WWSO - Prologue

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Robert Burns, "To a Mouse"

Six metres per second, north by north-west.

A physicist would look at such a figure and suggest that it perhaps described a moderate jog, or large, slow-moving vehicle. In fact, this particular velocity belonged to the small, Japanese-made hatchback which was crawling through the Mont Blanc Tunnel, crossing the French-Italian border. The occupants, both tourists, had been taking a scenic drive across Europe – they'd been on a gondola in Venice, visited Milan's La Scala opera house (and fallen asleep during a production of The Barber of Seville, to their chagrin), and walked through the cobbled streets of Verona (which they remarked seemed like "something out of a fairy-tale"). That which occupied them at this moment was far less interesting – the peak-hour crawl toward Geneva. The most direct route was to take the tunnel under the Mont Blanc mountain range, which had seemed like a good idea at the time. Certainly, the route, like most of Europe, was picturesque and the traffic, light.

Until they hit the tunnel itself.

The Mont Blanc Tunnel is reviled across both of the countries it spans at the site of horrific accidents and fires. Nowadays, it reviled as the site of some ferocious speed limits, which at the worst times produces horrendous congestion. For this reason, the car, which had spent most of the day careering down open country roads at a hundred miles an hour, was now crawling behind ten kilometers of commuters.

As he crawled doggedly in first, the driver noted the multitude of shiny, new German-made sports cars, and how starkly they contrasted with the mass of steel and rust he sat in. Not that there was anything wrong with Japanese cars, but this particular example had a chronically overheating radiator that just smelled of failure (right now, literally), and the stop-start traffic wasn't helping. Warning lights blinked on, telling him it was the engine's time of the month.

"Oh no you don't, not yet... Plenty of time for that once we're in Geneva. Just hold out for a while longer and I'll make sure I take you in for a servicethistime."

As the engine wasn't giving much promise, he turned to his passenger, sleeping next to him in the passenger seat. A girl of barely thirteen, her peaceable restfulness gave him some welcome solace – and a good reason to put on some steam. He smiled. At times like this, his sister was always a welcome comfort. Samantha by name, or Sammy to her brother, who used to pretend there was some sort of angel behind that pretty face and auburn hair. Nowadays, he didn't need to. In fact, given the extreme likelihood he was going to break down in the middle of a busy highway on a freezing winter's night, he could not think of anyone he'd rather be stuck with.

Just as he was starting to feel better about everything, he was nearly sideswiped by an irate Italian driver, who promptly gave him a piece of his mind, consisting mostly of vulgarities totally lost on the English-speaker. Returning his eyes to the road, he turned to the radio to drown out that black noise. Reception was terrible, admittedly, but with a little tweaking he was able to get a weak French station broadcasting a radio play. Though he understood as little French as Italian, he enjoyed the drama all the same, particularly the organ accompaniment.

He was briefly distracted as the traffic came to a standstill once more, and the temperature gauge hit the top end of the "NORMAL" scale. Nonchalant, he laid back and basked wistfully in the organist's eloquent grace, gliding along with the Tibia, cantillating with the reeds, quietly brooding with the chords on flute ranks. He himself once strived to play that same instrument with this elegance, this beauty, this grandeur – but now, that seemed little more than a distant wish, a dream he'd had as a child, a vain hope bequeathed by his father. A futile dream for futile men.

Perhaps that is the reality of all music – what passion cannot it raise and quell, but come the coda, what does it all mean? What does it really accomplish? What is it worth?

While he pondered this, the Corolla emerged from the confines of artificial lights and gridlock into the cold, starry night, and put on some speed. With good reason - Geneva was a good forty-five minutes away, but the car looked as though it might last thirty. And his nerves, less than five.

"Power at 2.5 TV, sir."

"Confirmed. Continue to rise until we reach 4 TV, then begin acceleration."

A team of physicists stood on the gantry overlooking the engineers at the helm of the largest particle accelerator ever built. At twenty-seven kilometres in diameter, the Large Hadron Collider was the single largest scientific instrument ever constructed, and a venture in which astronomical stretches of time and money had been invested over the decades put into its construction and use. Its job, put simply – to make a pair of atoms go really, really fast around a circular track, then a bigger circular track, before letting them run into each other and obliterate themselves in a spectacular explosion that no-one can actually physically see. In more scientific terms, the rationale was that it could produce extremely fast, high-energy collisions which could be used to further our understanding of physics at the most fundamental level – particularly in the field known popularly as quantum physics. The latter interpretation was the one most competent physicists agreed with, and their work with the Collider worked towards the advancement of science and the betterment of mankind. The former interpretation was that which this particular team were more usually associated with, who, as one particularly shrewd reporter had it, were little more than "boys with multi-billion dollar psuedoscientific toys." Whilst they would never admit it, the reporter wasn't wrong – rather than critically examining their figures to work out what they could do better, as per normal scientific method, they simply turned the power up to eleven just to see what would happen without any real justifications or aims. Whether or not bigger collisions meant better results, no-one could say, but bizzarely, some believed that surely, this was the truest science – a journey into the unknown, for the betterment of mankind, an intrepid group of adventurers takes up the mantle of their magnificent machine and dances with the divine beyond.

