The hum, Lena Voss’s constant companion in the pristine, sterile environment of her quantum physics lab, vanished.  Not with a bang, but a disconcerting whimper, a fading tremor that left a void in her ears, a silence more unnerving than any shriek.  The complex array of monitors, usually alive with a symphony of flashing lights and scrolling data, flickered, sputtered, and died, plunging her into an unsettling darkness broken only by the emergency lights, their pale glow casting long, distorted shadows.

The magnetic field, the invisible shield protecting Earth from the harshest cosmic radiation, had collapsed. It wasn’t a gradual decline; it was a sudden, catastrophic failure, as if some cosmic switch had been flipped, plunging the planet into a vulnerable, exposed state.