father was leaving. "But it isn't going to happen, isn't it? So long as we don't
replicate what we were doing here, there's no way in which the time-displacement
will repeat. We can't leave the world hanging. We've done enough damage already.
We can't let people be afraid to get on with their lives, to go back --as much as
possible --to the way things were before."
Béranger seemed to be considering this.
"Come on, Gaston. Someone is going to leak it soon enough anyway."
Béranger exhaled. "I know that. You think I don't know that? I don't want to be
obstructionist here. But we do need to think about the consequences --the legal
ramifications."
"Surely it's better if we come forward of our own volition, rather than waiting for
someone to blow the whistle on us."
Béranger looked at the ceiling for a time. "I know you don't like me," he said,
without meeting Lloyd's eyes. Lloyd opened his mouth to protest, but Béranger
raised a hand. "Don't bother denying it. We've never gotten along; we've never been
friends. Part of that is natural, of course --you see it in every lab in the world.
Scientists who think the administrators exist to stymie their work. Administrators
who act as though the scientists are an inconvenience instead of the heart and soul
of the place. But it goes beyond that, doesn't it? No matter what our jobs were, you
wouldn't like me. I'd never stopped to think about stuff like that before. I always
knew some people didn't like me and never would, but I never figured it might be
my fault." He paused, then shrugged a little. "But maybe it is. I never told you what
my vision showed ... and I'm not about to tell you now. But it got me thinking.
Maybe I have been fighting you too much. You think we should go public? Christ, I
don't know if that's the right thing to do or not. I don't know that not going public is
the right thing, either."
He paused. "We've come up with a parallel, by the way --something to toss the
press if it does leak out, an analogy to demonstrate why we aren't culpable."
Lloyd raised his eyebrows.
"The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse," said Béranger.
Lloyd nodded. Early on November 7, 1940, the pavement on the Tacoma Narrows
suspension bridge in Washington state began to ripple. Soon the whole bridge was
oscillating up and down, massively heaving, until, at last, it collapsed. Every highschool
physics student in the world had seen film of this, and for decades they were
given the best-guess explanation: that perhaps the wind had generated a natural
resonance with the bridge, causing it to undulate in waves.
Surely the bridge-builders should have foreseen that, people had said at the time;
after all, resonance was as old as tuning forks. But the resonance explanation was
wrong; resonance requires great precision --if it didn't, every singer could shatter a
wine glass --and random winds almost certainly couldn't produce it. No, it was
shown in 1990 that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had collapsed due to the
fundamental nonlinearity of suspension bridges, an outgrowth of chaos theory --a
branch of science that hadn't even existed when the bridge was built. The engineers
who had designed it hadn't been culpable; there was no way with the knowledge
then available that they could have predicted or prevented the collapse.
"If it had just been visions," said Béranger, "you know, we wouldn't need to cover
our asses; I suspect most people would thank you. But there were all those car
accidents and people falling off ladders, and so on. Are you prepared to take the
blame? Because it won't be me that takes the fall, and it won't be CERN. When it
comes right down to it, no matter how much we talk about Tacoma Narrows and
unforeseen consequences, people will still want a specific human scapegoat, and you
know that's going to be you, Lloyd. It was your experiment."
The Director-General stopped talking. Lloyd considered all this for a time, then
said, "I can handle it."
Béranger nodded once. "Bien. We'll call a press conference." He looked out his
window. "I guess it is time we came clean."
BOOK II
SPRING 2009
Free will is an illusion.
It is synonymous with incomplete perception.
--Walter Kubilius
12
Day Five: Saturday, April 25, 2009
The administrative building at CERN had all sorts of seminar halls and meeting
spaces. For the press conference, they were using a lecture hall with two hundred
seats --every one of which was filled. All the PR people had needed to do was tell
the media that CERN was about to make a major announcement about the cause of
the time displacement, and reporters arrived from all over Europe, plus one from
Japan, one from Canada, and six from the United States.
Béranger was being true to his word: he was letting Lloyd take center stage; if
there were to be a scapegoat, it was going to be him. Lloyd walked up to the lectern
and cleared his throat. "Hello, everyone," he said. "My name is Lloyd Simcoe." He'd
been coached by one of CERN's PR people to spell it out, and so he did just that:
"That's S-I-M-C-O-E, and 'Lloyd' begins with a double-L." The reporters would all
receive DVDs with Lloyd's comments and bio on them, but many would be filing
stories immediately, without a chance to consult the press kits. Lloyd went on. "My
specialty is quark-gluon plasma studies. I'm a Canadian citizen, but I worked for
many years in the United States at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. And
for the last two years, I've been here at CERN, developing a major experiment for
the Large Hadron Collider."
He paused; he was buying time, trying to get his stomach to calm down. It wasn't
that he had a fear of public speaking; he'd spent too long as a university professor
for any of that to remain. But he had no way of knowing what the reaction would be
to what he was about to say.
"This is my associate, Dr. Theodosios Procopides," continued Lloyd.
Theo half-rose from his chair, next to the lectern. "Theo," he said, with a little
smile at the crowd. "Call me Theo."
One big happy family, thought Lloyd. He spelled Theo's first and last names slowly
for the reporters, then took a deep breath and pressed on. "We were conducting an
experiment here on April 21, at precisely 1600 hours Greenwich Mean Time."
He paused again and looked from face to face. It didn't take long for it to sink in.
Journalists immediately started shouting questions, and Lloyd's eyes were assaulted
by camera flashes. He raised his hands, palms out, waiting for the reporters to be
quiet.
"Yes," he said, "yes, I suspect you're right. We have reason to believe that the
time-displacement phenomenon had to do with the work we were doing here with
the Large Hadron Collider."
