Sunfall

by Jim Al-Khalili

  He wondered what Marc would think of his crazy idea.

  14

  Saturday, 9 February – Princeton, New Jersey

  Marc was intrigued. It took a lot for Qiang to openly show emotion in this way. Looking down at the programme of talks for the morning he groaned inwardly. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘this session is basically welcoming speeches and a couple of plenary overview talks – nothing we don’t already know. Come on.’ He stood up and ushered his friend out into the aisle and up the steps at the side of the lecture theatre.

  The two men strolled out of the building, now walking against the stream of delegates entering through the glass doors. Once outside in the crisp morning sunshine again, Marc said, ‘Well, it seems my rehabilitation into the dark-matter community didn’t last long. But then I’m really not ready to sit through all that drivel just yet, especially not forty-five minutes of crusty old Goldstein telling us how everything we know about the subject is down to him; and certainly not when you’ve got something important to tell me. So, come on, spill the beans.’

  Qiang shook his head and watched in silence as a few late-running delegates hurried past them, nodding their greetings as they went. Marc thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat, hunching his shoulders against the chill air, and waited for Qiang to talk. When they were finally alone, Marc turned to his friend, puzzled at the apparent need for secrecy. ‘Well?’

  Qiang had pulled his collar up against the cold, which made him look even more conspiratorial, like an old-fashioned spy. Marc suppressed a smile.

  ‘OK, but I must first ask you to promise to keep what I say confidential.’

  Marc shrugged his shoulders and frowned. What could be so important? ‘Of course, but why do you even need to ask me that? How can you worry that I would ever talk about your work before you’d published?’

  ‘It’s not something that will ever get published.’ Qiang looked around nervously as though he feared they were being watched. ‘Several weeks ago, I was invited to Shanghai with a group of other scientists – mostly geologists, but still a surprising spread of expertise. Anyway, we had a couple of meetings with some high-level government officials. It was clear they wanted us to put our heads together to address the implications of the weakening magnetic field.’

  Marc raised his eyebrows. ‘What? Oh … I see. Well, you know you’ve really made it in the world of science when your government asks you to solve a problem you’re no more qualified to tackle than my plumber,’ he chuckled. Qiang frowned. Whatever he was involved in, it was obviously something that concerned him. Marc gripped his arm and looked his friend in the eyes.

  ‘Sorry, Qiang, I didn’t mean to suggest that you— OK, look, this doesn’t sound too sinister to me. I mean, everyone’s talking about the Flip and when it’s going to happen. They’re saying later this year. And after this horrific hurricane, which may or may not be linked to the weakening field, not to mention the CME that brought down the Air India plane … well, it can’t happen soon enough, I guess.’

  He now saw something in Qiang’s eyes that unsettled him. There was a wild excitement that looked somewhat out of place. Qiang grew suddenly animated and started walking more briskly. ‘And that’s the issue,’ he almost shouted. Then, as though remembering what a risk he was taking, suddenly dropped his voice back to a whisper. ‘What I learned from these meetings is that they believe the Flip may not happen as soon as we hope.’

  ‘What do you mean? Are there new data?’

  ‘No one is saying as much, but … Well, let me just say that the secrecy we’ve all been sworn to would suggest that we’re not being told everything.’

  Marc tried to suppress his impatience. ‘OK, look, I know what the Chinese authorities are like with secrecy and I can understand that you feel you’re taking a huge risk by talking about it, even to someone I hope you feel you can trust. But I’m also guessing you have good reason for wanting to confide in me. So come on, what the fuck is it you’re trying to tell me?’

  Qiang drew in a deep breath of the cold morning air and slumped his shoulders in resignation. ‘Well, I don’t know what they are basing their information on, but they’ve been looking at putting plans in place to cope with a drastically weakened magnetosphere over a three- to five-year period.’

  Marc stopped abruptly in his tracks. ‘Sorry, did you just say three to five years?’ He stared incredulously at his friend.

  Qiang gave him a grim nod. ‘I know. This dramatically conflicts with the official line, which is that we just need to ride this out for a few months before the Flip and the field rights itself, not several years.’

  Marc rubbed his hand slowly against his stubbly cheek. Why would the world be told things would start returning to normal in a few months if it was really going to take years? And what further damage could be caused if the field continued to weaken? Would life be fried by cosmic radiation? Would the ozone layer be stripped away? He stood gazing out across the campus, contemplating the ramifications of what he was hearing.

  Qiang had carried on walking without slowing and Marc hurried after him, falling into step with him just as he began talking again. ‘They encouraged us to come up with various proposals, from protective shields in orbit, to excavating vast underground bunkers. I didn’t really have much to offer. But on my return to Beijing, I started thinking. What if, for the sake of argument, we had to do something about the magnetic field itself? What if we simply couldn’t wait around for the planet to right itself?’

  Up ahead, jogging towards them, was a young couple, probably lost in music only they could hear. But Qiang nevertheless waited until they had passed and were a safe distance away before he continued.

  ‘I’ve been doing some digging around in the scientific literature. Did you know it’s only in the last ten years or so, thanks to advances in neutrino imaging, that we’ve properly understood how the Earth’s magnetic field is generated?’