These quaint, flowery musings belonged to a senior physicist on the gantry, an Edgar Burkhalter. A Swiss native, the extent to which he could be referred to as a scientist depended largely on interpretation, or indeed, who you asked – though in the interests of political correctness, the media addressed him always as a "visionary," an "innovator," or "the guy with huge ideas." In this way, his detractors were satisfied he wasn't getting undue credit, without going so far as denigration.

Of course, it is well-known that the real world frowns on quaint, flowery musings, or indeed, any sort of rational, meaningful contemplation, so it would come to the reader as no surprise that reality decided to throw some spontaneous happening at Burkhalter to cut them short as abruptly as possible.

"Er… sir? Do you want to introduce matter now?"

When flowery musings are abruptly cut short by throwing spontaneous happenings at them, said abruptly cut-short muser tends to resent the object of said happenings. Here, the object was a junior assistant physicist, simply carrying out the instructions Burkhalter had given him. He got a gruff "Hrmph!" for his trouble, before Burkhalter consented. The physicist relayed his instructions to the technicians, who prepared the first-stage accelerators for introduction of matter. Burkhalter lapsed back out of touch with reality again, imagining the acclaim his discovery of the Higgs Boson would bring him. How much more comfortable he felt, surrounded by supposed and suggested images of his adoring fans, his detractors repentant, all the nations singing his praises. Certainly, more comfortable than he actually was, in that cold, steel Faraday cage, surrounded by older men, uncomfortable amounts of noise and lots of electronic displays telling him things he should probably better understand. But no, that wasn't real, he thought - the truest reality was in his head, that which he was working to bring to fruition.

Soon enough, there would be no difference.

Among the range of noises that a Japanese-made small-bore petrol-driven engine can make, one should not find anything that sounds even remotely like an angle-grinder. This, of course, assumes the car is even slightly roadworthy, which of course, was not the case with the hatchback moving unusually slowly for the reasonably fast-moving Swiss highway it had been crawling along the side of. In fact, at this moment, one might even say it wasn't moving at all.

Any number of causes could probably be imagined for the stoppage, although the oil-covered windscreen and smoke pouring out of the bonnet probably gave it away. As a result, the driver had left the vehicle, and dived into the acrid plume armed with nothing more glamorous than a few spanners and a rag.

Though ordinarily a reasonably sound sleeper, Sammy had been sharply awoken by the keening racket of the dying engine, and when she noticed that she was in the car alone and couldn't see out of the windscreen, she got up for a look. Even without any technical expertise, it was clear things were not looking good.

"Liam!"

A few seconds later, her brother emerged from the smoke, easing up somewhat but still billowing out like a chimney-stack. Sammy's usually cheery demeanor caved in as he broke the news to her.

"She's beyond my help now, I reckon. I don't think I can get her up and running again."

Sam squeaked, terrified at the prospect of what that meant for them. Picking up on her distress, Liam walked up to her, drawing her in a big hug – a traditional parental remedy for a distressed infant. Returning the hug, she sobbed for a bit into his chest before he directed her back into the car.

Liam sighed. He felt a bit responsible for this mess, since he hadn't planned on the weather being so bad, or on having to go through Switzerland, least of all, heading back to St. Ives on half a day's notice.

But no, don't think about that. Least of all, that.

He wiped his face with the rag and stepped back into the car, reclining the seat. His watch ticked over to six, and the raging whiteness surrounding them just got thicker and colder. Again sighing, he lay back in his seat, until he felt, quite unexpectedly, some warmth. Sam had nuzzled up against him, trying for sleep.

He sighed one more time, but this time it was a happy kind of sigh, in the manner of a parent beholding an infant, his problems and toils forgotten awhile. As Liam himself started on his journey across that chasm between the conscious and the unconscious, he thanked whatever God it was he believed in for giving him someone so rewarding to look out for. He returned her affections with a gentle hug, and closed his eyes, at peace.

With that final thought, sleep took him, and his journey into the unconscious was complete. And perhaps it is a shame that in these final thoughts, the possibility of never returning from that journey never once crossed his mind. Not least because he would not.

Klaxons are, by all accounts, very unpleasant to have to listen to.

This is, of course, entirely by design. The purpose of a klaxon is to produce a loud, unsettling racket, to suggest to any who hear it that there is a possibility of something being quite dreadfully out of order in their vicinity. They are the modern war-horn, a call to arms. A signal that the time for action is now.

In this case, the time for action really was long past. What had originally been planned as a simple collision experiment well within safety parameters had suddenly become an out-of-control maelstrom of inoperative controls, botched evacuation and a twenty-seven kilometer toroid steadily accumulating an electrical charge at a rate several orders of magnitude greater than the total electrical generation capacity of the human race. It would be so very easy to put all of this down to gross negligence - easy for the public to believe, especially the families of the variously electrocuted or irradiated technicians. Not so for the ten or so people in a lead-screened electrically-isolated Faraday cage – they knew better. But that didn't matter, because nine of them were dead anyway.

