The bike slid along the road with her leg trapped underneath, ripping her jeans and cutting into her leg. Miraculously, the boys somehow managed to jump out of the way fractions of a second before woman and machine ploughed through them. She felt a sharp pain in her elbow as her arm displaced a brick that had been acting as a makeshift goalpost. Finally, Sarah and motorbike came to a stop in a shallow ditch by the side of the road. Dazed, she was vaguely aware that the boys were gathering around her. One or two were shouting, asking if she was OK, but a few were laughing. With her head pounding, she dragged her bloodied leg out from beneath the bike and forced herself to stand up. Lifting the machine up caused a spasm of pain to shoot up her left arm. She was pretty sure her elbow was fractured.
She turned to look at the boys. She wanted to scream at them, to tell them to get home, to find shelter, but they were already going back to their game. Ignoring the intense pain in her arm and leg, she heaved the bike back up and somehow managed to get back on. The engine was still running. Twisting the throttle, she flicked into gear and took off down the road again.
How long did she have? No time to check now. Just keep going.
Suddenly, there was a flash of light in her left eye, followed by two more in quick succession in her right eye. Please no, not yet.
For three quarters of a century astronauts had reported these flashes: high-energy particles from space travelling through the eyeball and hitting the back of the retina. So, this was it – the first and fastest particles from the Sun were arriving now, like the first few drops of rain before a downpour.
She turned a corner and felt a wave of relief as she saw the tunnel entrance on the road below her. The flashes were arriving more regularly. She gunned the throttle of the bike yet again, joining the road just a hundred metres from the tunnel entrance. The tailback of traffic now extended all the way into the tunnel. Without coming to a complete stop, she leapt from the bike, falling again and rolling over on the verge. She struggled to her feet and ripped off her helmet. Ignoring the searing pain in her leg, she half ran, half hobbled as fast as she could manage along the side of the road, pushing her way past commuters who had abandoned their cars. Many were rubbing their eyes, while some turned to stare at this wild woman in the torn and bloody jeans with dishevelled hair and panic in her eyes.
Consumed with pain and frustration, her breathing loud and laboured, she ran. She shouted to people to follow her towards the shelter of the tunnel. No one did. In a week, two weeks, maybe more if they were particularly unlucky, many of these people would be dead from radiation exposure.
She could see the tunnel entrance looming larger. Almost there. The spots in her eyes were coming thick and fast now.
At last, she had made it. Plunging into the cool darkness, she kept on moving deeper inside, until she was sure that the mass of rock above her head was sufficient to provide enough shielding. She finally slumped back against the tunnel wall, gasping for air. She wondered what the occupants of the cars stuck in the jam here would think when they discovered how lucky they were.
Later that night, lying in hospital along with hundreds of people who, unlike her, appeared sick from radiation exposure, she drifted in and out of a fitful sleep. Her dreams were haunted by the memory of those young Brazilian boys playing football in the street and how they would probably have all died painfully and horribly of radiation exposure soon after. They had laughed at her and she had left them to die.
And she dreamed too about how much worse things were going to get.
Interlude
The coronal mass ejection had been heading towards Earth for twenty-one hours. As it passed the first Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth, it washed over the Chinese Kuafu satellite. The satellite dutifully carried out the task it had been put there for and sent back data on the CME – to a mostly deaf humankind. Less than a minute before the CME reached Earth it began to feel the effects of the magnetosphere. Yet it hardly slowed down at all. Instead, it compressed the field ahead of it as though it were a car air-bag with not enough air in.
The CME blasted through the weakened outer Van Allen belt tens of thousands of kilometres above the Earth’s surface, destroying it. Charged cosmic-ray particles – protons and electrons – trapped by the magnetosphere in this radiation shell for millennia, were now set free and quickly scattered into space like autumn leaves whipped up in a storm.
With the magnetosphere squashed so thin ahead of the CME, many of the thousands of satellites in orbit were left exposed to its full force, and their electronic circuitry was instantly fried.
Although the particles making up the CME were lower in energy than the initial wave of protons that had arrived the day before, their sheer intensity meant they were just as deadly. There would have been an even greater number of fatalities had populations not been warned in time following the initial proton blast, but nothing could stop crops from being destroyed and livestock wiped out in many parts of the world.
Happening so close to the March equinox, the effects of the blast were felt most strongly around the equator. In South America, the final tally would reach two hundred thousand dead, mostly in eastern Brazil, where it coincided with the morning rush hour, with many people simply ignoring the warning messages. Luckily for those further west, it was too early in the day for many people to be outside their houses, which mostly offered them adequate protection. The same could not be said for sub-Saharan and southern Africa, where the radiation blast hit in the middle of the day. It was estimated that up to seven million people across forty countries suffered fatal exposure – dying either from lethal radiation poisoning in the immediate aftermath of the event or from cancers brought about by the ionizing radiation, over the following months, making it the world’s worst natural disaster in recorded history.
