by Jim Lombardo
As the elevator doors opened, the four exited into the interior of the detector room, nicknamed “the church.” Scott had switched on a few floodlights affixed in the cathedral ceiling, casting a dim illumination across room. The group made their way out onto the floor. About 20 feet ahead of them at “the altar” was the side of the gigantic detector, which took up more than half of the physical space in the room. They made their way over to a folding steel security gate along a nearby wall, which Scott had just unlocked from the control room. Inside was a walk-in closet that stored the tools and diagnostic equipment they needed for the inspection.
“Can’t wait to get under the hood,” said Neil earnestly as he began gathering the needed tools and instruments. “It’s a good day for spelunking.”
Neil would be crawling deep inside the detector, through a series of narrow ducts and crevices to diagnose what the problem was, and if necessary, remove components and bring them back to his company’s lab facilities for further examination and repair.
“I’ll take the 501 tool bag for us,” offered Cynthia.
“Are you sure? The thing weighs 50 pounds,” said Patrick.
“I’m fine, no problem,” Cynthia replied cheerfully. She always felt she had more to prove in this male-dominated field, and didn’t want any special treatment whatsoever.
“They should put wheels on that thing,” Patrick griped.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to only hire men?” Neil teased, giving Cynthia a grin.
The group finished rounding up their gear and began walking towards Titan. Anderson and Patrick led the way, while Neil and Cynthia trailed closely behind. Suddenly Cynthia shrieked and dropped the bag she was hauling.
“Ouch!” she cried. “I think I just pulled something.”
Patrick chided her. “I told you that thing was too heavy.”
He began walking towards his wife who was clutching her right shoulder with her left hand, her face contorted in pain.
As she removed her left hand, Patrick noticed a dark moist blotch on her white top.
“Woah, Cyn, I think you cut yourself.”
The woman noticed now that the glove on her left hand was soaked with blood. Looking down, she could see that she was bleeding profusely from an area around her right underarm.
“What? Did I actually tear my skin?” said Cynthia, confused about what had just happened.
“You must have somehow. Don’t move. I’ll get the emergency kit, and we’ll take a look.”
Patrick made his way around his wife and ran back to the storage closet. Meanwhile, Anderson walked back towards Cynthia to console her. He could see that the wound was serious and called up to Scott on his transmitter.
“Scott, uh, we had an accident down here. We’ll be coming back up.”
In a matter of seconds, Patrick was rushing back towards the group, holding the medical kit. But as he nearly reached them, he grabbed his chest and fell to his knees.
“Ohhh, I’m hurt!” he shouted. “Oh, God, it hurts!”
The group ran over towards him. Anderson suspected a heart attack and got back on his transmitter again.
“Scott, medical emergency! We need help, now!”
Within seconds, Patrick was falling onto his back, his eyes rolling up into his eye sockets, and his body convulsing. In the center of his chest a large, red circle of blood was expanding. Cynthia ran to him and let out a macabre scream. She fell to his side, and cradled his head in her arms.
“Patrick! Patrick! What’s the matter? Talk to me. Talk to me, darling!”
Anderson pried Cynthia off him. “Get back! Neil, help me get him to the elevator!” he ordered.
The men lifted Patrick’s now limp body and rushed him to the elevator with Cynthia in pursuit, screaming and crying hysterically.
An ambulance had been in the vicinity of the control building when Scott had summoned help, and by the time the four made their way back to ground level, and out the entranceway of the building, they could hear the sirens. By this point, Patrick appeared lifeless, and Cynthia was curled up into a ball on the front steps, moaning and smeared with blood.
The emergency vehicle swerved into place in front of the building. Two medics jumped out and began working feverishly in tandem on the injured pair. Neil and Scott were helping out, providing basic information, and neither of them noticed when Anderson turned and slipped back into the command center. Soon he was in the elevator and making his way back down to Titan. He was well aware that he was breaching protocol by returning without Scott’s formal clearance. But he simply couldn’t overcome his intense curiosity, which had always driven his personal and professional life.
The elevator came to a stop, and the doors opened. Anderson hesitated as he peered out into the murky chamber of the church. Something strange was happening in this small cavity of the world, and he wanted to find out what it was. He gazed over at the detector, which was resting in the shadows like a hibernating beast. For a minute he kept his foot against the elevator doorway to keep it open, and dared not move.
Just then, Scott called down to him on his transmitter from the control room.
“Gordy, what are you doing back down there?”
“Scott. Ah, I left my…onna-omega down here,” Anderson replied, purposely making up a nonsensical word because he had no reasonable explanation to be there, and he needed to buy some time.
Scott sounded disturbed. “Look, something’s whacked down there. Come back up, now.”
“Okay, I’ll just grab it and be right up.”
Anderson sucked in a deep breath and took a few steps towards Titan. He froze and looked down at a spot about 10 feet in front of him where there were pools of blood on the floor, along with the tool bag and the medical kit strewn erratically. Cautiously he began to shuffle toward the debris when something tiny in the air just in front of him caught his attention. Instinctively he swatted with his right hand at what he momentarily took to be nothing more than a flying insect, but he immediately felt a painful, piercing sensation in his palm.
