk and that he was still standing behind her. She swivelled round in her chair rather more quickly than she intended.

  ‘Well?’

  Miguel grinned and ambled back to his corner of the lab. Once seated, he pulled his display visor down over his eyes and started to hum tunelessly as his fingers danced across the virtual display hanging in the air in front of him, gathering and manipulating the data from the thousands of registered satellites. He would rule out the ones that would definitely not be crossing the path of the high-energy cascade of electrons, protons and atomic nuclei, then feed all the information on the rest into his simulation codes.

  Despite his irritating humming, Sarah felt a sense of admiration for the bright young Brazilian. He was smart and passionate about his work. She wondered whether his outward cheerfulness was genuine or whether he was just trying to hide his own apprehension.

  3

  Wednesday, 30 January – Waiheke Island, New Zealand

  Marc Bruckner was enjoying the peace and quiet of his favourite vineyard. When he’d arrived there late in the afternoon there had been several other customers, mainly elderly couples. He’d nodded greetings and then found a secluded table at the far end of the courtyard tucked under the shade of a large kauri tree. Its thick brown trunk was full of carved romantic graffiti from previous love-struck patrons. None of this registered on Marc’s consciousness, though; his own failed marriage was still too raw. He’d initially felt self-conscious about drinking alone while all around him people seemed to be blissfully paired up. A few glasses of wine would soon dispel any awkwardness. Alcohol seemed to be his only faithful companion these days.

  He remembered only too well the accusing look on his daughter Evie’s face when he had told her he needed to move back to New Zealand for a while. ‘How is running away to the other side of the world going to make things better?’ she’d asked through angry tears.

  It was true that he had come back to New Zealand with the genuine intention of ‘getting his shit together’ as his father had been fond of saying. Well, it had only been two weeks – surely he couldn’t be expected to turn his life around as soon as he’d landed. After all, he’d been fighting his demons for a long time; he’d been diagnosed with depression and anxiety several years ago, which meant he’d received all the clinical help he’d needed, but he still found it hard to shake the feeling that his problems were no more than a failure of moral fibre and will-power and that he could somehow talk himself better.

  It had been a warm and sticky afternoon, with the westering sun bringing out the best in the colours of the surrounding flora. The vineyard sat on top of a hill and afforded Marc a beautiful panoramic view of the island – from the well-manicured bushes and shrubs of the garden itself to the surrounding apricot, lime and plum trees further down the hill. Beyond was a lush rolling landscape, with more vineyards and farms dotted on adjacent hilltops. In fact, if he strained his neck up over the nearest bush he could see all the way down to the westernmost point of the island and Matiatia Bay, where the ferries transported inhabitants and the tourists to and from Auckland twenty kilometres across the water.

  Marc had sat pondering the mess of a life he’d left behind in America: his failed marriage, the broken relationship with his daughter, the car crash that his academic career had turned into, despite his success as one of the world’s foremost physicists … The only intrusion on his thoughts this afternoon had been the soft, competing sounds of insects and birds. Although he had not seen them, he knew an entire ecosystem existed hidden beneath the foliage, with grey warblers and fantails hopping from branch to twig searching for bugs, beetles and caterpillars.

  That had been a few hours ago. Now that darkness had closed in, with the lights of the Auckland skyline sparkling in the distance, he decided that Waiheke Island had to be just about the most beautiful spot on Earth. Why hadn’t he thought of spending more time here before? He recalled summer holidays on the island as a boy, swimming, fishing or messing around on his father’s boat. But his parents had only bought their retirement home on the south side long after he had moved to the States. Now that they were gone, their home was his. But he refused to accept that he was ready to settle down here just yet. There was still a flickering hope that he could put his life and research career back on track.

  Well into his second bottle of Syrah, he leaned carefully back in his chair to gaze up at the night sky, deciding to count shooting stars. He guessed he was probably the last customer stil
l left at the vineyard. Faint music drifted across the courtyard from inside the building and he kept catching snatches of it, deciding it was Frank Sinatra, crooning about flying off to Jupiter and Mars – rather appropriately, thought Marc, as he tried to locate those two planets among the hundreds of twinkling stars.