A taste of things to come.
30
Monday, 17 June – CERN, Geneva
Marc made his way past familiar buildings through the site of the vast laboratory complex of the Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire, where he had spent much of his early career, and considered how much had changed in his life over the past three months. In fact, it struck him that he felt pretty good about himself right now, in part due to his work on the Odin Project, but also because of his growing feelings towards Sarah and his continuing rehabilitation in the eyes of Evie – who seemed to be revelling in her father’s new-found fame.
Things had moved rapidly in the days that followed the events of 13 and 14 March. With the world reeling from the shock of such a cataclysmic loss of life, rumours spread fast that this was not a freak event – that unless the magnetosphere recovered, more devastation was inevitable. Across the world, the sense of unease grew stronger. Fresh riots broke out; looting became so widespread that many governments were powerless to stop it; and few people were prepared to believe the official line, that the March CME really was a once-in-a-century event.
It quickly became clear that the magnetic pulse devices still being worked on would not offer the protection needed from any future threat from the Sun of similar magnitude. At best, an Earth-based device would provide a temporary preventative measure – a local shield protecting the lucky few beneath it – but never a permanent global solution.
One group revelling in all this chaos was the Purifiers. The end-of-the-world prophecy they held by was coming true, and they rejoiced. But that didn’t dampen their enthusiasm for giving nature a helping hand. They upped the ambition and frequency of their attacks on government facilities and research labs working on potential solutions to the dying field, always driven and cajoled by their spiritual leader, Maksoob. Little was known of this shadowy figure, a man who had kindled a warped passion among his growing band of followers. He had recruited them carefully from around the world, mainly from among the disaffected and disillusioned in poverty-stricken areas: those in the once oil-rich nations of the Middle East and the millions displaced from coastal homes in southern Asia lost to the r
ising seas.
For several weeks after the Event, as it was now being referred to, Sarah had remained in Rio, in part to recover from her injuries – a fractured elbow, a sprained ankle and deep gashes in her leg – but also, as Marc had discovered when he’d visited her, because of her crushing feelings of guilt that she hadn’t done enough to warn people about the deadly radiation from the sky on that fateful morning.
Despite her pleas to be discharged, she had been kept under observation in hospital for a week to ensure that she wasn’t suffering from any radiation effects. Amid the chaos and disruption to travel in the days following the Event, Marc had somehow managed to get on a flight down to Rio, in part out of a genuine desire to see Sarah and check up on her, but also in the hope that he might discuss the possibility of resurrecting the Odin Project.
Within minutes of seeing her sitting up in bed, he could tell that her physical injuries would heal quickly enough, but her mental state was a different matter. In contrast to the zest and determination he’d admired in the woman he’d got to know on the few occasions they’d spent time together in New York over the previous weeks, Sarah was now quiet and withdrawn. It was as though she’d put up an impregnable wall around her to block the outside world out while she battled her inner demons.
No one knew better than Marc Bruckner about the futility of trying to talk someone out of depression. But he had tried.
‘Anyone would have done what you did. How could you possibly convince people in the few minutes you had out on the streets? And why risk fatally exposing yourself too?’
Sarah hadn’t answered. Instead, she’d cried a lot that day.
The day after he’d arrived in Rio, Marc had received a call from Qiang.
‘We’ve been asked to attend a briefing meeting at the UN tomorrow. It sounds like our idea is back on the table.’
‘Says who?’
‘Says … Well, I don’t know who’s made the decision. All I know is that they are now ready to listen to us, properly.’
Marc wasn’t sure how he felt. ‘Well, yes, I suppose desperate measures require desperate solutions, right?’
Qiang was quiet for a second, then he said, ‘You know, that’s exactly what they said to me!’
Marc had promised Sarah he’d come back to see her as soon as he could.
One week after the Event, news of the new plan to save the world had gone viral. Within days, everyone was talking about how dark matter was going to rescue humanity. The Odin Project had been born. It hadn’t taken long for the feasibility of the science to be checked and confirmed. The official view was that it could work, in theory at least. And that was enough. It had brought governments together in a way never seen before. Marc had been astonished by the speed at which consensus had been reached. Not since the Second World War had so many nations rapidly invested so much time and resource into a single objective – but this time they were all working on the same side. The scale of the task made mid-twentieth-century technical achievements like the Manhattan Project and the space race seem like amateur diversions.
It was a warm June morning in Geneva and, despite what was at stake, Marc felt excited. He found it hard to believe just how rapidly the Odin Project had evolved from crazy speculations about firing beams of neutralinos into the core of the Earth to serious discussions about how this might be achieved and where facilities would need to be built, to designing and carrying out the first feasibility tests. Today, the results of the first real tests of his and Qiang’s idea were being presented.