  He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Well, the liquid metal core of the Earth is basically a giant dynamo. As it swirls around it generates electric currents and magnetic fields, which push more conducting liquid metal around to create even stronger currents, and so stronger fields, and so on. It’s a gigantic feedback loop.’

  Despite the seriousness of the subject, Marc couldn’t help but feel a little amused. Qiang’s deep expertise in particle physics was so specialized, so niche, that, brilliant scientist though he was, he was only now discovering basic high-school geomagnetism. He was animatedly waving his arms around and wiggling his fingers to simulate various circular motions. His enthusiasm reminded Marc of those early years when he would pop into his office at Columbia first thing in the morning with a new idea and start scrawling Feynman diagrams on the board, while Marc tried desperately to keep up. But the subject matter now was far more important than a theoretical curiosity about the structure of dark matter.

  ‘But,’ continued Qiang, ‘if this liquid core gets disturbed, the magnetic field gets weaker. And right now, turbulent vortices thousands of kilometres below our feet are disrupting its smooth circular flow.

  ‘So, my question is this: if we really had to, is there a way of kick-starting the core again? How could we deliver a massive boost of energy to the right spots at the right time to push the liquid metal in the right direction?’

  Marc was intrigued. ‘I guess it’s a bit like sticking your finger into emptying bathwater above the plughole and stirring it to recover the steady circular vortex after it has been messed up.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Qiang with a small smile. ‘Only it’s not so easy to stick a giant finger into our planet. So, the problem is how to deliver that energy. In the old Hollywood movies, there’d be an expedition to the centre of the Earth, in which some kind of manned subterranean craft would blast its way to the core with a laser beam. Of course it’s a fun idea, but you and I both know it’s quite unrealistic. I mean, even today, the deepest boreholes in the Earth’s crust don’t penetrate beyond about twent
y kilometres. Compared with the six and a half thousand kilometres to the centre, that’s barely a pinprick.’

  They had left the large academic buildings behind and were now walking through rows of student apartments. They passed a Starbucks, busy with university staff and students picking up breakfast on their way to offices, labs and classes.

  Qiang stopped again and looked around, as though only now noticing how far they had walked. He turned to face Marc and put a conspiratorial hand on his arm. ‘Maybe we should start heading back.’ Marc shrugged, and they turned to retrace their route. Qiang continued. ‘So, if you wanted to deliver energy to the centre of the Earth without it being lost en route, what would you use?’

  ‘You mean like proton beam therapy to treat tumours?’

  ‘Exactly. Deliver energy into living tissue without obstruction, then dump it exactly where it’s needed inside the body at a precise location. What if, instead of a human patient, you were dealing with the entire planet?’

  Marc was puzzled. He was clearly missing something obvious. ‘OK, we already use neutrino beams for imaging the interior of the Earth, but that wouldn’t work here. Hardly any energy loss. Most of the particles in those beams pass straight through.’

  He sensed that Qiang was waiting patiently for the penny to drop. And it suddenly hit him like a bombshell. ‘Of course!’ he shouted. ‘Fucking hell, Qiang …’

  A woman walking her dog on the other side of the road stopped to look over at the two men. Qiang gave her a friendly wave.

  Marc was oblivious, finally realizing what Qiang was getting at. Of course there was a way to reach the Earth’s core. But it would involve a beam of particles trillions of times heavier and yet far more elusive than neutrinos. More to the point, they were the particles to which the two men had devoted their research careers.

  ‘Neutralinos!’

  Qiang stared up at him, bright-eyed. Expectant. Knowing he no longer needed to say any more.

  For the past twenty years, the two physicists had dedicated their lives to studying dark matter – more specifically, seeing what would happen when beams of neutralinos, the particles of dark matter, smashed together at high energy. Like their tiny cousins the neutrinos, these particles hardly interact with normal matter at all and so would pass through the Earth unobstructed. But, cross two beams of neutralinos together … Marc liked to quote Spengler, the character from the old movie Ghostbusters: ‘Don’t cross the streams.’

  His mind was racing. What if you aimed multiple beams of neutralinos down into the ground from different locations around the planet, all meeting at one point deep in the core? They would each travel through the Earth as though it were completely transparent, but if they met … He tried to do the calculations in his head to determine how big a bang that would make. Big enough to kick-start the Earth’s core again? He couldn’t tell whether the idea was even feasible; he knew too little about geophysics. It was certainly a daring idea. Actually, scratch that, it was a crazy idea. Even if it worked, it would take years to put it into practice.

  He realized Qiang was still staring at him, waiting for him to say something. He exhaled noisily. ‘I’m assuming you’ve not shared this ridiculous suggestion with anyone else.’

  ‘Of course not. But what if we had no choice but to try it?’

  Marc felt a strange mix of terror and excitement. All thoughts of going back to New Zealand were gone for now.