  Coming back to New Zealand had definitely been the right move. The stress of the divorce coinciding with the meltdown he’d suffered at Columbia University and the small-mindedness of academic colleagues he had thought he could count on as friends had all finally become too much to cope with.

  Maybe he really should put his past behind him and settle down here. Was it really such a bad idea? There were plenty of projects he could think of that would occupy him. And if he got too stir-crazy he could always go back to New York and try to pick up where he’d left off. After all, he was still on the right side of fifty, so it wasn’t like he was ready to retire any time soon.

  He allowed his eyes to adjust to the dark so that he could pick out the very faintest dots of light. It was funny how people assumed that all physicists were familiar with every star, planet and constellation in the night sky. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d had to explain that he was not an astronomer and that his research involved looking down at mathematical equations, or getting buried in complex electronic kit, studying the world at the tiniest of scales, rather than looking up at the heavens. Thanks to his colour-blindness, he couldn’t even tell Venus from Mars.

  He’d taken out his augmented-reality lenses so as not to have the spectacle ruined by any unnecessary overlaid information. The night sky lost its aesthetic beauty and majesty when each bright dot had detailed statistics superimposed around it. Of course, it wasn’t difficult to switch off his AR feed whenever he wanted, but there was something liberating about taking his contacts out – like walking barefoot on fresh grass.

  And yet, like countless others, Marc found it hard to do without AR – its use had become so ubiquitous that it was now hard to remember a time when no one had access to instant information overlying their field of vision. He marvelled at humanity’s ability to adapt to new technologies so quickly that it forgot how it had ever coped before. Born, as he was, just a few years after the dawn of the internet, and despite his scientific training, Marc was finding it increasingly hard to keep up with the pace of change, and when it came to the very latest fads he considered himself a bit of a dinosaur, preferring to wear the old-fashioned AR contact lenses rather than the liquid Nano-Gee retinal implants that had become all the rage in recent years.

  The field had been revolutionized with breathtaking rapidity once it was discovered that AR no longer needed the user to wear glasses or contact lenses on which to superimpose text, images and video – a veil of data through which they could still see the physical world around them. Instead, if you chose to – and most people under the age of forty chose to – you could access everything you needed from the Cloud as an integrated part of your vision. In fact, if you closed your eyes to block out the external world, the AR world really came into its own.

  It was a research team at Berkeley who had first discovered how to control the light-sensitive cryptochrome biomolecules covering the back of the retina. Several members of the team had quickly seen the potential of their breakthrough and within five years had become the world’s first trillionaires. Once it was understood how these proteins could be switched on and off with tiny electromagnetic signals sent to the users’ eyes from their Cloud-linked wristpads, rapid advances were made in the technology. Almost overnight, it seemed to Marc, everyone had access to double vision: reality and augmented reality, overlapping and yet, with a little practice, quite separate. So good had the AR projections onto the retina now become, that the technology’s main teething problem came from the user confusing the projection with the physical universe beyond.

  ‘Can I get you anything else, Professor Bruckner?’

  The soft voice behind him that snapped him back from his reverie belonged to Melissa, the vineyard owners’ daughter, who was waitressing at Stony Hill during the summer. She was doing a good job of hiding her impatience to knock off for the night.

  ‘Thanks, Melissa, no. Just finishing this glass and I’m off.’ Then he added, ‘Sorry if you’ve been waiting to close.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ she smiled. ‘Dad pays by the hour.’ She collected the small lamp from the adjacent table and pushed the four surrounding chairs in closer. Turning to go back inside she looked up at the night sky. ‘It’s so pretty up there, isn’t it? All those swirling colours.’

  Marc was puzzled and turned to look, following her gaze. ‘Oh, my God, it’s the aurora!’ he gasped. ‘It’s so vivid!’ The evening sky over the Pacific glowed majestically in green-white swirling patterns, constantly changing and stunningly beautiful.

  Marc decided this was the perfect end to the evening. Together they gazed up at a curtain of light to the left of the vineyard roof that grew more intense, then spread slowly round behind them before fading, only to be replaced by an equally stunning pattern on the right side. He and Melissa watched in appreciative silence.

