Chapter Twenty-Two

Thursday January 15, 2032

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Caltrain’s Hillsdale Station in San Mateo had its own predictable rhythm on weekdays. In the morning, commuters going north to San Francisco or south to San Jose would board for trips to their offices. On the same trains, the students going to private schools located far from home would likewise do their own trek soon after sunrise. The business commuters would return in the evening, but in the afternoon, Hillsdale was the exclusive domain of the children.

That day, as with all days, most all the kids were on their phones, not only because the act of waiting for the train to show up was dull, but also since the experience of face-to-face interactions didn’t hold as much appeal as the electronic alternative. A few oddballs opted out of screen time and gazed off in the distance or, in a handful of extraordinary cases, actually spoke to one another.

One such ninth grader interrupted his conversation when he saw something sparkle between a pair of railroad tracks. The entire surface surrounding the rails was covered with gravel, and the flat concrete platform where the kids stood was a couple of feet higher than where the tracks lay. The boy walked to the platform’s edge to get a closer look at whatever had reflected the light, and he saw a round metal object resting in the rocks between two wooden ties.

“Hey, Arun, come check this out!” said the boy, pointing to where the object was. His friend walked over, looking in the direction of the pointed finger.

“What? I don’t see anything.”

The boy scowled at him and said, “It’s right there! Jeez. Here, I’ll just go get it.”

He slipped off his backpack, placed it on the concrete and, looking up and down the tracks and seeing no train, jumped down to the gravel surface.

“Dude, what are you doing? You’re not supposed to be down there!” scolded Arun, whose parents had instilled in him a stronger fear of danger than his friend’s folks.

The boy on the gravel bent over and, brushing a few of the rocks aside, found his quarry. It was an old metal coin. He held it up and said, “Cool, check it out!”

Arun surveyed the length of the tracks and, relieved to still see nothing but empty rails, said, “Bro, get out of there, you’re going to get us both in trouble!”

The boy smirked at his friend’s nervous nature and pushed himself back up to the platform. He stood up next to Arun, and they looked at the coin together. As he twirled it between his fingers, he said, “It’s from 2001. It’s a quarter-dollar. Sweet! Hey, I know. My dad told me about something you can do with one of these.”

He again jumped down toward the rails, which instantly produced a panicked look from Arun who said, “Are you crazy? The train is going to be here any second!”

The boy ignored his friend. He leaned down and delicately placed the quarter in the center of the rail closest to the platform. Feeling a little nervous himself about his vulnerability, he quickly hoisted himself up to the concrete and, turning back to make sure the coin was in position, said, “When the train comes, it’ll squish that thing flat. My dad used to do that when he was a kid. He said you can still tell what kind of coin it is, but it makes it all bent and cool-looking.”

Arun said, “Yeah, but we’ll be getting on the train, and the coin will be under us! What good does that do? I’m not going to wait around for the next one, you know.”

“We don’t have to wait around. It’ll get flattened and fall off the rail, and I’ll pick it up tomorrow morning. Duh.”

Arun remained unimpressed. In the distance, a whistle blew, and the boys looked up the tracks to see their train finally approaching. Neither of them said anything about it, but it was a little unnerving to think how one of them had just been down in the same place where the giant locomotive was about to plow through. 

They turned their attention back to the quarter, still poised to meet its doom on the track, hoping they could get a glance of the coin’s metamorphosis as it was happening.

What they didn’t realize, nor could they know, was that something infinitely more spectacular was happening fifty miles above their heads. And although neither of the boys could have possibly imagined what was about to take place, the railroad track that had been such a focal point of their attention was milliseconds away from becoming the longest and largest antenna on the entire planet.

A nuclear explosion in space is largely inconsequential. There is no organ-liquifying shock wave. The searing heat touches no living creature. There isn’t any sound to conjure up terror and trauma. Nuclear explosions are a constant in the universe and are as unremarkable as a drifting asteroid or the solar wind.

Yet the peculiar physics of a nuclear explosion near Earth, coupled with the presence of a nearby atmosphere and an electromagnetic field, makes such bursts highly consequential, at least for the humans on the surface below.

Like an unholy trinity, the pulses occur as a set of three.

The fastest pulse, by far, is the first one which follows a nuclear reaction. So swift is its behavior, that nanoseconds – billionths of a single second – are the only measurement of time appropriate to express its progress. 

At the instant of an explosion, a flux of gamma rays is produced. These rays emanate in all directions, and for those racing into space at nearly the speed of light, their existence is meaningless. Those gamma rays heading toward the Earth, however, have an altogether different fate.

As the Earth-bound rays strike the atoms of the upper atmosphere, they shear off the electrons of the gaseous atoms in an unfathomably swift ionization process. The electrons, in turn, do not race toward the planet in a straight line, but instead interact with the Earth’s magnetic field, which causes them to spiral and curve in the manner of a corkscrew. 

Thus, instead of a tightly confined blast of electrons racing toward the surface in a straight line, the ionization produces a massive blob of electrons that, due to the effects of the magnetic field, is hurled toward the planet over a large arched area. Considering the destruction and misery these electrons are capable of producing, it is a cruel irony that the shape of the affected zone resembles a broad smile, as if a gargantuan grinning face was being etched upon the planet’s surface, mocking its own power.

The speed of this event, and the quantity of electrons comprising the pulse, are almost beyond human comprehension. The number of electrons from such a blast measure 10 to the 25th power, and their velocity is over 90% the speed of light, making the entire pulse event, from start to finish, last only a millionth of a single second. But in that millionth of a second, two mega-electron-volts of energy are dissipated and distributed in a giant swath, resulting in 50,000 volts for each and every single square meter of the affected area.

Although the blindingly fast and tremendously energetic pulse has such startling power, the living creatures that are bathed in that ionized pulse are unharmed. There is no heat, no pain, no sound, and no light. The pulse may as well be the broadcast from a local radio station, whose waves are just as painless and invisible. 

Such an electromagnetic shock wave, even on such a scale, is as harmless to organic life as any of the other ceaseless and invisible waves passing through every living creature on earth all day and all night.

Not so with machines, however. To machines, these electrons are a death sentence.

During such an event, nearly every electronic device in the pulse’s path is at risk. Communications towers and repeaters, electronic flight controls, semiconductors, medical equipment, traffic signals, and cell phone towers are defenseless against this kind of assault. Just about anything related to electricity, particularly if it is connected to any length of metal that can act as a de facto antenna, is prone to getting fried, rendering it instantly useless.

For any given object that might be prone to such a risk, if the first pulse doesn’t get it, the second and third pulses will.

The first pulse, having completed its task in a razor-thin sliver of time, carves out a vacant path for the pulses which follow. The second pulse behaves much like a lightning storm, and even for equipment designed with protective circuit-breakers, the one-two punch of the first and second waves is far too quick for human-made electromechanical safety devices to have any chance to perform their jobs effectively. 

Power transformers, water control systems, gas station safety devices, railroad signals, and countless other human inventions are at the mercy of the relentless barrage of the second pulse, and the third one, which ambles along at a languorous pace spanning hundreds of seconds, rips and tears at long electrical conductors, reducing electric towers to charred, non-functional hulks that resemble avant-garde sculptures made of blackened metal. 

At Hillsdale Station, the Caltrain locomotive slowly squealed its way to a complete halt. The doors did not open, and the lights inside flickered out. And although the boys and their puzzled schoolmates didn’t realize it, for all practical purposes, the technological clock of their world had just been turned back by two hundred years.