Sunfall

by Jim Al-Khalili

  They quickly followed signs pointing to an elevator. When they reached its wide metal doors, Marc pushed the button and heard the whirring of a distant motor. It seemed to take for ever for it to arrive, but at last the doors slid open and they stepped into its spacious interior. It was clearly designed to transport many people at once, or large pieces of kit, in contrast to the narrow entrance in the roof they had just used.

  ‘Where does this take us?’ Sarah asked as they began to descend.

  ‘Down six storeys to the core of the detector. The dark-matter beams haven’t been generated yet, but the energy of the protons circling in the main ring is already being ramped up. A siren goes off when the dark-matter beam is on, and if we’re still down here then— I don’t know how long we’ve got or even what we can do, but we have to try.’

  ‘Well, given what Fabiola just told us, I don’t suppose it matters whether we’re down here or back in the control room. We’ll be vaporized either way,’ said Sarah in a cold, flat voice.

  The elevator doors rumbled open, and they were greeted with the sight of a vast underground cavern. On any other occasion it should have taken their breath away, but Marc wasn’t in the mood to admire feats of technology. The hum of the electronics here was even louder than it was at the top. Sweeping his gaze around the chamber, he suddenly caught sight of movement over on one side. It looked like there were two people, a man and a woman, with their backs to him. They were crouched down in front of a piece of equipment and hadn’t heard the arrival of the elevator over the background noise. Marc’s initial reaction was one of relief, that someone was already here dealing with the situation.

  ‘Hey,’ he shouted, hurrying over to them, ‘how’s it going? Can you override things from here?’ But they still seemingly couldn’t hear him.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted, louder this time.

  The pair twisted their heads around. They appeared startled by the interruption. Marc could see clearly now that they had been working on what looked like an old-fashioned laptop perched on a wooden stool.

  The man – who had a wiry frame and pale face beneath lank dark hair and who looked like he could be any other regular accelerator scientist – suddenly jumped up to face him and, with a cry of rage, picked up a metal bar lying on the ground next to him, then rushed at him like a wild animal protecting its domain.

  ‘What the—?’ Marc watched, hypnotized, too stunned to move.

  As he ran towards Marc, the man twisted his body, lifting the bar above his head with both hands like a medieval knight wielding a longsword. By the time Marc came to his senses it was too late and his attacker was upon him.

  The man’s mistake was not to slow down as he approached. As he began to swing the heavy bar towards Marc’s head, it didn’t respond quickly enough. The split second it took for it to arc round was all Sarah needed. She crashed into him from the side, sending them both sprawling, and the bar clattered across the floor.

  Marc didn’t hesitate. He ran towards them, picking up the bar on his way. ‘Right, you’re going to tell me what the fuck you’re—’

  But the man had already scrambled to his feet and was sprinting towards the still open elevator doors. Marc thought about giving chase, but decided he had a more pressing issue to deal with. He turned to Sarah, who was getting to her feet and rubbing the side of her head.

  ‘Thanks for that. Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. Look, the woman’s gone too.’ She pointed to the abandoned laptop a few metres away.

  They ran over to it and stared at the still open command windows on the screen.

  Marc’s heart was pounding, and he tried to clear his head. He couldn’t afford to panic now, in what little time they had left. ‘Right, we have to assume that whatever they were doing is connected with hacking into Fabiola. But I don’t get this. It’s all just so low-tech. Why would sophisticated cyberterrorists use decades-old technology … and why would they need to be down here in person, knowing that they would be caught up in the blast if they succeeded?’

  ‘I think I can guess,’ said Sarah, still breathless. ‘Fabiola can’t be accessed from the outside world, so the only way to hack her would be to get into her base-level machine code, from the inside.’

  Marc nodded. ‘And they would have assumed there’d be no interruptions down here.’ He knelt down by the laptop and stared at the screen filled with lines of code.

  ‘Ah, shit. What the hell are we supposed to do? We don’t have network access down here inside all this shielding, so we can’t get help.’ Marc’s mind was racing. But maybe he could still shut Fabiola down. Their only hope was if the laptop was indeed plugged deep into her command level.

  He began to type and executed various Unix commands, but nothing he did seemed to have any effect.

  Behind him, Sarah suddenly stood up and shouted, ‘Look, I’m no use to you here, so I’m heading back to let the guys in the control room know where you are. We need their help.’ Without waiting for a response, she turned and ran towards the elevator. For a split second Marc thought about stopping her. What if she bumped into the terrorists? What good would it do if she made it back to the control room in time? How many more minutes, possibly just seconds, did they have, anyway? He pushed the thoughts away and turned his attention back to the screen.

  Suddenly, he heard Fabiola’s voice, loud and echoing above the background noise. It had the same gentle, almost reassuring quality as ever, which made it all the more chilling.

  ‘You are accessing forbidden code, Marc. Please desist now.’

  Good, he thought to himself, I’m getting under her skin.

