during the first Flashforward. A work stoppage in the near future to accommodate a
second Flashforward would result in less lost productivity than would one months or
years down the road when all businesses and factories were back to full operation.
The debates ranged over countless topics: economics, national security (what if
one nation launched a nuclear attack against another just prior to the departure of
consciousness?), philosophy, religion, science, and democratic principles. Should a
decision that affects everyone on the planet really be made on a one-vote-per-nation
basis? Should votes be weighted according to each nation's population, in which the
Chinese voice should be heard the loudest? Or should the decision be differed to a
global referendum?
Finally, after much acrimony and argument, the UN made its decision: the LHC
experiment would indeed be repeated, offset, as many had insisted, by twelve hours
from the first occurrence.
The European Union ambassadors all insisted on one proviso, before agreeing to
allow CERN to attempt to replicate the experiment: there would be no governmentlevel
lawsuits against CERN, the countries that owned it, or any of its staff members.
A UN resolution was passed, preventing any such lawsuits from ever being brought
at the World Court. Of course, nothing could prevent civil suits, although the Swiss
and French governments had both declared that their courts would not hear such
cases, and it was difficult to establish that any other courts had jurisdiction.
The Third World represented the biggest logistical problem: undeveloped or
underdeveloped regions where news arrived slowly, if at all. It was decided that the
experiment wouldn't be replicated for another six weeks: that should be enough time
to get the word to everyone who could possibly be reached.
And so, preparations began for humanity to take another peek at tomorrow.
Michiko dubbed it Operation Klaatu. In the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still,
Klaatu, an alien, neutralized all electricity worldwide for thirty minutes precisely at
noon Washington time, in order to demonstrate the need for world peace, but he did
it with remarkable care, so that no one was hurt. Planes stayed aloft, operating
theaters still had power. This time, they were going to try to be as careful as Klaatu,
even though, as Lloyd pointed out, in the movie Klaatu was shot dead for his efforts.
Of course, being an alien, he managed to come back to life ...
Lloyd was frustrated. The first time, for whatever reason, the experiment had
failed to produce the Higgs boson; he wanted to tweak the parameters slightly, in
hopes of producing that elusive particle. But he knew he had to reproduce everything
exactly as before. He'd probably never get a chance to refine his technique; never
get a chance to generate the Higgs. And that, of course, meant he'd likely never get
his Nobel Prize.
Unless --
Unless he could come up with an explanation for the physics of what had
happened. But even though it was his experiment that had apparently caused the
twenty-one-year jump ahead, and even though he, and everyone at CERN, had been
racking their brains trying to determine the cause, he had no special insights into
why it had occurred. It was just as likely that someone else --indeed, possibly even
someone other than a particle physicist --would figure out exactly what had
happened.
25
D-Day.
Almost everything was the same. Of course, it was now the ungodly hour of five
A.M., instead of five P.M., but since there were no windows in the LHC control room,
there was no real way to tell. There were also more people present. It was hard to
get a decent crowd of journalists for most particle-physics experiments, but for this
one, the CERN Media Service actually had to draw lots to determine which dozen
reporters could have access. Cameras were broadcasting the scene worldwide.
All over the planet, people were lying down in bed, on couches, on the floor, on
the grass, on bare ground. No one was drinking hot beverages. No commercial,
military, or private planes were flying. All traffic in all cities had come to a halt -
indeed, had been at a halt for hours now, to make sure there would be virtually no
need for emergency-room operations or air ambulances during the replication.
Thruways and highways were either vacant or giant parking lots.
Two space shuttles --one American, one Japanese --were currently in orbit, but
there was no reason to think they were in danger; the astronauts would simply enter
their sleeping bags for the duration. The nine people aboard the International Space
Station would do the same thing.
No surgery was under way; no pizzas were being tossed in the air; no machinery
was being operated. At any given moment, a third of humanity is normally asleep -but
right now almost all of Earth's seven billion people were wide awake. Ironically,
though, less activity was going on than at any other point in history.
As with the first time, the collision was being controlled by computer. Lloyd really
had nothing much to do. The reporters had their cameras on tripods, but they were
lying on the floor or on tabletops. Theo was already lying down, too, and so was
Michiko --a bit too close to Theo, for Lloyd's taste. There was an area of floor left in
front of the main console. Lloyd lay down on it. He could see one of the clocks from
there, and he counted down with it: "Forty seconds."
Would he be transported back to New England? Surely the vision wouldn't pick up
where it had left off months ago. Surely he wouldn't be back in bed with --God, he
didn't even know her name. She hadn't said a word; she could have been American,
of course, or from Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, France --it
was so hard to tell.
"Thirty seconds," Lloyd said.
Where had they met? How long had they been married? Did they have kids?
"Twenty seconds."
Was it a happy marriage? It had certainly seemed to be, during that one brief
glimpse. But, then, he'd even seen his own parents be tender toward each other
upon occasion.
"Ten seconds."
Maybe the woman wouldn't even be in his next vision.
"Nine seconds."
Indeed, it was likely he'd be sleeping --and not necessarily even dreaming -twenty-
one years from now.
"Eight seconds."
The chances were almost zero that he'd see himself again --that he'd be
anywhere near a mirror, or be watching himself on closed-circuit TV.
"Seven."
But surely he'd see something revelatory, something significant.
"Six."
Something that would answer at least a few of his burning questions.
"Five."
Something that would bring closure to what he'd seen before.
"Four."
He did love Michiko, of course.
"Three."
And he and she would be married, regardless of what the first vision, or this one,
might portray.
"Two."
But, still, it would be nice to know that other woman's name ...