Largely responsible for the spontaneous termination of their vitals was a smoking handgun, clip half-empty. It was now sitting on a table, next to a cup of coffee being intermittently sipped at by a very morose-looking senior physicist. His mood had less to do with the fact that he had killed nine people in cold blood once they'd found out he'd sent the other hundred or so staff to their deaths, and more to do with the fact that this whole science-y experiment-y thing was taking ages. He knew it was going to take time, and the monitor in front of him was giving him a very good indication of just how much time that would be, but… it just seemed quite a bit longer than he had expected. As the possibility of a Lorentz contraction crossed his mind, he recalled Einstein, on relativity.

"When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That's relativity."

Burkhalter often compared himself to the ubiquitously late theoretical physicist, and often turned to his words for inspiration. In particular, he felt vindicated by what he saw as Einstein's denouncement of what was traditionally regarded as scientific method, and his championing of scientific discovery as a fundamentally creative, rather than empirical discipline.

A fresh set of klaxons joined the din, waking said so-called buffoon from his stupor. This new set was telling him that the superconducting electromagnets were now inducing their own current in a positive feedback loop, due to the tremendous electromagnetic field now being generated inside the Collider. As a precaution, the circuit breakers between the reactor's turbine and the power supply for the magnets had tripped, preventing the current from reaching instrumentation.

Burkhalter smiled. This was precisely what he had been waiting for. Picking up his barely-touched cup of coffee, he walked over to the control panel for the breakers. He pressed the button to close the breakers, which immediately tripped again. He tried a couple more times before tipping his coffee down the panel, shorting the relays and forcing the breakers to fuse closed. The spectacular amounts of current now being channeled down those supply lines began to burn through the cables' insulation. This was fine, however – all electrical conduit through CERN was double-insulated, except for the large copper cables supplying the magnets with power, which had a single layer of extremely thick rubber insulation.

And now came Burkhalter's chef-d'oeuvre. Rummaging through the pockets of former colleagues, he located a cigar and a box of matches. Lighting it up, he proceeded to have the first, last and longest smoke of his life. It would be, simultaneously, the single greatest and most terrible thing he would ever do.

He was not smoking to celebrate his victory over the laws of physics, though, difficult as that must be while wheezing through one's first smoke. No, in fact, that he had closed all the windows and doors in the room was for reasons far removed from radiation and electrical safety.

His purpose was revealed when the senior physicist, who had by this time given up on actually smoking and was just holding the cigar in the air, suddenly became very wet and cold, courtesy of the sprinkler system he had just tripped. The system, which was equal parts faulty and sabotaged, did not trip the area where it actually detected something, but instead triggered every sprinkler on the premises. Every square inch of floor space in CERN was summarily soaked by high-pressure sprinkers. Every square inch, including the magnet cavities.

The rubber insulation on the cable was still doing its job, despite being near liquefied by heat. However, when the high-pressure spray of the sprinklers was turned on, it started to wash away, allowing unshielded copper cable to contact the ventilation ducts, aided by water, an excellent conductor of electricity. These were made quite cheaply from aluminum, also a reasonable conductor, and spread throughout the whole facility. Further, these contacted the steel frame upon which the whole structure rested, giving the astronomical charge the Collider had built a similarly massive path to ground. And, like all good electrical charges, it did go to ground – in a big way.

Anything in the vicinity of the wiring was superheated to a few thousand degrees, and anything flammable in the vicinity of the wiring spontaneously ignited. Just for good measure, the reactor, now coupled doubly to ground and this astronomical current, detonated, creating a small crater of a couple of kilometers in diameter, filled with radioactive sludge and waste. Most important, however, were the magnets, which also drew this massive current through them, inducing an equally massive electromagnetic field. The toroidal arrangement of the Collider's electromagnetic array concentrated the magnetic flux into a helix situated at the centre of its radius, creating, for an instant, an intensely focused electromagnetic field, on the order of several billion times more intense than a perfectly efficient conversion of all the Sun's energy into electromagnetic radiation. So intense was this field that it tore, also for the briefest moment, a rent in the fabric of space-time. And for that instant, that rent had the most intensely concentrated amount of energy to be found anywhere in the cosmos.

Now, dramatic as all this might sound, only three people were actually around to witness this death of the laws of physics by brutal, bloody murder.

And by that time, they were all dead.

In a now-dead car parked directly above the centre of CERN, two siblings died in each others' arms. The whiteness of the snow intensified yet more, but not because of the storm. It continued to brighten until it was several times brighter than the sun, before they were summarily vaporized by the intense amounts of heat generated by the action of the magnetic field on the relatively small amount of matter of which their vehicle and everything in it, themselves included, consisted. However, the average human reaction time is approximately one-fifth of a second, and they were dead in less than a trillionth. So, perhaps it is a small mercy that the pair were blissfully unaware of the fact that their lives had just ended in an extremely implosion of matter and time. Because whatever came next, dealing with it would only be harder had they known.