The coffee cup

"I'm moving, quit whining!" Jane said to the dog. Rolling out of bed, she dragged herself to the only need at five a.m. – Coffee. The dog ran around her feet, making sure she understood the urgency of the moment.

Coffee in hand, they wandered out to the back porch in the dark. The dog racing to the small grass area to leave his mark on the world. She settled into a chair, the sun beginning to rise, reds and yellows, minutes away from daylight. A long-awaited day off. The cheap Folgers coffee helping her wake-up to face another day. She looked at the ceramic cup, and the witty message, "Luckiest Electrical Engineer in the world!" Not today, and definitely not yesterday.

It had been a long ten days of fighting all kinds of crazy. The most recent was the main transformer blowing-up. Ten days ago, it was a simple water hammer. Every day in between, something else had gone to hell.

No plausible explanation, just fix it and move on. She was sure all the issues were connected, they had to be. Why couldn't the other Engineers see? Simple, it went against all the science. Now they were dealing with off-site power to keep the nuclear fuel cool. Six days, that is how long the Diesels would keep going. Science was science, physics was physics, this was science fiction!

And there she sat, watching the dog sniffing plants, licking the morning due, the sun peeking over the horizon. No sirens, no trucks, no cars, the world had stopped. Every power plant had failed- nuclear, wind, hydro, just stopped. Everything electrical just stopped. The world's best and brightest trying to come up with a solution.

"At least we were prepared," the dog nuzzling her for a scratch behind the ears. Happy she had installed a Faraday cage around the portable generator. She had coffee this morning. Her mind continued to go through each list of possible scenarios, always coming back to some kind of EMP. She had ruled out High Altitude Electromagnetic pulse, the satellites would have noted a missile. It could have been a coronal mass ejection caused by a Solar Flare, but solar flares were closely monitored, and nothing recent. There was the Carrington Event. A coronal mass ejection in 1859 and the one in 2012. That was a massive solar flare that just missed Earth. Every day seemed normal, no Aurora borealis sightings in the Caribbean.

She had to push the thoughts out of her head. Let them simmer in the background, she only had a single day to regenerate before heading back to the plant, if there was a plant. Stretching as she stood, the wildflowers swayed in the slight morning breeze, a chill ran up her spine. 

"What if it wasn't nature or man? What if it was something else, someone else?" She picked up her coffee cup, turning it to the clever comment on the back, "Oops, didn't think that COULD happen!"