I didn't get much sleep that night. I spent most of my time in a kind of restless, half-sleep, lost in ruminations. Perhaps I had slipped into a kind of paranoid fantasy, how did I ever expect to stumble across aliens in Cork, much less actually engage them in combat. So far, my crusade had resulted in a few moderately thought out survival plans, a little physical training, and a cupboard of emergency rations. The only emergency any of us were ever likely to face would be if we were hungover and too poor to pay for takeout. Perhaps it would be for the best if I just got on with the life I had in front of me.
The following morning I awoke late, having succumbed to weariness as the sun was rising. It was already noon by the time I rushed from my apartment and into my lab. Tony was already well settled in the room, having claimed the hotly contested window desk. The lab was moderately sized, with double door at the rear of the room opening into twelve workstations. Each workstation consisted of a sink, gas tap, power socket and a work table with desk space, and a press containing glassware such as beakers. There were no bubbling vats or arcing electricity, the lab was kept in a respectable working order. This was a room of science, not an alchemists den.
One of the far corner of the room, next to the blackboard contained the only exception to this rule. This was our "pile of crap", a random assortment of broken equipment, useless gubbins, defunct technology and old textbooks left behind by successive generations of students and lecturers alike. Pride of place in this pile was an old lab project of ours. We had built a small contained circuit designed to function as a photodiode. This quickly earned the name Jeff among our year. Jeff Goldblum being one of our idols, for no adequately explainable reason. Indeed, Jeff Goldblum can still be found in myriad forms across our campus. If you ever find a photo of Jeff on a random object, it was probably us.
The other item of reverence in this collection was the staff of density, so named for our flair for the dramatic, and Back to the Future jokes. In reality, it was merely a meter long metal rod which was occasionally used for pointing and gesticulating. As you can imagine, it can get boring in a physics lab when you're waiting on an experiment, or code to compile.
"Afternoon Arven. Nice of you to join us." mocked Tony, as I entered.
"No need to be cocky, just cause you got the good seat." I countered, smiling. "Besides, didn't get much sleep last night."
"Yeah, you were acting a little funny yesterday. But you're better now, yeah? No more pansy ass crap?"
Tony's capacity for empathy has never ceased to amaze me with its shallowness. I chose instead to change subjects, to avoid the awkwardness.
"So, looking forward to D&D tonight?"
"Yeah, Dave is meeting the girls at your place to run through their characters after lunch, yeah?"
"Yeah" I answered. "And we join them after college. It'll be good to DM again. Haven't found a decent group in months."
"That's not true!" Tony exclaimed. "What about the Towers of Wonderment?"
"When you set fire to an entire Elvish forest? I said a decent group."
Some time passed while we worked quietly. We were both deep in concentration, so it took us a few moments to be aware of a deep rumbling coming from outside. I looked up to see Tony peering out the window.
"What's the racket?" I called over, as I joined him by the glass.
"Nothing that I can see. Sounds a bit like a plane passing over."
"Yeah, but that happens all the time, we're 3 miles from an airport. This sounds louder than that."
The sound had been steadily drawing closer, louder. I began to worry that it might actually be a plane, decending at a rapid pace. Just as I was about to air my fears however, the noise fizzled out.
"Weird." said Tony, shrugging as he turned back to his laptop.
"Fuck!" he cried. I spun around to face him.
"What?"
"Did you touch my laptop? It's dead. Completely dead!"
"No I didn't touch it. It's probably installing updates or not charged."
"Damn it, I've been running that code for hours."
"Maybe it's the socket. You know what the wiring in this place is like."
"Yeah, yeah. Didn't a first year get electrocuted last year?"
"True. He's fine, though his hair will never be the same again." I said somberly. I gave Tony a hand moving his laptop to the next workbench along. Still it wouldn't power on.
Tony sighed. "Maybe the power is out in the building. Look! The LEDs on the projector are off too."
I slipped my phone from my jeans.
"I'll check out the campus News Feed, see if there's... hmm."
Tony frowned at me. "Was that a good hmm or a bad hmm? You know I hate hmms."
"My phone is dead too. Just like your laptop. My watch as well."
I tried not to panic, even though this was obviously more than just a problem with the power grid. Something had seemingly rendered all electronic devices inert. How widespread was it? Was it our building, Cork, the whole country? I dared not not to think about the impact on hospitals and transport.
"What if it was a sort of EMP?" I suggested after a few moments.
"You mean like a solar flare?" asked Tony.
"NASA are normally good at seeing that kind of stuff in advance, but I dunno." I replied.
"Or Nuclear Detonations. EMPs are a byproduct of nuclear bombs."
"Tony, if a nuke went off, I don't think we'd be here to discuss the lasting effects. No, this feels like something else entirely."
The cold dread in the pit of my stomach eased somewhat. Now that I'd ruled out more terrestrial causes for this problem, I was strangely calm. This must be something alien, something rifty. This was something I could handle. Oddly enough, I'd spent so much of my life stressing over minutia of daily affairs, now that a real existential threat had arisen I was somehow OK with it.
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