“Owwww!” he cried, recoiling backwards and shaking his injured hand, trying to ease the pain. He then yanked off his glove. “Am I bit?” he said, examining himself. In the dead center of his palm was a minute circular wound with blood streaming out. He then felt something warm on the back of the same hand. He flipped it over to reveal the exact same injury, also rapidly oozing blood. Something small had just penetrated and transited his entire hand with the precision and power of a laser.
Anderson took a step back and assumed a defensive posture, ready to ward off another attack. In a confused state of alarm, his eyes darted around, searching his immediate space for what had injured him. He considered the implausibility of a bug or living organism being able to survive in this environment. Then he caught sight of it again. A few feet ahead at chest level, he saw a very small, vividly black physical object hanging in midair. While keeping his eyes fixed on it, he reached into his side pocket for his flashlight, switched it on, and pointed the beam of light at the thing. Upon further inspection, he confirmed this was definitely not an insect or animal, but a tiny sphere, about half the size of a pea, floating motionlessly, and seemingly defying gravity. Anderson took a deep breath and moved the flashlight’s beam closer to the object. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before. He noticed that the perfectly round, utterly black blob was casting miniature rainbow-colored sparks randomly off its surface.
Terrified, but spellbound, the scientist took another deep breath and poked at the object with his flashlight. When he did, the front part making contact with it vaporized instantaneously. The flashlight’s bulb disintegrated as well, leaving Anderson bathed only in the weak light cast by the lamps above. He no longer had a fix on the position of the destructive orb. Panicked, he spun around and bolted for the elevator.
Chapter Forty
Aurora
The Code Aurora emergency protocol for the Super Stonehenge Collider had been established years before, and was formally revised on a quarterly basis by EPIC. The goal was to ensure there would be an efficient response to any potentially hazardous incidents involving the machine. But previous transmissions of the warning notification and employee emergency response had been merely a drill. Until this day.
Following procedure, key EPIC leaders who collectively comprised the EPIC Council were summoned to report as quickly as possible to the company’s headquarters. Within an hour the Council had assembled inside a spacious, conservatively adorned but technologically laden conference room. By special invite, Anderson sat close to the head of the room near a 15-foot plasma screen, his wounded hand heavily wrapped in bloody bandages. Scott Perkins and Neil Bransford sat beside him.
The noise level was deafening, as the rumor mill had already spread throughout EPIC. Physicists were engaged in animated conversations, discussing, theorizing, and debating over what had taken place at Titan. Dr. Bruce Murray, the Chief Executive of EPIC, sat at the front of the room with the screen behind him, and he brought the group to order with a look. Murray was a refined and distinguished-looking Brit with a neatly trimmed moustache. However, on this day he was dressed casually in an open-necked short-sleeve yellow shirt, having just rushed up from his research lab, his favorite place in the world, to address the situation. There was unmistakable apprehension in his eyes as he began speaking in his very proper sounding British accent.
“Welcome, friends. Let’s begin. Thank you all for getting here promptly. As you’re all aware, we’ve had an incident this morning at the Titan detector on the southern quadrant, with numerous injuries. I have the tragic news to report that one of our dear colleagues, Senior Engineer Dr. Patrick Houseman, who many of you know personally, has died.”
A murmur resonated throughout the room.
“The good doctor’s wife, Senior Engineer Cynthia Houseman, has been seriously wounded, and is now in emergency surgery. I’d like to request a moment of silence for the Housemans.”
Murray paused, but only briefly given the state of affairs. “We have reason to believe that Dr. Houseman’s death was not of natural causes, and we’re waiting for the results of an emergency autopsy for confirmation. I’ll have the last few months of Titan’s maintenance reports emailed to you, but as far as I know there has been nothing awry with the detector’s performance as of late. Let me reassure you that the Titan facility has been locked down by our security people, and local Bobbies will be maintaining a perimeter until we get this thing figured out. At some point today I’m going to need to make a statement to the press. We need to be respectful to the public by keeping them informed, but on the other hand we don’t want to cause unnecessary alarm. So please, until you hear from me, I am to be the only voice of EPIC.”
The leader then intentionally made eye contact with his subordinates around the room to reinforce his point. “What we discuss here today stays in this room.”
Dr. Murray introduced Anderson, Scott, and Neil to the group and pushed the desktop microphone stand on the table in front of him over to Anderson, who was still clearly shaken.
Anderson, with Scott and Neil’s help, recounted the events of the previous two days, beginning with the initial observance of the speck. He presumed that the speck he had initially observed during experimentation, and the phenomenon he and his associates had encountered earlier in the day were related. The physicists in the room pelted Anderson with questions. Although there was genuine concern amongst the group, there was also palpable excitement about what had occurred. Attendees kept interrupting and shouting over one another. Occasionally Murray had to interject to restore order. One of the most dramatic parts of Anderson’s presentation was when he pulled the flashlight out of his pocket and passed it around the room so everyone could see firsthand the incredible destructive force of the unknown entity.
