she, at least, hadn't been hurt. "Anybody seriously injured?" he asked.
"A few bruises and another bloody nose," said Michiko, "but nothing major. You?"
Lloyd scanned for the woman who had banged her head. She hadn't shown up
yet. "One possible concussion, a broken arm, and a bad burn." He paused. "We
should really call for some ambulances --get the injured to a hospital."
"I'll take care of that," said Michiko. She disappeared into the office.
The assembled group was getting larger; it now numbered about two hundred
people. "Everyone!" shouted Lloyd. "Your attention, please! Votre attention, s'il vous
pla.t!" He waited until all eyes were on him. "Look around and see if you can account
for your coworkers or office mates or lab staff. If anyone you've seen today is
missing, let me know. And if anyone here in the lobby requires immediate medical
attention, let me know that, too. We've called for some ambulances."
As he said that, Michiko re-emerged. Her skin was even paler than normal, and
her voice was quavering as she spoke. "There won't be any ambulances," she said.
"Not anytime soon, anyway. The emergency operator told me they're all tied up in
Geneva. Apparently every driver on the roads blacked out; they can't even begin to
tally up how many people are dead."
CERN was founded fifty-five years previously, in 1954. Its staff consisted of three
thousand people of which about a third were physicists or engineers, a third were
technicians, and the remaining third were split evenly between administrators and
craftspeople.
The Large Hadron Collider was built at a cost of five billion American dollars inside
the same circular underground tunnel straddling the Swiss-French border that still
housed CERN's older, no-longer-used Large Electron-Positron collider; LEP had been
in service from 1989 to 2000. The LHC used 10-Tesla dual-field superconducting
electromagnets to propel particles around the giant ring. CERN had the largest and
most powerful cryogenic system in the world, using liquid helium to chill the magnets
to just 1.8 Celsius degrees above absolute zero.
The Large Hadron Collider was actually two accelerators in one: one accelerated
particles clockwise; the other, counterclockwise. A particle beam going in one
direction could be made to collide with another beam going in the opposite direction,
and then --
And then E=mc2, big time.
Einstein's equation said simply that matter and energy are interchangeable. If you
collide particles at high enough velocities, the kinetic energy of the collision may be
converted into exotic particles.
The LHC had been activated in 2006, and during its first few years of work it did
proton-proton collisions, producing energies of up to fourteen trillion electron-volts.
But now it was time to move on to Phase Two, and Lloyd Simcoe and Theo
Procopides had led the team designing the first experiment. In Phase Two, instead of
colliding protons together, lead nuclei --each two hundred and seventeen times
more massive than a proton --would be rammed into each other. The resulting
collisions would produce eleven hundred and fifty trillion electron volts, comparable
to the energy level in the universe only a billionth of a second after the big bang. At
that energy level, Lloyd and Theo should have produced the Higgs boson, a particle
that physicists had been pursuing for half a century.
Instead, they produced death and destruction on a staggering scale.
Gaston Béranger, Director-General of CERN, was a compact, hairy man with a
sharp, high-bridged nose. He had been sitting in his office when the phenomenon
occurred. It was the largest office on the CERN campus, with a long real-wood
conference table directly in front of his desk, and a large, mirror-backed, wellstocked
bar. Béranger didn't drink himself --not anymore; there was nothing harder
than being an alcoholic in France, where wine flowed with every meal; Gaston had
lived in Paris until his appointment at CERN. But when ambassadors came to see
what their millions were being spent on, he needed to be able to pour them a glass
without ever once showing how desperately he would have liked to have joined
them.
Of course, Lloyd Simcoe and his sidekick Theo Procopides were trying their big
experiment in the LHC this afternoon; he could have cleared his schedule to have
gone and watched that --but there was always something major going, and if he
went to watch every run of the accelerators he'd never get any work done. Besides,
he needed to prepare for his meeting tomorrow morning with the team from Gec
Alsthom, and -
"You pick that up!"
Gaston Béranger had no doubt where he was: it was his house, on Geneva's Right
Bank. The Ikea Billy bookcases were the same, as were the couch and the easy
chair. But the Sony TV, and its stand, were gone. Instead, what must have been a
flat-panel monitor was mounted on the wall above where the TV used to be. It was
showing an international lacrosse game. One team was clearly Spain's, but he didn't
recognize the other team, clad in green-and-purple jerseys.
A young man had come into the room. Gaston didn't recognize him, either. He
had been wearing what appeared to be a black leather jacket, and had thrown it over
the end of the couch, where it had slipped down to the carpeted floor. A small robot,
not much bigger than a shoebox, rolled out from under an end table and started
toward the fallen coat. Gaston pointed a finger at the robot and barked, "Arrêt!" The
machine froze, then, after a moment, retreated back under the table.
The young man turned around. He looked to be maybe nineteen or twenty. On his
right cheek there was what seemed to be an animated tattoo of a lightning bolt; it
zigzagged its way across the young man's face in five discrete jumps, then repeated
the cycle over and over again.
As he turned the left side of his face became visible --and it was horrifying, all
the muscles and blood vessels clearly visible, as if, somehow, he'd treated his skin
with a chemical that had turned it transparent. The young man's right hand was
covered over with an exoskeletal glove, extending his fingers into long, mechanical
digits terminating in glistening surgically sharp silver points.
"I said pick that up!" snapped Gaston in French --or, at least it was his voice; he
had no sense of willing the words out. "As long as I'm paying for your clothes, you'll
take good care of them."
The young man glared at Gaston. He was positive he didn't know him, but he did
bear a resemblance to ... whom? It was hard to tell with that ghastly halftransparent
face, but the high forehead, the thin lips, those cool gray eyes, that
aquiline nose ...
