The Flip - Chapter 1

“Elephant.”

Xena is lying on her back on the spotty grass, looking up at the clouds and finding familiar shapes as they float by. There’s no one else to speak to, so she thinks it to herself.

“Camel.”

It’s been a month since Xena saw another human and the clouds are the only friends she feels she has most days, and the stars at night. She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply and tries to see how long she can hold her breath. Last time she counted 20 seconds. These little games are what occupy her mind and keep her sane these days.

“You can do anything for 30 seconds,” is sometimes what she thinks on the long treks to the next town in search of food and supplies. “I don’t have to walk 8 more miles. I just have to make it to that telephone pole 100 yards off,” and when she makes it to that landmark, she sets a new target - maybe a mile marker or an interesting looking tree.

Xena exhales and pushes herself up on one side. She has to get up slowly now so she doesn’t get light-headed. It’s been a day since she ate at all and a week since she had a good meal. She has been sleeping with a water bottle on her stomach so the weight of it will help with the hunger pangs.

“Butterfly.”

This time it’s an actual butterfly flitting by, not an imagined shape in the clouds. It reminds her of a story her grandmother used to tell her, Mariposa Blanca, meaning white butterfly. Xena instinctively touches the heart locket she wears around her neck, which holds a picture of her grandmother inside. Since the event, she has had no contact with her, and has no idea if she survived or not. Her grandmother raised her, and now - before the event, that is - Xena stays with her grandmother to help care for her as she gets older. Xena had gone to meet friends on a camping trip for the weekend when it happened. She still thinks about driving off from her grandmother’s house waving goodbye and smiling, saying she’d be back in a couple days. A couple days had turned into a month in the wilderness. It wasn’t safe to go back into the city after it happened, but now Xena had to find her way back to her grandmother to know if she was alive.

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The “flip,” how people are calling it, isn’t wasn’t what killed people. It was the panic.

Scientists had been saying for at least a century that the planet was due for a magnetic pole reversal. Sediment cores from the base of the ocean evidenced at least several times in recent geological history that the poles shifted as if they were reversing position but lacked the electromagnetic momentum, if you could call it that, to complete the reversal; they always returned to their previous polarities. Not this time. The polar reversal would take over a year even to complete, but the impact in daily life was almost immediate.

Global positioning systems were the first to go haywire, and all satellite based systems. Xena had been driving out of Yosemite National Park when her navigation system cut off. She thought maybe it was just due to driving through the mountains and tall trees. Communication didn’t stop all together; the land-based telephone and internet connections survived. When Starlink first went down though, a few hours went by before everyone fully realized what was happening. News stations were still able to get word out eventually, but in the delay, there was wild speculation based on bad information.

If it had just been a polar reversal, things might have ended up alright, but as fate would have it, the flip wasn’t the only thing that went awry. In the leadup to the magnetic flip-flop, political tensions had been rising between North Korea and Canada-States (so-named when Canada and the United States became one nation in 2119). Matters escalated when North Korea decided to make a show of force, staging a test launch of missiles off their shore. When the polar reversal began, there were wide-spread issues with electronic and radar-based systems, aside from just GPS problems. One of the affected systems was the PAVE PAWS early missile detection radar in California. The system experienced an anomalous alert due to the electromagnetic misgivings, and because of the already heightened defense environment, the misinformation was up-channeled immediately..

Even this unfortunate series of circumstances might have ended well, all things considered. The Triple Tragedy insisted, however, on another inconvenient circumstance: the recently elected President of the Canada-States - prior celebrity and many-times-over failed businessman - had access and all authority to release codes for launch of nuclear sorties. When the missile detection system alert was received by USSTRATCOM and subsequently briefed to the President, many intelligence officers, military and strategic political advisors did everything in their power to advise him against leaping to conclusions and to stop him from starting a war. Primed by recent events with North Korea and his petulant nature, the President promptly fired anyone who argued with his judgment and set off a sequence of events ending in the launch of sea-based missiles on the presumed attacker. Almost immediately after the message was sent, it was confirmed that the signal had been an artifact of the polarity reversal. The President tried to reverse his order to cancel the launch, but it was already too late.

What happened next, no one is completely sure of. A high altitude burst over northern California, what can only be retaliatory, took out all electronics. The entire western states were downed. Electricity stopped when the power grids died. Electric cars died, wherever they happened to be. Some Teslas and Prius’s in driving 70 miles per hour slowed to a halt in the middle of busy highways. Traffic lights stopped working. Accidents stopped traffic everywhere, and with only hardened communication lines remaining, no one could even turn on a cell phone. Ambulatory services were extremely slow to respond. People died in the wake of that first event, and it only got worse from there.

Confusion grew quickly. Fear spread faster than good information could outrun it. Emergency services were overwhelmed by slowed communication and traffic gridlock after power lines went down, on top of simply not having enough responders for the number of incidents. Some people saw an opportunity amidst the chaos to steal from shops - TVs, food, money, anything they could take. With no police available, shop owners took justice into their own hands. Within two days, the streets had become unsafe. Families started boarding up their windows.

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Xena pulled her journal out from her backpack to log the date. It was the only way she had to keep track of how many days had passed. “1 July 2121. Hope to make it to Google-Amazon campus in Old San Jose today.” She closed the notebook and took her time getting her things together for the long walk ahead before getting up and taking in the view before her from the hill where she stood. She sighed and thought, “I wish I had a camera to take a picture.” Then she started down the hill towards the city in the far distance.



TO BE CONTINUED...