From the point of the earliest conception of particle accelerators, many physicists had warned of possible apocalyptic consequences from recreating the conditions that gave rise to the birth of the known universe. Inside the core of SSC’s detectors, temperatures could reach 100 trillion degrees Fahrenheit, or 100,000 times hotter than the interior of the sun. The risk, they argued, was that such high-energy experimentation could create miniature black holes, or produce freakish new particles or forms of matter that could inadvertently set off an uncontrollable and cataclysmic chain reaction. In layman’s terms, they simply didn’t know what they were messing with.
Was this now the beginning of a doomsday scenario? Some physicists in the room scoffed at that notion, pointing out that cosmic rays had been bombarding the Earth for eons with much higher energy than those generated by the collider, without ever leaving evidence of a similar effect. Moreover, within the SSC tubes, 600,000,000 super-charged collisions had been occurring during every second of experimentation for years without causing so much as a hiccough to the natural order of things.
The meeting was interrupted when Dr. Murray’s cell phone rang. He raised his hand for quiet and listened as a surgeon provided him with the initial results of Houseman’s autopsy. After the call ended, Murray addressed the group and explained the findings. Dr. Houseman’s breastbone had been penetrated, and there was a hole from that point leading directly to the interior of his heart. Then, the path had veered off, exiting out the top left ventricle of his heart and continuing on a curved path through muscle and bone until finally departing his body. The trajectory definitively ruled out a bullet, or a bolt popping off of Titan at high speed, which some in the room had speculated may have been the cause of the injury. Such objects could have ricocheted after striking bone, but they would have traveled in a linear direction through the soft tissue of the heart. While the source of the injury was still a mystery, the results were at least conclusive that Houseman had not died of natural causes.
Several IT staff arrived and notified Dr. Murray that video feeds from the security cameras at the Titan detector room had been successfully routed to his laptop, which in turn were being fed to the room’s plasma screen. They had been able to transfer manual control of the cameras, lighting, and sound pickups positioned within the chamber, from Titan’s command center over to the laptop as well. The sound sensors were part of a quality assurance system, programmed to constantly monitor the detector’s audio signature and automatically shut it down if any anomalies were recorded.
“Could you get the lights please, Samuel?”
The conference room went dark, and everyone fixated on the plasma screen. The group sat and watched the entire episode that had been recorded, beginning with the crew’s entrance into the underground enclosure. Gasps were heard amongst the group as the injuries were sustained, including Houseman’s fatal injury. Finally they watched the replay of Anderson’s fateful return to the detector. However, the black sphere Anderson had described was not spotted on the video.
“Scott, could you come over here and assist me with these controls?” asked Murray.
The room fell silent again, everyone watching intensely, as the first live video transmission popped up on the large screen. Everything appeared ordinary except for the debris field from the encounters with the strange object.
“Could you scan the room slowly, Scott? Floor to ceiling, please?”
The engineer complied, and with a few clicks and using mouse control, he was able to pan across the room. He switched to different cameras when necessary to get complete coverage of every inch of the room, even behind the detector, but there was no sign of any menace.
“Dr. Anderson, where exactly were you when you got hurt? And where was the thing you confronted, in relation to you?” Murray inquired.
“I was just to the left of the medical bag there, and it was right in front of me about four and a half feet off the ground, just hovering there.”
“
That spot’s tough to see,” said Murray. “Can you turn up the lights in there, Scott?”
“They’re up as high as they can go, but I can maneuver all of them to that spot to make it brighter.”
He clicked away on Murray’s laptop, while operating the mouse, and within a couple of minutes, the area was bathed in the focused light.
“That’s the best I can do, sir,” Scott advised.
Anderson, along with everyone in the room, strained to locate the perpetrator. “I don’t see it, Doctor, but it was there,” he insisted. “Of course it was very small.”
“How about the sound pickups, Scott, anything unusual?”
With the detector completely shut off, and its depth underground, the room should have been completely silent. Scott increased the volume, and his eyes lit up.
“That…that’s not right. I hear something,” he said. After many years of manning the detector, Scott was strongly proficient in this department. He turned the volume up as loud as it would go. A high-pitched buzzing sound could be heard, very similar to the sound a mosquito would make, but its uniformity ruled out any living organism as its cause. There was mumbling around the room amongst the attendees, and Dr. Murray ordered quiet. The sound was unmistakable.
“Is there a way to pinpoint the source?” asked Murray.
“I think I can,” said Scott.
The sound detection equipment was highly sophisticated, and by redirecting the sensors, and gauging changes in the level of the noise, the engineer was able to train the security camera on a specific area of the floor about halfway from the elevator to the point of Anderson’s encounter. He zoomed in closely and slowly maneuvered the camera around.
“That black ball there…what is that exactly?” Murray asked Anderson and Neil. “Is that something from the first aid kit?”