  15

  Monday, 11 February – Tehran

  Shireen had been on the run for three days. Savak, the recently resurrected and feared Iranian secret service, had been on her tail and getting closer all the time. It hadn’t taken her much effort to hack into surveillance cameras to monitor locations around the city that she had passed through and watch as they clumsily followed clues she had deliberately left as bait to throw them off course. So far, it had worked, and she had managed to stay one crucial step ahead of them. But unless everything went according to plan, which she admitted was a long shot, especially since the plan itself was still so hazy, it would only be a matter of time before they caught up with her.

  Her world had started caving in when Majid hadn’t shown up for class on Friday, the morning after her successful hacking session in his apartment. But it wasn’t until lunchtime that a mutual friend on the dark web informed her that Majid had been arrested after receiving a visit from Savak late on Thursday evening. How close had she been to getting caught too? They must have very quickly traced the security breach to his computer. Poor, innocent Majid. She felt wretched about getting him mixed up in all this, and at the same time terrified by the speed with which the authorities had reacted. Clearly, she hadn’t been quite as careful as she’d thought.

  Majid must have tried to cover for her, otherwise she’d have been picked up too, but he had bought her a few precious hours – enough for her to put a rough plan of action in place with the help of several cybs on the dark web whom she felt she could trust. By Friday evening she had yet to look at the files she’d obtained, now buried deep in her little corner of the dark web where even the most sophisticated AIs wouldn’t find them. Or so she hoped. After all, she’d managed to acquire them, hadn’t she? But she hadn’t allowed her paranoia to get the better of her. One of the advantages of the dark web was its sheer size – layer upon layer, world upon world, like a multiverse of realities coexisting in the same cyberspace yet never interacting, allowing millions to hide their secrets away from prying eyes.

  She hadn’t gone back home on Friday. Savak agents would be there waiting for her, she was sure of it. Of course, her parents would have been sick with worry, but for now, the less they knew the better. Instead, she’d headed for the most secure place she could think of: an internet café called Nine Nights – a typically geeky play on the ‘1001 Nights’ stories, but with the number interpreted in binary. It was a popular haunt of the Tehran cyb community, run by a retired coder by the name of Hashimi who in an earlier life had been an associate of her father’s.

  Hashimi was a tall, thin man, with a grizzled grey beard that used to scare her as a young girl when he would come round to their house. The beard had always made him look much older than his years. Even now, she figured, he had to be only around sixty. But he had kind eyes that shone with a deep wisdom she found reassuring. A few years ago, he and her father had fallen out over Hashimi’s shady dark-web activities and she hated to think how disappointed her father would be if he knew she had come to Hashimi for help instead of confiding in him.

  She had no choice now but to trust the man. He had been very pleased to see her when she had turned up just as he was closing the café. But his mood changed to one of concern when he’d seen the look in her eyes. He’d ushered her inside, locked up the café and sat her down. She had told him about the files without giving him too much detail about exactly how she had acquired them. Although he’d been initially reluctant to get involved, the look in his eyes gave away his palpable admiration for what she had achieved, and he was clearly as intrigued as she was by what the files might contain. Nevertheless, it had taken all her powers of persuasion to stop him from contacting her father. He’d led her through a dimly lit corridor to a door at the back of the building that required biometric access. The room they entered looked like a cross between a junkyard and NASA’s Mission Control Center. It was filled with an array of old computers with old-fashioned physical display screens and cables covering the floor. She could swear that much of the hardware looked older than she was. And yet the familiar electronic hum and glowing LEDs left her in no doubt that this was a working environment. Every square centimetre of surface area was filled with a mix of electronic gadgetry, empty food cartons, beer bottles and coffee cups. Along one wall was stacked a bewildering mountain of defunct hardware that presumably Hashimi couldn’t bring himself to get rid of. On the other side of the room was an unmade bed and a small sink. Shireen had wondered under what circumstances he might have needed to spend the night in this electronic
bunker when his own apartment was just upstairs.

  She’d felt overwhelmingly grateful when Hashimi left her alone to read the contents of the files in privacy. But he’d insisted she come and get him if and when she needed his help.

  It had taken her about an hour to access and scan through all the files. Among them was high-resolution satellite footage, magnetic-field data, graphs and tables, scientific papers in preprint form, emails, internal memos and confidential reports. By the end, she had been left in no doubt what she had. Nor did it take her long to work out why people at the very top of the food chain wouldn’t want this information to get out.

  The facts were simple enough. Here was solid evidence that powerful individuals, and possibly entire governments, had been hiding the truth about the Earth’s weakening magnetic field: it was not about to flip, but was instead slowly dying, probably permanently. The official line to the public seemed to be that quite the opposite was taking place: that pockets of the magnetic field in the southern hemisphere were recovering fast and that the crisis would be over by the end of the year. These files told a very different story, however, and it terrified Shireen. She had sat staring into space for a long time, trying to clear her head and calm her nerves. She didn’t understand all of the science, but it didn’t take much effort to piece together what this implied: without a magnetosphere, all life on Earth would eventually be wiped out.

  Shireen had lived her entire life in a world struggling to cope with the severe consequences of climate change, and humankind was finally winning the battle to turn things around. Was it now about to face an even greater challenge to its survival? What she had not been able to find was the source of the cover-up. Who had ordered it, and why?