The God Particle and Other Things That Give Me a Headache Pt. 2

From bad to worse...

Case File: 0157 / 30 March 2010 / Switzerland

The Problem

Getting into the CERN Control Centre building was easy.

A confident stride, a flash of the press pass, and a targeted whisper of glamour at the security guard to make his brain replace my face with ‘Authorized Personnel.’ Simple stuff.

The real challenge was the room itself—the sanctum sanctorum.

The control room wasn’t a place for journalists, especially not on the biggest day in the history of physics. It was a clean room for the high priests of science, and I was carrying far too much psychic dirt to belong.

The building’s interior was a sterile labyrinth of white hallways and glass-walled offices. The air buzzed, not just with the whine in my head, but with the palpable electricity of human intellect pushed to its absolute limit. Ph.D.s and engineers moved with a focused, almost frantic energy, their conversations a rapid-fire volley of jargon that was as foreign to me as Enochian.

They were all believers here, true believers in the church of the empirical. Their faith was in numbers, in data, in the elegant, unbreakable laws of the cosmos. It was a beautiful, noble, and suicidally naive point of view.

I needed an in.

Not just a keycard, but a vector. Someone with enough authority to be near the center of things, but whose attention was so narrowly focused on the sublime mechanics of the experiment that they’d be blind to a more terrestrial threat slipping in on their flank. A substantial part of being a great magician was also being a great conman.

I scanned the faces rushing past—men and women, old and young, a united nations of genius. I could feel the shape of their thoughts: tangled skeins of equations, worries about coolant flow, giddy anticipation. They were all lost in the machine. I just needed to find the one most deeply entranced.

And then I saw her.

She was standing near a coffee machine that looked like it could launch a satellite, holding a tablet like it was a sacred text. I reached out with my mind and found a name… Dr. Anya Sharma.

She radiated an intensity that made the air around her seem to vibrate. She was maybe my age, though she carried it with a frantic energy that made her seem younger. Her dark hair was pulled back in a severe, no-nonsense ponytail, but a few rebellious strands had escaped to frame a face that was all sharp angles and sharper intelligence.

She wasn’t just a participant; she was a True Believer.

The experiment wasn’t a job to her; it was a crusade. Her excitement was a beacon, a miniature sun of pure, unadulterated intellectual passion. She was perfect.

She was talking to a pair of younger physicists, her hands gesturing emphatically as she pointed to a complex graph on her tablet. Her voice was crisp, clear, and carried the conviction of someone who has done the math a thousand times and knows she is right. She was the tip of the spear. And people at the tip of the spear are often the easiest to blindside.

I waited for her acolytes to disperse, then made my move, walking toward the coffee machine with the casual air of someone who needed a caffeine fix before the big show. I timed it perfectly, arriving just as she turned from the machine, a tiny cup of espresso in her hand.

“Doctor,” I said, my voice low and calm.

She looked up, her eyes momentarily losing their theoretical focus to register the frayed Ramones logo in front of her. A flicker of annoyance. I was an unscheduled variable. “Do I know you?”

“No. Name’s Nathaniel Verone. Freelance.” I gestured vaguely with my thumb towards the press pass clipped to my blazer. “I won’t take much of your time. I know today is… momentous.”

“It is,” she said, her tone clipped. She was already dismissing me, her gaze wanting to return to the scripture on her tablet. “If you want a quote, my assistant can schedule something for after the beam stabilization.”

“This isn’t for a quote,” I said, leaning against the counter.

I had to hook her, and fast. I couldn’t talk about magic, about psychic noise or the structural integrity of reality. I had to speak her language, or a dialect close enough to be unnerving. “I’m here about the preliminary energy readings. The ones you’re attributing to quantum foam instability.”

That got her attention. Her eyes snapped back to mine, sharp and analytical. “Those readings are classified. How would you know about them?”

“My field is… adjacent to yours,” I said, letting the ambiguity hang in the air. “Let’s call it theoretical risk analysis. Some of us believe that when you push this hard at the fabric of spacetime, you don’t just have to worry about the machine. You have to worry about the workshop. The readings you’re seeing? That’s not the foam. That’s the foundation creaking.”

She stared at me, her head tilted slightly. For a split second, I saw a flicker of something beyond academic curiosity. A sliver of unease. I had hit a nerve. But her entire life, her entire worldview, was built on a scaffold of logic and evidence. I was an anomaly without data to back me up.

“The foundation,” she repeated, her voice flat, the skepticism flooding back in and drowning that flicker of doubt. “Mr. Verone, we have run every conceivable simulation. Our models account for every variable, from cosmic ray interference to seismic activity. The structural integrity of the… ‘foundation,’ as you put it, is perfectly sound.”

“You’ve checked every calculation,” I said, pushing off the counter and meeting her gaze directly. “Every single one, except the most important one: the structural integrity of the basement wall of reality itself. You’re about to ring the biggest dinner bell in history, Doctor. You have no idea what might be hungry.”

That was it. I’d crossed the line from ‘eccentric analyst’ to ‘full-blown crackpot.’ Her expression hardened, the brief moment of engagement replaced by a polite but impenetrable wall of scientific certainty. She saw the blazer, the band shirt, the carefully constructed persona, and filed me away under ‘kook.’

“Thank you for your concern, Mr. Verone,” she said, her voice dripping with finality. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to help discover the secrets of the universe.”

She moved to step around me. As she did, I held up a hand.

