September 9th, 2027, was a day to be rembered, when a collossal wave of electromagnetic pulses and solar wind swept the earth, stripping its atmosphere and magnetic field of any substance, as well as destroying every electronic device in the world.
So deeply did humanity rely on technology that it was utterly destroyed in one fell swoop.
This is the story of Alley Lang- a smart fourteen-year old, her story told far into the future past her death.
It was a thursday evening, and Alley Lang did not like thursdays. Because of this she was sitting and listening to music quietly, in the solitude of her own room.
“Alley!” her mother’s voice rang, abnormally loud through the concrete floor below. “Come put these clothes away!”
Alley hauled herself to her feet and trotted downstairs. Light filtered in through the frosted glass windows in the kitchen and struck her with astounding force as she came through into the living room. The largest wall of the house, a two-storey tall open area, was entirely of clear glass. Of course, there was a hard diamond coating on the outsides to protect it. Although giving the view a slightly bluish tint the diamond made up for that one shortfall by remaining scratchless and clear as water for years after installment. It was this hard window that Alley found her mother standing on the other side of, on the balcony, folding some dry clothes.
Alley slid open the door soundlessly and stepped out next to her mother.
“I’ll help finish the folding,” she said, taking a pair of dark trousers from the rack. She looked out at the endless sea of blue, solar rooves- her apartment in the Chaplin Building was at the fiftieth floor, a little higher than most buildings in New Argentum.
Alley had until recently wondered often why the Chaplin building was named so, having only recently learning about its namesake, Charlie Chaplin. Why a high-rise buiding had to be named after an ancient mime, she couldn’t understand. He must have been pretty famous for his name to have lasted nearly a hundred years without his being in a position of power.
Carrying the clothes upstairs, Alley heard a sound remarkably like a thunderclap. She pondered on it for a second, then dismissed it as fantasy- the day was bright, sunnier than the week preceding it, if that was even possible. She fed the clothes into their respective slots in the sorter, watching them zip out through the tube and sort themselves by colour and type along a rack. She took her mother’s clothes and fed those into the machine, which promptly broke down. The unwavering green light, embedded a millimetre under the translucent silicone, decided that it was ready to die.
“Mum!” Alley called. “The sorter’s broken down.”
“What?” Her mother sounded stressed. “Turn it back on again, I’m busy enough here as is.”
Despite incessant prodding, the sorter refused to wake up and Ally ran back down the stairs. “It’s completely bro-” she began, before she saw the state of the house. The automatic blinds had released their grip and had completely closed. The fishtank had stopped bubbling. In fact, everything was dark and dead.
“Mum, what did you do?”
Alley heard a huge booming crash from the next room. Startled, she moved into the living room where everything was surprisingly normal. There weren’t too many devices that had shut down, so there wasn’t a difference as noticable as before. The only thing missing was-
The suspended globe.
The giant metal world map that hovered above the ground, suspended electromagnetically.
“Mum?”
Alley took a few steps forwards.
“MUM!”
Alley saw her mother dead under the globe, her face frozen in an unchangable expression of regret.
Updated version, with more paragraph breaks and a few extra words- still need some character development, I guess, but I'm not sure how I can fit that in. It'll be nicer to read. I added a sort of explanation for how the globe could have fallen (I hadn't mentioned a boom or crash before, which such a large object would undoubtedly create).
