Bill, Johnny and Ted trekked across the desert on a journey to rescue their father. Henry Henderson's air-vee had gone down outside of Phoenix about 9 o'clock this morning. The text received by his sons included his coordinates and indicated he was uninjured, but implied mysterious trouble.
About two-thirds of the way along, the brother's ground-vee quit and now they were walking the last three miles. Ted was the first to suspect a connection between their father's crash and the stalling of their own vehicle. "Maybe some localized phenomena is affecting electromagnetic dependent systems," he said recalling how their smart coms died at the same time.
Johnny wasn't buying it. "If an EMP disabled Dad's air-vee, how was he able to text us afterward?" he said. At that moment Bill noticed his smart com was working again.
Henry was drinking from a bottle of water at straight up noon when he heard a distant shout. He shortly recognized three walking figures as his sons, but why were they on foot? he would find out in another few minutes.
When the emotional greetings of reunion concluded, Henry and sons compared notes on what had happened to each. Henry described the sudden power loss of his personal air vehicle while flying at low recreational altitude, but never checked his smart com until after gliding and sliding to a stop on the ground. They concluded that if a power loss zone was responsible for both vehicle failures, Henry must have drifted past it before messaging for help.
Henry said, "I think Ted's got a good theory suggesting a localized electromagnetic dampening zone. Where an electromagnetic pulse would have induced an overload and fried our electronics permanently, this did the opposite and drained the current from them. Let's call it an 'EDZ.'"
The Henderson's each saw their smart coms die as they walked back to the ground-vee. Upon arrival they further put Ted's theory to the test by putting the vehicle in neutral and pushing it backwards. After about 100 feet the ground-vee systems and all their coms sprang back to life.
In the weeks that followed, Henry and Ted mapped the zone's perimeter by watching a smart com while walking experimentally around the border they had found. It was a circular area about one mile in diameter and its effect remained constant over time. Ted thought it possible to exploit the EDZ by straddling the live/dead border with some kind of differential engine, but was unsuccessful.
It was Bill who make money (for a while) off the discovery by selling tours to visit "The Ted Zone: an oddity of nature." In the end the government seized the spot for a surveillance-proof military base. Ted speculates that research is the government's real motive and that EDZ weaponry won't be far off.