The God Particle and Other Things That Give Me a Headache Pt. 1

That time I went to Geneva.

Case File: 0157 / 30 March 2010 / Switzerland

The Annoyance

Let me first establish this, right out of the gate: I hate Europe.

It’s not the people, not really. People are the same brand of hopeful, terrified, self-interested ape everywhere you go.

It’s not the food, or the architecture, or the bafflingly small cars.

It’s the noise.

I don’t mean the audible kind, the multilingual chatter and the whine of scooters slicing through ancient alleyways.

I mean the other noise.

The psychic residue. The spiritual stains left behind by millennia of people living and dying and hating and bleeding and praying all over each other in such a densely packed space.

America, for all its faults, is psychically shallow.

You get a few hot spots, sure—Gettysburg is a mess, and parts of the Deep South hum with a particular brand of spectral misery, and we won’t even talk about the Psychic Scream shit shows going on in New York and LA—but for the most part, it’s a clean slate.

The background radiation of human experience is low. You can find quiet there.

In Europe, the quiet was murdered centuries ago.

Every cobblestone, every brick in every cathedral, every inch of soil is saturated with the echoes of things that should have had the decency to fade. It’s a continent soaked in history, and history is a bloody, screaming, messy affair.

For someone like me, walking through London or Rome is like trying to think straight in the middle of a Metallica concert being held during a Viking funeral. It’s a constant, low-grade thrum of bad vibes, a psychic plaque that cakes onto your soul and leaves you with a headache that no amount of aspirin can touch.

And when you have the “gift” of Omniversal Awareness, it’s all very loud and hard to ignore.

I’d learned to live with it.

It was part of the job description, another line item in the long list of occupational hazards, right below ‘existential dread’ and ‘laundry.’ For thirteen years, I’ve been the guy they send when the shadows get a little too deep, when something whispers back from the abyss.

My official title, as far as the handful of people who know what I do are concerned, is True Mage.

In practice, I’m a janitor for reality. I clean up the messes that defy explanation. And usually, those messes are loud, chaotic, and dripping with the kind of ancient, organic nastiness that Europe specializes in.

But this was different.

For the past six weeks, my personal, ever-present headache had been hijacked. The familiar, messy static of human history—the ghostly screams, the phantom plagues, the faint, agonizing echo of a thousand bad poets dying of consumption—was being shouldered aside by something new. It was a high-frequency whine, clean, sterile, and utterly devoid of passion.

It wasn’t the sound of a ghost, or a demon, or any of the usual suspects. It was the sound of a machine thinking too hard about something it was never meant to comprehend. It was the sound of pure, unadulterated logic being pushed into a realm where logic breaks down, and the resulting feedback was drilling a hole directly into the base of my skull.

Unlike the ambient psychic noise of the continent, this signal had a source.

It was a beacon. A sharp, focused beam of wrongness that cut through the background chatter like a laser. My internal compass, the one that usually twitches in the direction of a desecrated graveyard or a freshly opened hellmouth, was screaming one location. It wasn't some gothic castle in the Carpathians or a forgotten crypt beneath Paris.

It was pointing directly at Geneva, Switzerland. Specifically, a sprawling, modern campus on the Franco-Swiss border that looked more like a tech billionaire’s fever dream than a source of supernatural woe.

It was pointing at CERN. The temple of Big Science, home of the Large Hadron Collider.

And that’s why I was standing here, trying to look like I belonged. My usual uniform—a worn leather jacket that had molded itself to my frame over a decade, a faded band t-shirt, and jeans that had seen better days—wasn’t going to cut it.

This place wasn’t about old-world magic; it was about new-world genius. It required a different kind of camouflage.

So I’d raided the back of my closet for my “press pass” persona. A well-tailored but suitably worn black blazer over a vintage, frayed Ramones t-shirt. Dark, slim-fit jeans that were only mildly uncomfortable. And a pair of scuffed-up Doc Martens that had kicked in more than one door, both literal and metaphorical. The look said I could be a writer for Byte, or maybe a documentarian working on a piece about the hubris of man.

It said I belonged in the world of ideas, but I was still ready for a fight.

It was a lie, of course. All of it. The only thing I was ready for was for this to be over.

I badged my way through the main gate with credentials that identified me as a freelance journalist with a focus on emerging technologies. The IDs were flawless, of course. That kind of glamour is bush league. If you don’t learn those your first year, you’re as good as dead.

As I stepped onto the campus proper, the whine in my head intensified. It went from being a drill bit to being the sound of a god-sized tuning fork preparing to shatter a wine glass the size of the planet.

The pressure was immense, a physical weight behind my eyes. It was clean, so clean. It was the psychic equivalent of a hospital operating theater, scrubbed of all life and emotion, leaving only the hum of machinery that was about to perform a very, very delicate operation.

I walked the grounds, letting my senses adjust, my eyes doing the work while my brain tried not to liquefy.

It was a city unto itself. Buildings named after titans of physics, roads buzzing with electric carts, and a population of the smartest people on Earth walking around with lanyards and an air of barely contained excitement. They were all focused on one thing: the big show.

The restart.

In a few hours, they were going to smash two beams of protons together at nearly the speed of light, hoping to glimpse the face of God in the debris. They saw it as the culmination of human ingenuity, a triumph of reason.

I saw it as a bunch of hyper-intelligent kids banging on the basement wall of the universe without checking to see what was on the other side.

My gaze drifted across the campus, past the Globe of Science and Innovation, and settled on a squat, unassuming building.

Building 867. The CERN Control Centre.

That was the heart of it. That was the nexus. The whine was sharpest there, a needle of pure, sterile power aimed right at the sky. From there, they would command the beast that lay sleeping in its 27-kilometer circular tomb hundreds of feet below the earth.

I pulled out a cigarette, a bad habit I’d never managed to kick, and lit it with the battered Zippo Alistair had given me years ago. The flame flickered, steady and real. A small point of chaotic, dirty fire in this temple of cold, hard math. The scientists hurrying past gave me disapproving looks. I was an analog impurity in their digital world. They lost interest quickly thanks to the glamour.

I took a long drag, the smoke a welcome poison against the sterile hum in my skull.

They were all vibrating with anticipation, their minds a symphony of complex equations and theoretical models. They were looking for the Higgs boson, the God particle, the key to unlocking the secrets of mass and creation. They had checked every calculation, simulated every outcome, and prepared for every contingency they could imagine.

But they hadn't imagined me.

And they hadn't accounted for the one thing their instruments could never detect: the structural integrity of reality itself.

I finished my cigarette, flicking the butt into a designated receptacle because, even when facing a potential apocalypse, I’m not a complete monster. The pressure in my head was building to a crescendo. The big event was close.

And as I started walking towards the control room, towards the source of that terrible, clean sound, I felt a familiar wave of resignation wash over me. Thirteen years. Thirteen years of being the guy who stands in the dark and pushes back. I was good at it. I knew I was good at it. And I was so, so tired of having to prove it.

Another Monday, another potential apocalypse.

Time to go to work.