  Fabiola’s repeated warnings reverberated with increasing urgency around the chamber. He tried to ignore them. He knew he just needed to find the correct reboot commands. His fingers danced around the keyboard as he tried to recall his almost forgotten programming knowhow.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the AI’s voice went silent, and the computer screen went completely blank. Marc’s fingers hovered above the keyboard, waiting. Had he done it? Had he really reset an AI Mind? Suddenly, two words popped up in the top left corner of the screen. He recognized them as the two best-known words in computer science, representing the output of the most basic program anyone could write – two words that became famous decades before he was born, but which still carried significance for anyone with coding knowledge. They said simply:

  hello, world.

  Marc stared at the screen for a few seconds. Of course, even a sophisticated AI like Fabiola would operate fundamentally on deep neural net architectures using reinforcement learning. Rebooting her really did mean wiping her memory clean.

  His hands were now shaking uncontrollably, and he felt beads of sweat running down his temples. The deafening noise had stopped, as though a number of the machines had shut down. It had to be the scientists back in the control room. They had taken over manual control and stopped the run. Euphoric relief washed through him and he started to stand up, aware that his knees felt stiff. But he didn’t get very far. He felt a sudden bolt of excruciating pain in the back of his head and everything went black.

  For a few seconds after he came to, Marc couldn’t figure out where he was. All he knew was that he had a splitting headache and the bright lights above him were not helping. As his surroundings swam into focus he made out a sea of concerned faces hovering over him. He recognized Carlo and tried to sit up, to speak, but a wave of dizziness overwhelmed him, and he flopped back down again. ‘Don’t try to move, Marc,’ said Carlo. ‘Enough heroics for one day, eh? You’ve been out cold for an hour.’

  He tried to recall what had happened. He’d been down in the bowels of the VENICE detector. And he’d shut down the CERN Mind.

  ‘Is the beam shut off?’ he croaked. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks to you. We had less than fifty seconds to spare before we’d all have been vaporized.’

  It came back to him now. ‘What about those two who trie
d to sabotage the experiment? Were they Purifiers? I guess one of them hit me.’

  ‘We don’t know. There’s no sign of them yet. But lab security and Geneva police are searching the lab. In fact, they would like to speak to you as soon as possible to get an ident.’

  Marc tried to sit up again, more slowly this time. ‘Where’s Sarah? Is she OK?’

  He saw her pushing her way in to him. ‘I’m here, Marc. I’m fine. These guys showed up just in time, but not before one of the two we interrupted had hit you over the head.’

  Marc grunted. ‘Out of sheer bloody spite because we’d ruined their party.’ He was relieved Sarah was safe. Hell, he was relieved CERN was safe. Those Judgement Day nutters seemed keen to sabotage any plans that would rescue humanity. If this was the work of the Purifiers, then maybe they had yet to realize that there was an option B – that the best way to ensure a quick and decisive end to humanity would be to wait for the endgame when the Odin Project was ready, then strike. Maybe they weren’t as smart as people thought. Hacking a Mind with a museum-piece laptop and hitting people over the head – presumably with that fucking iron bar – didn’t sound like the work of sophisticated cyberterrorists. But they’d still come close to succeeding. Too close.

  By attempting to destroy one of the three labs capable of producing beams of dark matter they were clearly still aiming to prevent the Odin Project from getting off the ground in the first place. But it wouldn’t take long for them, and the rest of the world, to realize just what a risk this entire venture was.

  32

  Wednesday, 3 July – Juliaca, Peru

  Despite the even tighter security after the CERN attack, the Project continued to move forward rapidly. But with only two months to go now to the planned Ignition, there was still so much to do. Sarah was relieved not to be directly involved with operational matters, or the messy world of politics, any longer. She had, however, found herself inescapably grouped with Marc and Qiang as one of the talismanic global representatives of the Project. She still loathed all the media attention this entailed, but she knew she really had no choice. Anyway, Marc and Qiang were good company. She continued to work hard at not falling for Marc’s charms, but she sensed deeper feelings for him growing inside her that had nothing to do with any superficial physical attraction. Still, she had kept them locked away. These were no times for starting up a relationship, particularly with someone she had to work with professionally.

  Having dealt with the world’s press at CERN following the failed attack, their attention was now focused on Mag-4, under construction high on the Andean Plateau in southern Peru, one of six facilities around the world housing the giant magnets that would bend the beams down into the ground. The three physicists had come to the site to witness the next test: to see if a pulse of heavy neutralinos would indeed behave in the way Marc and Qiang had proposed – that the particles would decay at just the right moment to be bent by the magnets. Their official brief was to offer encouragement, discuss the science with the locals and generally provide the media with the charm offensive so vital in the face of continuing public opposition and widespread, but understandable, fear. Along with the other countries on the Pacific coast of South America, Peru had got off relatively lightly during the CME back in March. The initial devastating radiation burst had hit before 6 a.m. local time and most of the population had still been in bed, not out in the open.

  As soon as she got off the plane at Juliaca Airport, Sarah could sense that the atmosphere was thinner. And despite the coolness of the air inside the bustling terminal, once out in the harsh sunlight she felt its warmth. They’d been warned of the discomfort they were likely to feel at such altitude – four thousand metres above sea level – and not to exert themselves for the first few days until they had acclimatized. So, she was grateful that a couple of bots took their luggage on ahead, weaving smoothly on their treads through the crowds entering and leaving the terminal building.

