"We escaped the main body of the flare itself, only the tail end of the energy wafted across our planet, like the smoke from next door’s bonfire drifting into your garden on a Saturday afternoon. It made for a spectacular lightshow, the midnight sky illuminated as beams of super-heated gas shot across the heavens, streaks of light, sunset orange at first then a brighter yellow then finally bright white, the intensity of the energy increased and blended with our atmosphere. No sound, not at first at least. The bright streaks overhead moved in silence, from what seemed like directly overhead then off into the distance, they looked to disappear over the horizon as they shot off into space. Then came the noise, it sounded like distant thunder to begin with, a low rumble that grew and swirled around the busy sky. The streaks overhead increased in size, until the whole sky flashed white with intermittent blinding explosions within the magnetic field around our Earth. We stood and watched open mouthed, as the universe gave us a stark reminder of our place within it. It acted as a global EMP, frying solenoids like bacon all over the world, we lost almost all electricity overnight. Weeks passed before the power started to come back on, clean became available and the world was settling back down to a variation of normal. It took years to properly rebuild, decades of struggle, but now some forty years later we have new technology borne out of the flare, electromagnetic propulsion was fast becoming a reality. New discoveries were being made decades after the event, only last week a chap in Germany had learned how to ignite a fire underwater, a remarkable, if somewhat pointless endeavour. All of this leads us to here, where the next great discovery happens, today, to a man called Jack."
