Microstory 670: Unpredicted Devastating Solar Flare

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Like so many other things, many of the issues that plagued us in the past are exactly that, in the past. We don’t worry about hurricanes ravaging our homes, or energy crises, or sex robots being hacked to murder their owners. Included in this list are celestial phenomena, notably solar flares. Most people around the universe haven’t dealt much with devastating solar flares. They’ve happened on occasion, and have caused some minor disturbances, like malfunctioning electronics, but they’re not usually all that bad. Even for the ones that do happen, we’ve developed technology to predict them. Every solar orbital, satellite, and space vessel comes equipped with the necessary sensors; even the least advanced ones. We can’t predict them years, or even weeks off, but we can generally see them coming with enough time to engage countermeasures. Something was different in a little remote star system in the Casini cluster. Suddenly, completely without any warning, something known as a superflare erupted from a star called Doppel b. Within minutes, the flare had a disastrous effect on the two habitable planets in the system, Delena and Steroline. This caused the majority of both planets to go completely dark. They had no way of communicating with each other, let alone someone at an interstellar distance. They spent the better part of three days working tirelessly to reconstruct their communication capabilities, only to learn that the superflare was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection, which was in the middle of sending a stream of deadly plasma towards the planets. The inhabitants released multiple E285FF wide-spectrum distress beacons, but they were all too late. A nearby luxury ship arrived just in time to watch Delena and Steroline become consumed by Doppel b’s fire. Everyone died instantly, leading a few believers in the Light to question why the Sacred Savior spoke of the solar flare, when really it was the CME that they should have been worried about.