[ WP ] What will the apocalypse be like ?

Just over eight years ago there was a solar flare as powerful as the Carrington event; it took down the power grids of many countries in the world. Many of these countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, used to be economic powerhouses, but the blackout of 2015 left their populaces struggling to survive in just-turned-third-world countries. The population of Great Britain is now less than twelve million, and only nine million survived these eight long, miserable years. 
 
 On the second of June in the year 2023, the British government announced that finally over ninety percent of the country, including the area where the twenty-six-year-old man lived, had access to electric power. It used to be considered essential, of course - before 2015 it was essential, as the deaths of over fifty million British people and over seven hundred million people worldwide had shown - but now, as in 1900, it was considered a luxury. Rather aptly, the lights were first turned on in London on the first of May - people had begun to move back there three years earlier - and Prime Minister Williams had said that electric power would be available for all Britons by the end of July. 
 
 Upon hearing the news, the twenty-six-year-old man, who had moved from the Midlands to the south west eight years ago, took out his hard drive - nearly ten years old, used for the first time in September of 2013 and for the last time, of course, on Walpurgis Night of 2015 - which he had kept safe for eight years just in case something like this happened - an anti-4/30, if you will - and plugged it in to an old Windows 7 computer. He did n't know why he'd kept the computer, or the hard drive for that matter - the computer had ceased to work and the hard drive had had nothing to work with starting on the night our world ended, and the man had been almost certain in those chaotic first few weeks that, if he'd been lucky enough to be buried, the tombstone would say `` 1996-2015''. But that had n't happened - he'd witnessed the deaths of his sister and his mother, the only two people he lived with, and he'd lost contact with all of his friends on the last day before the lights went out, but somehow he'd lived to see the ninth and final summer of the blackout, and the twenty-seventh and hopefully nowhere near final summer of his life. 
 
 He turned the computer on, and he saw a lot of numbers. The numbers all had twelve digits and they all began with `` 201504''; scrolling up, he saw 201503s and 201502s. These were files, files with information eight years out of date. 
 
 Some were images: `` 21:03 30/04/2015'', `` 17:08 30/04/2015'', `` 20:09 29/04/2015''... mostly images of a social media website called Reddit, which had gone down when the solar storm hit on May Day morning. Of course it had been cloudy that night, where the twenty-six-year-old man lived when he was only eighteen: he never saw the aurora borealis even well above fifty degrees north, neither after the event nor before, but most nights he saw a view of stars that would seem wondrous to a person from 2014. 
 
 The man had slowly got used to the thousands of stars shining brilliantly on those nights - he had wept the night the moon turned blood-red, the night of September 27th, but he had been thankful to still be alive - he had had other things to worry about during that first horrific summer, such as where to find food and clean water. During those first few months he'd seen hundreds die of hunger, thirst and water-borne diseases, but he was certain that the true British death toll was somewhere in the tens of millions. 
 
 No-one had heard from David Cameron or Ed Miliband - that May morning when all of the electronic ones and zeros had been turned into plain old zeros had been only six days before a general election was due to take place, the first general election under a fixed-term Parliament. Back in the early 2010s, for the first time ever, people had been one hundred percent sure about the date of the next general election: Thursday, 7th May 2015 - that had been planned almost four years previously, but ruined less than a week before it was due to take place. Radios which had ran on grid power, along with televisions and computers, had of course ceased to work that morning just before four o'clock, but there had been no sign of the BBC or the British government on battery-powered or hand-crank radios. 
 
 On Thursday the seventh, food riots had been commonplace in every major city in the country, and doubtless in many other countries as well: the man reckoned they'd started on about day five and ended in about week five. But during the last eight months of 2015 and the first three or four months of 2016 - during the winter that had been proof of Murphy's Law, with temperatures below freezing on most days from mid-November to early April - the British people did n't see any sign of a government. 
 
 The number of governments in the formerly-first-world country of England had decreased from a few hundred microstates in early 2016 to one in late 2017; many of the surviving electrical engineers had worked, whenever they had been able to, to form a new National Grid; now, on this Friday evening in early summer, the twenty-six-year-old man saw light that was not from celestial bodies, the burning of oil or an open flame for the first time in more than eight years. 
 
 Perhaps now, as summer once again turned to autumn, as significant seventeenth, fifty-fourth and twenty-seventh birthdays passed, as the moon turned partially red just before Hallowe'en and as 2023 turned to 2024, life could possibly return to some semblance of normality. People would never return completely to the naïve lifestyle of the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, but perhaps this dark chapter in the history of humanity could finally, after 2,954 days, be closed.