The pointed tips of the finger extensions retracted with a whir, and the boy picked
up the jacket between mechanical thumb and forefinger, holding it now as if it were
something distasteful. Gaston's gaze tracked with him as he moved across the living
room. As it did so, Gaston couldn't help noticing that a lot of other details were
wrong, too: the familiar pattern of books on the shelves had changed completely, as
if someone had reorganized everything at some point. And, indeed, there seemed to
be far fewer volumes than there should have been, as though a purge had been done
of the family library. Another robot, this one spiderlike and about the size of a
splayed human hand, was working its way along the shelves, apparently dusting.
On one wall, where they used to have a framed print of Monet's Le Moulin de la
Galette, there was now an alcove, displaying what looked like a Henry Moore
sculpture --but, no, no, there could be no alcove there; that wall was shared with
the house next door. It must have really been a flat piece, a hologram or something
similar, hanging on the wall and giving the illusion of depth; if so, the illusion was
absolutely perfect.
The closet doors had changed, too; they slid open of their own volition as the boy
approached. He reached in, pulled out a hanger, and put the jacket on it. He then
replaced the hanger inside the closet ... and the jacket slipped from it to the closet
floor.
Gaston's voice lashing out again: "Damn it, Marc, can't you be more careful?"
Marc ...
Marc!
Mon Dieu!
That's why he looked familiar.
A family resemblance.
Marc. The name Marie-Claire and he had chosen for the child she was carrying.
Marc Béranger.
Gaston hadn't even yet held the baby in his arms, hadn't burped it over his
shoulder, hadn't changed its diaper, and yet here he was, grown up, a man --a
frightening, hostile man.
Marc looked at the fallen jacket, his cheek still flashing, but then he walked away
from the closet, letting the door hiss shut behind him.
"Damn you, Marc," said Gaston's voice. "I'm getting sick of your attitude. You're
never going to get a job if you keep behaving like this."
"Screw you," said the boy, his voice deep, his tone a sneer.
Those were baby's first words --not "mama," not "papa," but "Screw you."
And, as if there could be any doubt remaining, Marie-Claire entered Gaston's field
of view just then, emerging through another sliding door from the den. "Don't speak
to your father that way," she said.
Gaston was taken aback; it was Marie-Claire, without question, but she looked
more like her own mother than herself. Her hair was white, her face was lined, and
she'd put on a good fifteen kilos.
"Screw you, too," said Marc.
Gaston rather suspected that his voice would protest, "Don't talk to your mother
like that." It did not disappoint him.
Before Marc turned back around, Gaston caught sight of a shaved area at the
back of the kid's head, and a metal socket surgically implanted there.
It had to be a hallucination. It had to. But what a terrible hallucination to have!
Marie-Claire was due any day now. They'd tried for years to get pregnant --Gaston
ran a facility that could precisely unite an electron and a positron, but somehow he
and Marie-Claire had been unable to get an egg and a sperm, each millions of times
larger than those subatomic particles, to come together. But finally it had happened;
finally God had smiled upon them, finally she was pregnant.
And now, at last, nine months later, they were soon to give birth. All those
Lamaze classes, all that planning, all that fixing up of the nursery ... it was soon
going to come to fruition.
And now this dream; that's all it must be. Just a bad dream. Cold feet; he'd had
the worst nightmare of his life just before he got married. Why should this be any
different?
But it was different. This was much more realistic than any dream he'd ever had.
He thought about the plug on the back of his son's head; thought about images
being pumped directly into a brain --the drug of the future?
"Get off my back," said Marc. "I've had a hard day."
"Oh, really?" said Gaston's voice, dripping with sarcasm. "You've had a hard day,
eh? A hard day terrorizing tourists in Old Town, was it? I should have let you rot in
jail, you ungrateful punk --"
Gaston was shocked to find himself sounding so much like his own father --the
things his father had said to him when he was Marc's age, the things he'd promised
himself he'd never say to his own children.
"Now, Gaston ... " said Marie-Claire.
"Well, if he doesn't appreciate what he's got here ... "
"I don't need this shit," sneered Marc.
"Enough!" snapped Marie-Claire. "Enough."
"I hate you," said Marc. "I hate you both."
Gaston's mouth opened to reply, and then -
--and then, suddenly, he was back in his office at CERN.
After reporting the news of all the deaths, Michiko Komura had immediately gone
back into the front office of the LHC control center. She kept trying to phone the
school in Geneva that her eight-year-old daughter Tamiko attended; Michiko was
divorced from her first husband, a Tokyo executive. But all she got was busy signal
after busy signal, and the Swiss phone company, for some reason, wasn't offering to
automatically notify her when the line became free.
Lloyd was standing behind her as she kept trying, but finally she looked up at him,
her eyes desperate. "I can't get through," she said. "I've got to go there."
"I'll come with you," said Lloyd at once. They ran out of the building, into the
warm April air, the ruddy sun already kissing the horizon, the mountains looming in
the distance.
Michiko's car --a Toyota --was parked here, too, but they took Lloyd's leased
Fiat, with Lloyd driving. They made their way out of the CERN campus, passing by
the towering cylindrical liquid helium tanks, and got onto Route de Meyrin, which
took them through Meyrin, the town just east of CERN. Although they saw some cars
at the sides of the road, things looked no worse than they did after one of the rare
winter storms, except, of course, that there was no snow on the ground.
They passed quickly through the town. A short distance outside it was Geneva's
Cointrin Airport. Pillars of black smoke rose to the sky; a large Swissair jet had
crashed on the one runway. "My God," said Michiko. She brought a knuckle to her
mouth. "My God."
They continued on into Geneva proper, situated at the westernmost tip of Lac
Léman. Geneva was a wealthy metropolis of 200,000, known for ultra-posh
restaurants and wildly expensive shops.
Signs that would normally be lit up were out, and lots of cars --many of them