People were already taking their seats in the main auditorium as Marc made his way down towards the front. He quickly spotted Qiang in animated discussion with Gabriel Aguda and noticed the dramatic contrast in size between the two men. Aguda had consistently voiced his reservations about the Odin Project. Unlike the MPDs, which he claimed at least gave the world a stay of execution, he’d argued strongly that this was too expensive, too uncertain, could not be achieved in time and, most importantly, diverted attention from the more ‘reliable’ MPDs option. Marc found it hard to read what the man was thinking.
Scanning the hall to see if Sarah had arrived, he soon spotted her sitting by the middle aisle on the far side. She mouthed, ‘Good luck.’
As he navigated his way down to the stage area through the throngs of delegates standing around in the aisle, the irony of how his fortunes, and mood, had improved as a consequence of the situation that was sinking the rest of humanity into pessimism and anxiety was not lost on him.
Qiang had admitted that he too felt the same sense of purpose about the Odin Project – and argued that it was OK for Marc to feel positive. ‘After all,’ he’d said, ‘if we don’t have faith in the science, then we’ve lost.’ Marc didn’t buy this cheap psychology, but knew what Qiang had meant. They were, after all, leading the most ambitious and important scientific undertaking the world had ever known, one that would determine the future of the planet, which was, by any measure, pretty fucking awesome. If nothing else, it put his own demons into perspective.
He had been somewhat surprised at the speed of his reacceptance among the international community of high-energy physicists as soon as the Odin Project had taken off. The reputation of a research scientist was a fragile thing which, like one’s virginity, could only be lost once. He’d certainly lost his. But here he was again, back at CERN where he’d spent the first fifteen years of his research career and the centre of attention for the world’s leading scientists once more, and realizing that he still enjoyed it. He adjusted his tie as he walked. This was probably the first time ever he had given a physics talk in a jacket and tie, but he felt the occasion merited some sort of formality.
Of course, there was a dark backdrop to all this sanguine enthusiasm. Marc knew better than anyone just how outrageously ambitious the Odin Project truly was. There were simply too many unknowns, too many challenges, and too little margin for error.
And it was now clear that security was an even bigger problem than the science. As soon as the Odin Project was announced the Purifiers had issued a statement outlining their intent to sabotage it. So, they had begun to target the new facilities being built and the scientists and engineers working on the Project. In the past week alone, two accelerator physicists in Paris had been murdered and a research lab outside Tokyo had been extensively damaged by a bomb. Worst of all was the devastating destruction of the half-built Dark Matter Facility in Texas, which had been expected to play a central role in the Project. The vast underground lab had been obliterated by a huge blast, which the Purifiers claimed responsibility for, and which had buried alive three hundred workers and technicians. The depth of the facility underground meant that even in the unlikely event of there being any survivors, all hopes of rescue were futile.
Now, global security had been ramped up to near preposterous levels, almost doubling the cost of the Project. Armies had been mobilized and all travel restricted. The distribution of the financial burden had yet to be settled, but governments understood that they couldn’t afford to delay.
Marc sat down in the front row of the auditorium next to Qiang, sweeping aside the sheet of paper with the words ‘Reserved. Professor Bruckner’ on it. The atmosphere of anticipation in the big hall was palpable, and Marc knew that the world outside was also holding its collective breath. The talks were being streamed live to billions.
He turned to his friend. ‘Morning, Qiang. All set?’
Qiang merely nodded nervously, but Aguda, one seat along, said, ‘It’s OK for you two, Marc, you get to promise to save the world. I’m just the guy who has to make sure as few people as possible find out about the catastrophic consequences if you boys get anything wrong.’
‘Well, so far, so good, right?’ Marc had been more relieved than excited by the results from the recent Antarctica test.
Qiang turned to him. ‘But there wasn’t so much at stake, was there? We can afford to get it wrong for the test, but when we do the real thing …’
> Mark said nothing. Qiang was right; they’d only have one shot at this. He turned to survey the audience behind them. The four hundred seats were all occupied now, and there were people still streaming in, packing the aisles and filling up the rear of the auditorium. Most were CERN scientists and engineers working on the Odin Project, but there were also groups representing various governments and media bodies. Marc had already met many of the movers and shakers the previous evening at dinner – including, for the first time, the leader of the American delegation, Senator Hogan, who he saw was now seated just two rows behind them and deep in conversation with CERN’s director-general. Sarah had been right – there was something unsettling about Hogan’s manner, a cold detachment that Marc had found disturbing. He’d taken an instant dislike to the man.
The noise began to subside in anticipation of the start of proceedings.
Qiang was fidgeting, cracking his knuckles as he always did when nervous. His task today was straightforward: he was to report on the first successful test in which the only three operating dark-matter accelerator labs – here at CERN, Fermilab near Chicago and J-PARC north of Tokyo – had all successfully fired their invisible beams down through the Earth. Everything had gone exactly to plan with three synchronized neutralino bursts, each passing unhindered through ten thousand kilometres of solid planet, converging just before they emerged at a point one hundred metres below the surface of the Antarctic ice.
Sunfall Page 22