CERN, Geneva Area, Switzerland, Year 2048
The Large Hadron Collider lay buried under the Jura Mountains, twenty-seven kilometers of supercooled vacuum, the largest machine humanity had ever built.
Inside the control center, rows of consoles hummed beneath the glow of flat-panel monitors.
Screens showed beam intensity graphs, cryogenic readouts, and particle event simulations scrolling in real time.
The air smelled faintly of coffee and electronics, the familiar perfume of late-night physics.
Dr. Eliza Moreau stood at the center of it all, hands clasped behind her back. At fifty-two, she still had the quick posture of her Parisian youth, though streaks of silver threaded her black hair. Her voice carried lightly in French-accented English, confident but without theatrics. "Final checks. Let's walk through it once more," she said.
"Cryogenics stable," reported Jian Wei, the cryo-systems lead. His monitor showed temperatures barely above absolute zero. "Magnet lattice holding at one-point-nine Kelvin. No quench risk."
"Vacuum integrity is clean," added Elena Rossi, vacuum engineer. "No leaks across the full ring. Pressure at ten to the minus twelve millibar."
"RF cavities locked," said Arjun Patel, beam operations. "We can accelerate as scheduled."
And then, the voice everyone half-feared, half-respected—Dr. Robert Klein, theoretical physicist, chair of the project's advisory board. A man who had built his reputation on following the rules. Daring proposals that skirted the line between brilliance and recklessness were not his forte; they were Eliza's. He had begrudgingly succumbed to her request to conduct this experiment after the fifth long shutdown. He tapped a finger on his tablet. "Let's not forget why we're here," he said. "This isn't just another Higgs run. This is the Higgs–vacuum stability test. We're probing the potential instability of the electroweak vacuum at Planck energies."
Several heads turned to him. (Klein's weak stomach for pushing scientific boundaries paired oddly with his love of attention.)
Eliza spoke calmly. "Our objective is controlled. To recreate conditions that may produce microscopic black holes predicted by certain higher-dimensional models. Nothing stable. Lifetime on the order of ten raised to the power of negative twenty-six seconds. They'll evaporate instantly via Hawking radiation."
Jian muttered, "Instantly, she says," earning a nervous laugh from the shift team.
Klein smiled thinly. "Unless, of course, the universe itself is metastable. In which case—"
"Robert," Eliza cut him off politely, but firmly, "save the philosophy for the debrief."
A hush fell.
The technicians glanced at one another.
Everyone knew the risks were vanishingly small.
The calculations had been checked, double-checked, published, reviewed, attacked, defended.
But still, there was something about summoning black holes beneath the Alps that unsettled the gut.
Eliza leaned forward. "We proceed by protocol. Beam injection in T-minus five minutes. Arjun?"
"Proton source ready," Arjun confirmed. "Linac four has the bunches at 160 MeV, injected into Booster, then Proton Synchrotron. We're clean to transfer to the Super Proton Synchrotron before main ring injection."
"Good. Jian?"
"Cooling stable."
"Elena?"
"Vacuum stable."
Eliza took a breath. "Then let's make history."
The countdown ticked.
Consoles lit green across the control room.
Far below, in the buried tunnels, protons coursed through the injector chain, stripped of their electrons, whipped into ordered bunches.
"Beam one injected," Arjun said. His fingers danced across his console. "Beam intensity one-point-three times ten to the eleven protons per bunch. Beam two on standby."
On the wall display, two thin lines circled the ring—two beams of light, counter-rotating.
"Synchronize."
The beams accelerated, guided by superconducting magnets colder than deep space.
450 GeV…
1 TeV…
3 TeV…
Climbing toward the target of 25 TeV per beam, a record never before attempted.
"Crossing angle set," Arjun reported. "Collision point: ATLAS detector."
The ATLAS cavern, buried a hundred meters beneath the French countryside, stood like a cathedral to science—a cylindrical detector forty-six meters long, twenty-five meters high, layers of calorimeters, trackers, and muon chambers, all waiting to catch the subatomic shrapnel of colliding worlds.
Eliza's heart hammered. Years of work had led to this moment. She whispered almost inaudibly, "Allez."
"Beam one stable. Beam two stable. Collisions in three… two… one."
On the screens, particle event displays bloomed like neon fireworks. Jets, leptons, showers of energy carving arcs of color.
"Collision achieved," announced Arjun. "We have data."
Elena clapped softly.
Jian grinned with relief.
For a moment, the room felt giddy, triumphant.
Klein, though, leaned forward. "Check event ID 047392."
A technician pulled it up. The display showed an unusual spray of particles, high transverse momentum, energy deposits far exceeding projections.
"Strange," murmured Eliza. "Run the reconstruction again."
Data scrolled.
Higgs signatures emerged as expected, mass peaks at 125 GeV. But layered across the graphs were anomalies, energy losses that didn't balance, invisible momentum leaking into nowhere.
"Missing transverse energy at unprecedented scale," said Klein, his voice sharp. "That's not neutrinos. That's… something else."
Jian frowned. "Could be detector noise. ATLAS muon chambers miscalibrated?"
"No," said Eliza quietly. "That's real."
The room fell silent.
Another collision fired.
Again, the strange deficit.
Then another.
And another.
Eliza's throat went dry. "Arjun, reduce luminosity. Lower beam intensity by half."
"Copy." He tapped. The screen flickered.
"Stabilizing."
Everyone exhaled.
The anomalies quieted.
For several tense minutes, the collisions returned to expected patterns.
Relief spread.
Jian chuckled nervously. "False alarm. Just turbulence at injection, I think."
Even Eliza allowed herself a small smile. "We'll review the logs. But for now, the machine holds."
Chairs creaked as people leaned back. Coffee cups were lifted. The air lightened. Only Klein remained tense, staring at the event displays as though listening for a whisper.
No one noticed the faint shudder in the floor. No one saw the hairline fracture of light deep within the ATLAS cavern, where detectors registered not just particles, but something that bent around them.
Space itself had pinholed. It hadn't collapsed via Hawking radiation as Eliza expected, nor had it vanished into quantum froth. On the contrary, it was opening, stretching, as though answering a call.
In the silence between proton bunches, the opening widened a fraction, like a pupil dilating.
Through it seeped a sound, a vibration…
The scientists above saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing. Their screens showed stable runs. Their graphs returned to normal.
Eliza Moreau smiled faintly at her team. "Congratulations," she said. "You've just stepped into a new era of physics."
But in the cavern, a ripple spread outward from the pin-hole, the first thread of Noxia unfurling into the world.