The magnificent auroras were especially dazzling over the United States.
These high-energy particles from space rampaged through the atmosphere, bombarding its oxygen atoms and nitrogen molecules, briefly exciting and ionizing the gas particles. The excess energy was released as photons, weaving this brilliant display of auroras.
In the last remote-sensing images transmitted by the satellites, all of North America looked as though some invisible hand had wiped away its lights. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington... urban corridors stretching thousands of kilometers had all sunk into darkness.
Humanity had briefly returned to the era before the electrical revolution.
The next day, at 5:21 a.m. Washington time.
The Pentagon finally completed its assessment of losses among low-Earth-orbit satellites.
The bad news was that contact had been lost with more than 4,600 orbiting satellites, covering almost every field, including communications, navigation, meteorology, and military operations.
The good news was that other countries had no satellites left either. Everyone was screwed together.
Afterward, the European Space Agency, the Russian Federal Space Agency, the China National Space Administration, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency released similar assessments in succession. Of roughly 14,000 active satellites in orbit worldwide, preliminary figures showed that contact had been lost with more than 99%.
Almost total annihilation.
In the civilian sector, navigation systems such as GPS, BeiDou, Galileo, and GLONASS had all fallen victim.
Fortunately, the internet had not collapsed completely.
Submarine cables and terrestrial fiber-optic lines carried 99% of global internet traffic. Although conventional space-based communications nodes had been cut off, people in every country could still discuss the geomagnetic storm online.
Because NASA's radiation monitoring team had been the first to detect the storm, and it had happened during the lunar landing mission, it was given a special name: the "Artemis Geomagnetic Storm."
After the Carrington, Miyake, and Quebec geomagnetic storms, it was the fourth geomagnetic storm event to receive its own name.
The name "Artemis" also commemorated the four legendary astronauts who had died in the Artemis Moon Landing Program.
Those poor children. They all had hearts of gold.
But at that moment, few people besides NASA and the various national space agencies were paying attention to them.
The satellites' paralysis had affected everyday life far too severely.
Wall Street's financial trading systems had been knocked out, and banks and cryptocurrency markets had been caught in the fallout. Through a chain reaction, the global economy, already teetering since the end of 2027, suffered yet another blow and looked poised to collapse.
Beyond that, civilian flights had been grounded, contact with ships at sea had been lost, and there were international logistics networks, disaster relief efforts in remote mountain regions, repairs to national power grids...
By comparison, the lives of four astronauts seemed so insignificant.
According to incomplete figures, secondary disasters triggered by the geomagnetic storm had already killed nearly a thousand people worldwide. These included a European airliner's crash during an emergency landing, in which none of the 216 passengers from various countries aboard had survived.
Fortunately, the International Space Station had been unoccupied during a routine crew rotation, so there had been no casualties there.
By some unknown means, the Chinese Space Station had weathered this Artemis Geomagnetic Storm head-on. All three astronauts stationed there had emerged completely unscathed, though they would not be coming down anytime soon.
NASA was astounded.
The sky had finished burning, but the embers remained scorching hot.
Online, every sort of claim ran rampant. In the absence of official information, theories emerged about a "solar flare eruption," an "alien invasion," "some country testing an electromagnetic pulse weapon," "the biblical Last Judgment," and more.
Scientific, science-fictional, superstitious, conspiratorial, anti-intellectual, satirical...
Conflicting claims flew everywhere, whipping up an uproar.
The Artemis Geomagnetic Storm seemed to have knocked out not only low Earth orbit, but also the nervous systems of governments around the world.
Vance, the new president of the United States, delivered an address to the nation.
The Vance administration classified the event as "an unprecedented natural disaster."
This conclusion was soon widely cited by countries around the world, setting the official verdict on the Artemis Geomagnetic Storm. The scientific community, however, was not reassured. Its members remained uneasy.
Unlike the bewildered public, they understood one fact all too well.
With solar activity stable, how exactly had the Artemis Geomagnetic Storm arisen?
In the past, whether it was the Carrington, Miyake, or Quebec geomagnetic storm, or an ordinary G5 geomagnetic storm, every single one had been caused by solar activity.
Violent stellar activity released large amounts of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, streams of high-energy protons, and flare radiation. These stellar plasma clouds then hurtled toward Earth at hundreds or thousands of kilometers per second, striking its magnetosphere.
These plasma clouds continually compressed and tore at Earth's magnetic field, inducing currents in power grids worldwide, satellites, and the atmosphere, creating geomagnetic storms that swept across the globe.
If solar activity had not caused it, then what had?
In theory, a high-yield nuclear explosion at high altitude could also produce an effect resembling a geomagnetic storm. But the intensity of a nuclear blast fell far short of G1. Even detonating the world's entire nuclear arsenal at once could only produce a G2 or G3 geomagnetic storm.
Apart from that, disturbances caused by "core turbulence" could also produce weak geomagnetic storms.
Deep within Earth's core, liquid iron and nickel generated the geomagnetic field through turbulent flow. Disruptions to convection could also produce geomagnetic storms, but the viscosity and fluidity of the liquid iron and nickel severely limited their intensity.
Rather than the government's less-than-rigorous explanation, people were more inclined to believe that a squirrel running around inside Earth's core had accidentally triggered the event.
But as time passed, the debate over the geomagnetic storm grew increasingly bizarre.
Popular-science videos mixing truth and falsehood circulated on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and other video sites. The debate over the Artemis Geomagnetic Storm rapidly devolved into confrontations and arguments between several camps.
People's energy was rapidly drained by these meaningless online flame wars.
Such practiced techniques for managing public opinion left many clearheaded people feeling helpless.
But faced with global internet censorship bodies, they could only watch as the topic rapidly descended into mutual attacks between different groups.
Environmental organizations blamed the disaster on some country's industrialization, while sexual-minority organizations attributed it to a backlash against religious oppression. Ordinary people who offered opinions were swiftly branded as members of hostile factions. Men and women argued endlessly, and all manner of damning labels came crashing down in the name of the geomagnetic storm, quickly reaching everyone in the world who could access the internet.
Vertically and horizontally, humanity was endlessly divided, breaking from a whole into small groups, then from small groups into atomized individuals.
The geomagnetic storm's radiation seemed to have hit the wrong place.
It seemed to have struck people's brains.
Under the influence of that radiation, the spirit of civilization was gradually turning cancerous.
Some relished it, some were helpless, some argued their case, and some tried to ease the conflict between the warring sides, only to be swiftly branded as two-faced and disappear from the discussion.
Everyone could pick up a label online that suited them.
Of course, some people were just there for the thrill of fighting.
Only when ICANN-the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers-announced that the global DNS root servers would undergo inspection and maintenance did the world briefly fall quiet.
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