“One last thing.” My fingers brushed the sleeve of her lab coat, a touch so light she barely registered it. It was all I needed. A moment of contact, a whisper of intent. A small, focused glamour transferred from me to the keycard clipped to her belt.

It wouldn’t rewrite its data, but it would rewrite the perception of anyone who saw it. For the next hour, that card would read ‘Universal Access’ to any electronic or human eye that fell upon it.

She pulled back instinctively, a frown creasing her brow. “Don’t touch me.”

“My apologies,” I said, giving her a wry, tired smile. “Enjoy the show.”

She gave me one last look, a mixture of pity and irritation, then turned and walked away, her mind already back among the quarks and gluons. She hadn't convinced me I was wrong, and I hadn’t convinced her I was right. A perfect failure on both ends.

I gave it a two-minute count, then walked to the secure entrance of the control room. I flashed the guard my own useless pass, but angled myself so his gaze was drawn to Dr. Sharma’s keycard, which I had palmed from her belt during our little dance. He glanced at it, nodded, and waved me through. Bush league.

The control room was exactly as I’d pictured it, only more so.

It was a tiered amphitheater of intellect, a shrine to data. Banks upon banks of monitors covered every wall, displaying a dizzying array of graphs, schematics, and cascading numbers. The air was cool and still, humming with the quiet power of a thousand computers and one giant, underground god-machine. At the front, a massive screen showed a stylized graphic of the 27-kilometer ring, with two points of light screaming towards each other.

I found a spot at the back, near a fire extinguisher, and leaned against the wall, doing my best to look like an inconsequential piece of the architecture.

The whine in my head had become a deafening, silent roar. It wasn't a sound anymore; it was the absence of sound, a void of pressure that seemed to be sucking all the ambient psychic noise out of the room. All the hope, the fear, the excitement of the scientists—it was all being consumed by this sterile, hungry hum.

The source was here.

It was the machine.

It was the experiment.

The countdown began, voiced by a calm, disembodied voice that echoed through the room. “Cinq… quatre… trois…”

The atmosphere was electric. The faces of the scientists, illuminated by the glow of their screens, were a portrait of rapturous anticipation. This was their moment. They were on the verge of confirming a lifetime of work. They looked like kids on Christmas morning, waiting to open the biggest present in the universe.

“Deux… un…”

A new voice, sharp and triumphant, cut through the tension. “Collision confirmed! We have a collision!”

The room erupted. Cheers, applause, people hugging each other, crying tears of joy.

On the main screen, the data began to pour in. A beautiful, chaotic flower of energy bloomed from the point of impact, showering the detectors with a rain of subatomic shrapnel. To them, it was a masterpiece, a perfect cascade of information that would take them months, years, to fully decipher. A wave of collective euphoria washed through the room.

But I wasn't looking at the data. I was looking at a small, unassuming monitor in the corner of my eye. A raw security feed from inside the collider tunnel itself, camera PT-88V.

And I saw it.

For a single frame, one-thirtieth of a second, at the precise point of collision, the fiery explosion of energy was replaced by something else.

It was a patch of perfect, featureless black.

It wasn’t a shadow. A shadow is the absence of light. This was the absence of everything. It was a hole in the image, a hole in the light, a hole in the world. It was a piece of pure, unadulterated nothing, a visual representation of a null set. It didn't absorb the light; it erased the very concept of the space the light should have been in.

Then it was gone. The feed flickered back to the swirling energies of the collision. No one else saw it. No one else could have seen it. But I felt it. I felt it like a needle of ice in my soul. Reality had just taken a punch, and for a fraction of a second, it had staggered. The basement wall had a crack in it.

My eyes darted across the room, searching for any sign that the world had registered the blow. Everyone was still celebrating.

But then my gaze fell on a man a few rows down. He was a portly, fussy-looking physicist with a meticulously trimmed mustache, staring intently at his own monitor, his brow furrowed in concentration. One moment, he was there, a solid presence in a slightly-too-tight shirt.

The next, his chair was empty.

There was no flash of light, no puff of smoke, no sound. It wasn't a disappearance. It was a deletion. The man was simply… not. The space he had occupied a second before now held only air and the faint hum of a cooling fan. His coffee cup still sat on the desk beside his keyboard.

I felt it like a punch to the gut, a sudden, jarring lurch in the fabric of existence. A thread had been pulled. A line of code erased.

My head snapped towards Dr. Sharma. She was at the main console, her face alight with triumph.

But then she blinked. A tiny frown, a flicker of confusion, passed across her features. It was the look of someone trying to remember something that was just on the tip of their tongue. She scanned the consoles, her eyes briefly passing over the empty chair where Klaus had been.

She turned to the man beside her, a thin, balding physicist who was clapping her on the shoulder. “An incredible success, Anya!” he beamed.

“It is,” she agreed, but the frown lingered. “Wait… Wasn’t Klaus supposed to run those final diagnostic numbers?”

The man’s smile didn’t falter, but his eyes were blank. He looked at the empty chair, then back at her, his expression one of complete, untroubled puzzlement.

“Who’s Klaus?”

The question hung in the air, harmless and horrifying. The man hadn't just died. He hadn't been teleported away. He had been retroactively unpublished from the book of life. The Null, the unspeakable, unimaginable evil from outside the margins of creation, had seeped through the crack.

It didn't kill.

It didn't destroy.

It erased.

And it was just getting started.