"How can that be?" asked Klee, a stringer for CNN.
"Are you sure?" called out Jonas, a correspondent for the BBC.
"Why didn't you come forward before this?" called the Reuters reporter.
"I'll take that last question first," said Lloyd. "Or, more precisely, I'll let Dr.
Procopides take it."
"Thanks," said Theo, standing now and moving to the mike. "The, ah, reason we
did not come forward earlier is that we didn't have a theoretical model to explain
what happened." He paused. "Frankly, we still don't; it has, after all, only been four
days since the Flashforward. But the fact is we engineered the highest-energy
particle collision in the history of this planet, and it occurred precisely --to the very
second --at the moment the phenomenon began. We can't ignore that a causal
relationship might exist."
"How sure are you that the two things are linked?" asked a woman from the
Tribune de Genève.
Theo shrugged. "We can't think of anything in our experiment that could have
caused the Flashforward. Then again, we can't think of anything else other than our
experiment that could have caused it, either. It just seems that our work is the most
likely candidate."
Lloyd looked over at Dr. Béranger, whose hawklike face was impassive. When
they'd rehearsed this press conference, Theo had originally said "the most likely
culprit," and Béranger had sworn a blue streak at the word choice. But it turned out
to make no difference. "So are you admitting responsibility?" asked Klee. "Admitting
all the deaths were your fault?"
Lloyd felt his stomach knot, and he could see Béranger's face crease into a frown.
The Director-General looked like he was ready to step in and take over the press
conference.
"We admit that our experiment seems the most likely cause," said Lloyd, moving
over to stand next to Theo. "But we contend that there was no way --absolutely
none --to predict anything remotely like what happened as a consequence of what
we did. This was utterly unforeseen --and unforeseeable. It was, quite simply, what
the insurance industry calls an act of God."
"But all the deaths --" shouted one reporter.
"All the property damage --" shouted another.
Lloyd raised his hands again. "Yes, we know. Believe me, our hearts go out to
every person who was hurt or who lost someone they cared about. A little girl very
dear to me died when a car spun out of control; I would give anything to have her
back. But it could not have been prevented --"
"Of course it could have," shouted Jonas. "If you hadn't done the experiment, it
never would have happened."
"Politely, sir, that's irrational," said Lloyd. "Scientists do experiments all the time,
and we take every reasonable precaution. CERN, as you know, has an enviable
safety record. But people can't simply stop doing things --science can't stop
marching forward. We didn't know that this would happen; we couldn't know it. But
we're coming clean; we're telling the world. I know people are afraid that it's going
to happen again, that at any moment their consciousness might be transported once
more into the future. But it won't; we were the cause, and we can assure you -assure
everyone --that there's no danger of something similar happening again."
There were, of course, cries of outrage in the press --editorials about scientists
messing with things humans were not meant to know about. But, try as they might,
even the sleaziest tabloid wasn't able to come up with a credible physicist willing to
claim that there was any reason to have suspected that the CERN experiment would
cause the displacement of consciousness through time. Of course, that engendered
some halfhearted comments about physicists protecting one another. But polls
rapidly switched from blaming the team at CERN to accepting that this was
something that had been utterly unpredictable, something totally new.
It was still a difficult time personally for Lloyd and Michiko. Michiko had flown back
to Tokyo with Tamiko's body. Lloyd, had, of course, offered to go with her, but he
spoke no Japanese. Normally, those who spoke English would have politely tried to
accommodate Lloyd, but under such dire circumstances it seemed clear that he
would be left out of almost every conversation. There was also the awkwardness of it
all: Lloyd wasn't Tamiko's stepfather; he wasn't Michiko's husband. This was a time
for Michiko and Hiroshi, regardless of whatever differences they'd had in the past, to
mourn and lay to rest their daughter. As much as he, too, was crushed by what had
happened to Tamiko, Lloyd had to admit that there was little he could do to aid
Michiko in Japan.
And so, while she flew east to her homeland, Lloyd stayed at CERN, trying to
make a baffled world understand the physics of what had occurred.
"Dr. Simcoe," said Bernard Shaw, "perhaps you can explain to us what
happened?"
"Of course," said Lloyd, making himself comfortable. He was in CERN's
teleconferencing room, a camera no bigger than a thimble facing him from atop an
emaciated tripod. Shaw, naturally, was at CNN Center in Atlanta. Lloyd had five
other similar interviews lined up for later in the day, including one in French. "Most of
us have heard the term 'spacetime' or 'the space-time continuum.' It refers to the
combination of the three dimensions of length, width, and height, and the fourth
dimension of time."
Lloyd nodded at a female technician standing off camera, and a still image of a
dark-haired white man appeared on the monitor behind him. "That's Hermann
Minkowski," said Lloyd. "He's the fellow who first proposed the concept of the spacetime
continuum." A pause. "It's hard to illustrate the concept of four dimensions
directly, but if we simplify it by removing one spatial dimension, it's easy."
He nodded again and the picture changed.
"This is a map of Europe. Of course, Europe is three dimensional, but we're all
used to using two-dimensional maps. And Hermann Minkowski was born here in
Kaunas, in what is now Lithuania, in 1864."
A light lit up inside Lithuania.
"There it is. Actually, though, let's pretend that the light isn't the city of Kaunas,
but rather Minkowski himself, being born in 1864."
The legend "A.D. 1864" appeared at the lower-right of the map.
"If we go back a few years, we can see there's no Minkowski before that point."
The map date changed to A.D. 1863, then A.D. 1862, then A.D. 1861, and, sure
