When Jacob Phillips woke up on his cot to a screaming alarm clock that flashed 7:00AM at him in bright green lettering, he certainly was already quite grown and had endured his share of hardships, though nothing like what he was about to experience.  Sure he was down on his luck, having moved into a closet of an apartment in his hometown after losing his Helpdesk job, but Jacob was focused and unmoving in his drive.  As he squeezed past the end of the Army cot so he could get into the shower stall, he absentmindedly turned off the screeching alarm clock, knocking over a stack of classified ads that encompassed a good portion of the last six months.

Jacob spent most of that shower reflecting on his position in life and the cards he had been dealt.  It had not been a life of leisure, for sure.  Since high school, Jacob had been working to earn extra income.  When his parents were killed in a car crash on his seventeenth birthday, he chose to live on his own and finish school on his own terms instead of moving in with an eccentric Uncle in Germany who did not speak English.  To say this was fortuitous to the human race would be an understatement.

Everything had worked out pretty well, though Jacob recognized that his parents’ death did not affect him the way it probably should have.  He rationalized that pretty easily, though, given that full responsibility for his life had been suddenly thrust upon him.  Really, who had time to grieve when you needed to find an apartment and get a better paying job?  The life insurance payout had only been fifty thousand, ten of which was slated to go to caskets.  Being the logical and frugal person he was, Jacob had instead put them in a couple pine boxes and cremated them.  He just could not understand why anyone would pay that much money for something going in the ground?

Finding out his parents had taken a second mortgage on the house had caused some issues.  Jacob ended up needing to put twenty five thousand of his available cash toward the remainder on the three-bedroom ranch they had owned after it sold.  Even someone as economically savvy as the young Mr. Phillips could not recoup the overall losses incurred by the real estate fiasco and so he had been living in relative squalor for the past ten years.

Prior to his termination, Jacob accrued a nest egg of roughly one hundred thousand dollars in various currencies, bonds, and precious metals (which he kept in a safe in his apartment).  He did not report this information to the IRS for various reasons, the most important of which being that it was none of their business.  Why should the government have a say over his assets when they have already been taxed?  It just did not make any sense to him, so Jacob chose to diversify his economic portfolio with pseudonyms and falsified identifications.  That was before the Sundering, of course, though it would make the transition into the new world much easier.

Most of you know that story, of course, but I will continue anyway, just so we have a complete tale.

Far from Jacob Phillips and his quiet, cold shower something was about to happen in Geneva, Switzerland.  It had just turned 16:00 on 12 May 2012 as the Large Hadron Collider – or LHC – began its first full capacity experiment after its lengthy warm-up period.  No one knows exactly what they were testing, though people who had been in contact with the scientists at the LHC during the days and weeks before the accident were told that they were finally going to test for the Higgs-Boson that day.  Many of the zealots at the Glänzen Academy believe that everything that has happened after was directly because the researchers at the LHC were successful.  This, we will never know.

One thing is certain, we can be sure of the time the experiment started because of the result.

At exactly 16:01:23 in Geneva, Switzerland – 7:01:23 AM in Utica, NY – most of central Europe disappeared.  Exactly 0.77 seconds later, an Electro-Magnetic Pulse of catastrophic proportions blasted through the Earth, disabling all non-shielded – or poorly shielded – electronics instantly.  Hundreds of airplanes with inadequate insulation fell from the sky, silent torpedoes of death and destruction.  Most landed in water or unpopulated areas, but there are at least twelve that landed in heavily settled areas: three landed in New York City, two in Chicago, and another two right on top of Leonardo Da Vinci Airport (they had been circling due to a mix-up with the ground crew).  The remaining five landed in India and China.

A billion people around the world fell dead immediately as the pulse raced through the Earth, their bodies still, perfect.  To this day, they do not rot, though we did not know that at the time.  The Cult of Perfection rose out of the fragile sanity of those who had lost friends and loved ones.  To this day they raise those dead up as Gods and place them in glass thrones; a mockery of their memory.

We all know the chaos that came immediately after the destruction, but none of us knew at the time what Hell had been unleashed or how the pulse had affected a minority of us, seemingly at random.  We certainly did not know Jacob Phillips then; few knew him.

As the world descended reveled in its pandemonium, the feral phantasms of fantasy and horror running wild amongst us, we would come to learn of the gift that had been granted to us in our most desperate time and through this gift we would be given a savior.

We would know Jacob Phillips.

We would be saved.

© Michael J. Wyant, Jr.