BLACKOUT

At 3:47am on Tuesday, a solar flare hit Earth and took everything with it.

Not the lights. Not the internet. Those still work. What's gone is quieter than that and harder to explain.

The banking system suspended all transactions at 4:12am. Not because the servers failed — because the flare corrupted every digital record simultaneously. Accounts, balances, transaction histories. Gone. The physical infrastructure is intact. The information that gave it meaning is not.

By 6am, three major hospitals had locked their doors. Not because of damage. Because patient records, staff credentials, medication histories — all corrupted. A surgeon showed up for her shift and couldn't prove she was a surgeon. The hospital couldn't prove it either. They sent her home.

By noon, the courts had suspended all proceedings. Property records, legal documents, contracts, titles — unverifiable. A man showed up to work in a building he'd worked in for eleven years. Security turned him away. His access credentials no longer existed. Neither did proof that they ever had.

The city is physically intact. The roads work. The shops are open. But the invisible systems that told us who owned what, who owed whom, who was authorised to do what — those are gone.

We are fourteen hours in. Nobody knows how long this lasts. Nobody knows if the records can be recovered. Nobody knows what happens if they can't. What we know is this: the city is still running on momentum. People are still going to work out of habit. Shops are still opening because nobody has told them not to. The tube is still running because the drivers showed up.

But momentum runs out.

Somewhere in the next 28 hours, the questions that nobody has answered yet are going to start mattering. Who owns what. Who has the right to do what. Who gets to decide. How do you prove anything about yourself to a stranger when every record that confirmed it no longer exists.

Nine million people. Twenty eight hours. No instructions. What do you build?