  However, as the novelty of the spectacle began to wear off, Marc got a niggling feeling that he was missing something obvious. Something very important. The thought germinated and grew in his mind, despite the wine that was blunting his analytical skills. Then it suddenly hit him. He ran a quick mental check to make sure he’d got his bearings right. The impressive Aurora Australis he was looking at was in completely the wrong direction. It should have been in the southern sky, towards the Pole. But this display was to the north. How the hell was that even possible?

  4

  Thursday, 31 January – 05:30, New Delhi

  Flight AI-231 from Stockholm was beginning its descent into Delhi. Captain Joseph Rahman preferred these old-fashioned subsonic journeys even though they took all night. He just didn’t feel comfortable doing too many hyperskips these days. Thanks to the weakening magnetic field of the Earth, they carried an increasingly high radiation risk. While he could understand the attraction of getting from Europe to India in forty-five minutes by skimming off the upper atmosphere at Mach 10, like a stone on the surface of a pond, he was determined to minimize his own exposure to the bombardment from cosmic rays.

  He switched on the cabin’s exterior projection, so that the feed from the hundreds of tiny cameras covering the outer surface of the plane mapped onto the interior of the windowless fuselage, making it appear entirely transparent to the passengers. But it was a pointless exercise. Ordinarily, the panoramic view this gave as the plane came in to land would have been a quite dramatic experience, with the lights of the mostly still sleeping megacity spread out below. Instead, they were greeted by a wall of white thanks to the thick fog that often engulfed Indira Gandhi Airport at this time of year. They’d been circling in a holding pattern at three thousand metres for forty minutes now, waiting their turn to land.

  Suddenly several of his displays went blank.

  It looked like an issue with the satnav system. He waited a few minutes for the aircraft’s AI to resolve the matter. With nothing for him to do he flicked on the intercom to update his crew and passengers. Like all pilots for the past hundred years, Captain Rahman’s tone was deep and rich, and, with twenty-five years of flight experience under his belt, exuded calm confidence.

  ‘Sorry for this slight delay, ladies and gentlemen, we’re still waiting to be given a slot to land. There might also be a further short delay as we look into a problem with the plane’s AI. We hope to fix this quickly and I’ll keep you posted.’ Then, to avoid any unnecessary panic, he added, ‘There’s absolutely nothing to be alarmed about.’

  Still, he now had to keep an eye on the battery gauge. A strong headwind for most of the journey from Stockholm, then this long hold above Indira Gandhi Airport, meant that the charge was lower than he would have liked.

  While his two young co-pilots busied themselves trying to find
the source of the satnav problem, he radioed air traffic control.

  ‘Delhi, this is Air India two-three-one. We’ve lost satlink, so I guess we’re entirely in your hands now. We’re running low on batteries too.’

  The response from the control tower was reassuringly immediate:

  ‘Copy that, two-three-one. You now have clearance to land. Sit back and we’ll take it from here.’

  Rahman allowed himself a small sigh of relief. Most airports now had AI systems that would take control of all incoming flights if necessary, particularly in poor visibility, manoeuvring the planes remotely to the correct approach angle. However, thanks to the ubiquity of artificial intelligence in all complex systems, aircraft were generally more than capable of doing the job themselves, and international regulations stipulated that airports’ air traffic control should only step in when absolutely necessary. Captain Rahman was more than happy to hand over his plane on this occasion: his aircraft’s AI system, more powerful than old-fashioned autopilots, could not function without GPS. Still, he promised himself he’d get to the bottom of the problem once he was on the ground. GPS had only ever failed him on one previous occasion; and that time he’d at least been able to see outside and watch as the invisible hands of the airport’s AI system had guided the plane down safely.

  Then, just as suddenly as the satellite signal had dropped out, so now did the aircraft’s entire communication system. There was a sudden jolt as it was released from the hold of the control tower.

  OK, now he would have something to do. Shit, this was getting serious. Still, no need to panic. He turned to his co-pilots, who were both watching him intensely. He smiled at them reassuringly and tried to keep his voice steady. ‘Come on, guys, let’s stay professional here. It’ll be a story to dine out on, right?’ Without waiting for a response from either of them he turned his attention back to the job at hand.