"One."
He closed his eyes, as if that would better summon a vision.
"Zero."
Nothing. Darkness. Dammit, he was asleep in the future! It wasn't fair; it was his
experiment after all. If anyone deserved a second vision, it was him, and --
He opened his eyes; he was still flat on his back. Over his head, high above, was
the ceiling of the LHC control center.
Oh, Christ --oh, Christ.
Twenty-one years from now he would be sixty-six years old.
And twenty-one years from this vision, a few months later -
He'd be dead.
Just like Theo.
God damn it. God damn it.
He rolled his head to the side, and happened to see the clock.
The blue digits were silently metamorphosing: 22:00:11; 22:00:12, 22:00:13 ...
He hadn't blacked out --
Nothing had happened.
The attempt at replicating the Flashforward had failed, and --
Green lights.
Green lights on the ALICE console!
Lloyd rose to his feet. Theo was getting up as well.
"What happened?" asked one of the reporters.
"A big fat nothing," said another.
"Please," said Michiko. "Please, everyone stay on the floor --we don't know that
it's safe yet."
Theo thumped the flat of his hand against Lloyd's back. Lloyd was grinning from
ear to ear. He turned and embraced Theo.
"Guys," said Michiko, propping herself up on her elbow. "Nothing happened."
Lloyd and Theo disengaged, and Lloyd surged across the room. He reached out
and took Michiko's hands and pulled her to her feet, then hugged her.
"Honey," said Michiko, "what is it?"
Lloyd gestured at the console. Michiko's eyes went wide. "Sinjirarenai!" she
exclaimed. "You got it!"
Lloyd grinned even more. "We got it!"
"Got what?" asked one of the reporters. "Nothing happened, damn it!"
"Oh, yes it did," said Lloyd.
Theo was grinning, too. "Yes, indeed!"
"What?" demanded the same reporter.
"The Higgs!" said Lloyd.
"The what?"
"The Higgs boson!" said Lloyd, his arm around Michiko's waist. "We got the
Higgs!"
Another reporter stifled a yawn. "Big fucking deal," he said.
Lloyd was being interviewed by one of the journalists. "What happened?" asked
the man, a gruff, middle-aged correspondent for the London Times. "Or, more
precisely, why didn't anything happen?"
"How can you say nothing happened? We got the Higgs boson!"
"Nobody cares about that. We want --"
"You're wrong," said Lloyd emphatically. "This is major; this is as big as it gets.
Under any other circumstances, this would have been a front-page story in every
newspaper in the world."
"But the visions --"
"I have no explanation for why they weren't reproduced. But today's event was
hardly a failure. Scientists have been hoping to find the Higgs boson ever since
Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg predicted its existence half a century ago --"
"But people were expecting another glimpse of the future, and --"
"I understand that," said Lloyd. "But finding the Higgs --not some damn-fool
quest for precognition --was why the Large Hadron Collider was built in the first
place. We knew we'd need to get up over ten trillion electron volts to produce the
Higgs. That's why the nineteen countries that own CERN came together to build the
LHC. That's why the United States, Canada, Japan, Israel, and other countries
donated billions to the project as well. This was good science, important science --"
"Even so," said the reporter, "the Wall Street Journal estimated the aggregate
total cost for your labor stoppage amounted to over fourteen billion dollars. That
makes Project Klaatu the most expensive undertaking in human history."
"But we got the Higgs! Don't you see? Not only does this confirm the electroweak
theory, it proves the existence of the Higgs field. We now know what causes objects
--you, me, this table, this planet --to have mass. The Higgs boson carries a
fundamental field that endows elementary particles with mass --and we've
confirmed its existence!"
"No one cares about a boson," said the reporter. "People can't even say the word
without snickering."
"Call it the Higgs particle, then; lots of physicists do. But whatever you call it, it's
the most important physics discovery so far in the twenty-first century. Sure, we're
not even a decade into the century yet, but I'll bet that at the end of this century,
people will look back and say this was still the most important physics discovery of
the century."
"That doesn't explain why we didn't get anything --"
"We did," said Lloyd, exasperated.
"I mean why we didn't get any visions."
Lloyd puffed his cheeks and blew out air. "Look, we tried the best we could.
Maybe the original phenomenon was a onetime fluke. Maybe it had a high degree of
dependence on initial conditions that have subtly changed. Maybe --"
"You took a dive," said the reporter.
Lloyd was taken aback. "Pardon?"
"You took a dive. You deliberately muffed the experiment."
"We did not take --"
"You wanted to torpedo all the lawsuits; even after that song-and-dance at the
UN, you still wanted to be sure that no one could ever successfully sue you, and,
well, if you showed that CERN had nothing to do with the Flashforward the first time
--"
"We didn't fake this. We didn't fake the Higgs. We made a breakthrough, for God's
sake."
"You cheated us," said the man from the Times. "You cheated the entire planet."
"Don't be ridiculous," said Lloyd.
"Oh, come on. If you didn't take a dive, then why weren't you able to give us all
another glimpse of the future?"
"I --I don't know. We tried. Really, we tried."
"There'll be an inquest, you know."
Lloyd rolled his eyes, but the reporter was probably right. "Look," said Lloyd. "We
did everything we could. The computer logs will prove that; they'll show that every
single experimental parameter was exactly the same. Of course, there is the problem
of chaos, and dependent sensitivity, but we really did the best we could, and the
result was hardly a failure --not by a long shot." The reporter looked like he was
about to object again --probably claim that the logs could have been tampered with.
But Lloyd held up a hand. "Still, maybe you are right; maybe this does prove that
