The Great Gamma Blip of 2548 was when the first live HX came close to Earth during recorded history. Close was near Sirius, but when an HX "blips" -- in or out -- space-time gets rattled and there's a huge gamma ray burst.
HX's may have blipped near Earth many times in it's history without affecting life on Earth. The Earth's atmosphere is thick enough to absorb the gamma rays and transform them into harmless light and heat before they get to the surface. Oh, and on Earth the gamma ray burst also becomes a huge electromagnetic pulse because Earth has a magnetic field around it, but since when does a plant or an animal care about EMP?
The plants and animals don't care, but almost every human electric and electronic device does.
Zap! This time the Earth was shut down by the huge EMP pulse! No one at the time had any idea what had happened. Anything on Earth that could diagnose that we had just been hit with a huge gamma ray pulse was fried by the EMP. Anyone that could figure it out couldn't talk to anyone else because all the communications systems were gone, too. It was years later, well into The Recovery, before the word got around on what caused the whole Solar System to shut down.
We were lucky. We were vacationing on Palau island in the Pacific Ocean at the time, doing some scuba diving on a coral reef. What we noticed first was that the outboard motor wouldn't start. It was weird. It was also weird that we couldn't phone for a rescue. We were really pissed that we had to row all the way back. When we got back to shore -- hot, angry and thirsty -- we found out that our problems were small potatoes. All the island's phones, radios and electricity had all stopped working, too. It was a mystery, but Palau's food supply and people were stable enough that we figured we could survive without deep hardship, whatever the problem was.
Well, the problem turned out to be huge, and it took a year to get rescued. I learned to fish six different ways while we were waiting. By the end of the year, Yanci and I were right up there with the native teenagers as top fish providers for the island, and we got a lot of respect for that.
I also learned that I had deep feelings for Sherry, and she shared them. If we had been stranded a bit longer, we would have gotten married on that lovely tropical island, and started raising kids who would have called that reef home. We talked long and hard about it, she and I, but we both knew how different our families were. And, while this crisis brought our families together while it was happening, no one knew what the future would bring.
One day, about a year after The Blip, a medium-size boat finally showed up on the horizon. The Palauans were cautious of the boat. "They look like pirates." our native friends cautioned us. The boat sailed for a while off shore, but made no move to land.
While the ship was cruising around off shore, the Blackheart family went stir-crazy. They had been chronic complainers since the Big Blip, and finally had chosen to live apart. I could never figure out why, but they would not accept that the whole Earth was in trouble. They acted like this hardship we were experiencing was some sort of trick, and all they had to do was get to the next land and things would all be OK. When they saw the boat, they waved to it and shouted that they would pay a lot to get off the island. The boat came close and picked them up, then sailed away. I later heard that the boat took them to the South Philippines, and it was another year before their family got them loose from there.
Two months later, a Philippine government ship arrived; the rest of us who wanted to leave got off safely.
It was when we got to Manilla that the magnitude of the damage done by the blip really hit us. We found out that even though it was now a year since The Blip, our settlement in Greenland was not rehabilitated yet. When we went to the movies the first one we saw was about the Crenshaw Expedition. These were people who had trekked to the coast when The Blip shut down life support for most of the Greenland ice cap. After we came out it hit me: if we had been home for The Blip, we would have been cut off, trekked and died!
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Most of the colonies around the Solar System suffered like Greenland did, but not from EMP. The killer for all the colonies without atmosphere was raw gamma radiation. The blip radiation was so intense that normal shielding for solar storm radiation was not enough. Basically, half the colonies survived: those who were facing away from the blip when it happened so that there was a lot of some kind of mass between them and the gamma rays. The people of other half died after one month, of radiation poisoning.
Ships suffered the same fate: any ship shielded survived and any ship exposed lived for either thirty hours or thirty days, depending on whether or not the gamma radiation fried life support control systems. In Manilla we heard a lot of sad stories about ships, too. The Alpha Centuri colonies probably suffered the same as the solar system colonies. The blip radiation would have been a little less intense there, but not much. But we wouldn't know details for another three years.
Titan Colony was a survivor. Titan Colony and Mars survived the best in the Solar System. Both had an atmospheric shield, and neither got hit with EMP because they have no magnetic field to speak of. Both recovered within days, and started sending out help. The big difference between Titan Colony and Mars was who got the help: Mars send a lot of help Earthward, and Titan Colony helped the other colonies.
That difference in where the aid went seemed small at the time, and it was, given the magnitude of the crisis, but it grew in significance as the Solar System recovered and started to pull apart on the HX issue again.
The HX issue loomed large just as quickly as people recovered from The Blip. It loomed large because the last thing reported by scientists in the Solar System observatory ships was the direction The Blip had come from. And as soon as the big telescopes were operational again, they were pointed in that direction, and the HX was spotted: there was now a live HX 10 light-years from the Solar System.