3 July 2025

The Sun blazed bright against the black emptiness of space. Charged particles raged deep beneath its surface to fuel the celestial furnace, just as they had for millennia. But something unnatural disrupted their age-old procession and the particles felt the tug of an outside force. It was slight, but enough to disturb paths that had been predetermined for aeons. Ever obedient to Nature’s laws, the particles surged along their new trajectory and began a long journey.

Towards Earth.

Few knew that anything was awry until their phones stopped working. Freed from technology’s tight grip, people looked up from their devices and craned their necks to marvel as ribbons of light streamed across the sky.

The Sun had spewed large flares before but this one was different. Huge, and cast directly into Earth’s orbit. It well surpassed the Carrington Event, an 1859 solar flare so strong that it powered disconnected telegraph lines and brightened the night-time sky enough that goldminers resumed their work in the middle of the night.

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What came to be known as the Long Day was just as intense, but longer. Auroras streaked across the sky for fourteen hours. Night became day and nowhere on the planet was untouched.

Although initially alluring, the flare devastated the delicate web of silicon chips around which humanity had built its civilisation. Cars and phones. Power grids and pacemakers. In mere hours, the entire intricate web was fried by electrical currents induced by the storm raging in the magnetosphere above.

An unnerving silence descended across the planet and the full impact only became apparent when the auroras faded. Families tried in vain to contact their loved ones and immobilised vehicles clogged arterial roads, obstructing the endless stream of food required to feed cities’ bulging populations.

Anarchy erupted as overwhelmed governments struggled to coordinate relief efforts, battling against others who sought to leverage the calamity for their own selfish ends. Food and medicines ran out in days. Within weeks, all was chaos.

Hundreds of millions died across the globe.

Yet it was at the start of this period of pandemonium that a lone physicist – working with pencil and paper during a cross-country journey back home – made the biggest scientific breakthrough of all time.

Time travel.