Intergalactic

Elias had taken it calmly to be plunged into darkness. He had been trained for years to react to the unexpected. After confirming that it was not just the main power but everything electrical that was off, he had found the hand-crank in the corner of one tool drawer and closed the three sides of his shop. Partially to keep out thieves, partially so none of the people stumbling around blindly in the perfect darkness fell over his stuff and damaged them or hurt themselves.

Then the sound of a palm hitting a forehead echoed through the small room.

„I’m an idiot.“, Elias told himself. Steps sounded out, first on the floor, then on the stairs towards his upstairs study. There, rummaging around he found what he had been looking for, and with a flick of a finger ignited the lighter, then with it the tea candle.

A warm, yellow light pierced the pitch black, flooding the room in a very faint glow, just enough to make out the main features. He was no longer completely blind. In the dim light, Elias quickly found his reserve of tea candles, then went downstairs again, leaving the one candle above burning like the beacon of a light house. A very small light house.

Downstairs, he put four candles on suitable flat surfaces throughout the shop and ignited them, so that there was a bit of light illuminating most parts of it. The candle lights attracted people from the nearby market, where everything was still pitch black. No, in the distance Elias could just about make out one more flickering light - someone else had a taste for the old fashioned as well it seemed. It was too far away to make out anything.

In the darkness and then the dim light, all of that had taken him nearly ten minutes. Just as Elias was starting to consider his next steps, the tapestry of talking and coordinating voices outside was washed away by hushes and „psst“ sounds.

Then he heard, in the distance but now that people quieted down, clear voice of Bloom’s governor, Nico.

„Again so everyone can hear it.“, Nicodemus could be heard in the darkness ahead, „We don’t yet know anything, my guess is we were hit by an EMP attack. Don’t know by whom, not sure why.“

A low murmur rumbled through the market, but quickly died out as people wanted to hear more. It also allowed Elias to take a rough guess that hundreds of people, at least, were in the market.

„I see“, Nicodemus continued in the distance as Elias edged closer to the narrow door that was the entrance to his shop when it was closed, „a few faint lights around. So some of you have chemical lights. That is good, much better than pure darkness. But“, he spoke up, „use them sparingly. The air processing units are also off, so for the moment, preserving oxygen is paramount. This might be a long night. I’ll be heading over to engineering next and find out.“

Mumbling in the crowd and voices in the distance shouting something Elias could not understand made it hard to pick out every word that the governor was saying, but Elias caught most of it. Right now, though, Nicodemus was straining to talk over the crowd and it took a few more rounds of hushing until Elias and those near him could hear his voice clearly again: „Another important thing: The gravity field has its own inertia. Even if we don’t get power back soon, it’ll be half an hour or so before it starts to collapse. I recommend that you all secure your things for zero-G and unless you are required for station operations, get into a room where you’ll be ok when gravity comes back. Tell others who aren’t here.“

Sounds of people stepping aside, everyone making just one or two steps and then standing again, came through the silence after Nicodemus had finished, and was then quickly drowned out by hundreds of people moving about carefully, most in complete darkness, some in the very dim light of the few candles like Elias’s that had been lit somewhere.

Elias ducked back into his shop and closed the small door. He went upstairs to extinguish the candle, following Nicodemus advice to not waste oxygen on fires that were not strictly needed. Then he sat down in his shop and pondered. There was anyway no use in going out right now, with the market filled by darkness and a crowd. It would take a while for the crowd to disperse, given that everyone had to feel their way around. And he remembered from his training how easily people get lost in darkness. The terms “vestibular system“ and “proprioceptive cues“ came to his mind. The human body was a set of interconnected systems, and visual clues were used by many non-visual subsystems for calibration. Elias forced his thoughts back to the moment.

No power meant no way for him to contact his superiors. Not a problem, he could work autonomously. But a strike on Binary Bloom probably meant that something had changed and he couldn’t get the intelligence.

„Right“, he said to himself quietly, „Working blind. Not the first time.“ In the soft glow of the candles, determination hardened his eyes.