  She didn’t feel tired. The one-hour, ten-thousand-kilometre hyperskip from Geneva to Lima had been uneventful, as indeed had the much shorter heli flight across to Juliaca.

  The city of Juliaca, in the Puno region of southern Peru, lay to the northwest of Lake Titicaca. It was a sprawling metropolis of over a million inhabitants and a thriving trade centre, forming the hub that linked Peru’s three largest urban areas of Lima, Arequipa and Cusco to La Paz across the border in Bolivia.

  A man in dark sunglasses was waving to them from across the road outside the terminal. Sarah noted that, in contrast to the three scientists’ casual attire, he was wearing a three-piece grey suit, its buttoned-up jacket straining against his waistline and the fabric so shiny it glinted in the bright sunshine. She assumed this was their host, Dr Arnau Diaz-Torres, the Mag-4 chief engineer. He stood beaming at them as they approached, his thick, well-groomed moustache speckled with grey.

  ‘Welcome. Welcome to Peru,’ he said in his heavy Spanish accent, extending a hand to Sarah. ‘Dr Maitlin, it is a pleasure to meet you. I have watched you on the news so much in recent months that I feel I know you.’ He turned to Marc and Qiang. ‘And, of course, you two gentlemen are my physics heroes. You are true giants of science.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure to be here,’ replied Sarah. ‘I hadn’t quite expected it to be so warm, given this is your winter and we are so high up.’

  ‘Oh, just wait until the sun goes down. The contrast in temperature between day and night up here is greater than in any desert.’

  The doors of the car waiting alongside slid open and Sarah was a little surprised to see a driver inside. Diaz-Torres saw the look on her face. ‘Because of the heightened security, we have decided that a human driver is the safer option. Humans are less likely to be hacked.’ He laughed. ‘Especially when we have such important visitors. We will of course have an army escort too.’

  Sarah noticed for the first time the two jeeps on either side of their car, each one containing several heavily armed soldiers. They only slightly reassured her. She hadn’t truly felt safe in a while, despite her round-the-clock protection. If the Purifiers wanted to strike, she was sure they’d find a way. Since the failed attempt to destroy CERN, they had been quiet, but no one believed they had given up. And yet the authorities were no closer to defeating them.

  As they pulled away, Diaz-Torres said, ‘You will be staying in accommodation within the high-security Mag-4 compound. But if you don’t mind, we will go straight to the facility and I can show you how the Peruvian sector of the Odin Project is progressing.’

  She detected more than a hint of pride in the man’s voice. He then reached into the satchel on the seat beside him and took out various items and passed them around. ‘I have taken the liberty of providing you all with sun hats and sun-block pills. These days the dangers of UV radiation are even greater than usual so far above sea level.’ Sarah accepted her provisions and thanked the Peruvian, but when he turned his attention to Qiang, she exchanged a quick glance with Marc. They didn’t have the heart to tell Diaz-Torres that they had everything they needed already in their rucksacks. Still, it was a sweet gesture.

  They drove out of the airport and along the busy roads that skirted around the city centre. She stared out of the bullet-proof glass window, only half listening to Diaz-Torres as he explained how life had changed in Juliaca over the past few weeks. ‘The city’s population has been swelled by many thousands. And it isn’t just all the scientists, engineers, technicians and the three thousand Mag-4 construction workers. We have bus-loads of tourists arriving each day, as well as many traders from around the region.’

  It also looked to Sarah that a large fraction of the Peruvian army was making its presence felt. Groups of armed soldiers stood on every street corner and army vehicles rumbled up and down the main streets.

  After about twenty minutes, they were on the winding highway north of the city. Sarah had visited the astronomical observatories in Chile, high in the Atacama Desert, but this landscape was even more spec
tacular. The Altiplano, or ‘high plain’, was more commonly known throughout the world as the Andean Plateau, where the seven-thousand-kilometre-long Andes mountain range was at its widest. On both sides, beyond the barren hills bulging up indiscriminately over the otherwise flat ground, were impressive peaks: to her left, like an array of giant shark’s teeth, was a chain of majestic-looking volcanoes, and to her right, in their dramatic, serrated, snow-capped splendour, rose the Andes mountains themselves. The only vegetation she could see, stretching into the distance, was highland grass. Diaz-Torres explained that this was the ichu, the staple grazing food for the herds of llamas and alpacas.

  They passed a picturesque lake and surrounding marshland almost entirely covered by a vast flock of pink flamingos, a sight Sarah found enchanting. Then, without warning, they were there. The view that greeted her around the next bend was impressive: a wide, flat plain surrounded on three sides by fierce-looking mountain ranges. At first, it was difficult to appreciate its scale, but she estimated it was about five to six kilometres deep and three kilometres wide. Along the entire length of the road, an imposing high fence had been erected, isolating the area from the outside world.

  The car slowed down as the driver negotiated the dense traffic of other vehicles and people surrounding the compound. It looked as though an entire town had suddenly sprung up outside. Sarah’s senses were bombarded with a sea of colour, sound and activity. There seemed to be everyone from tourists, well-wishers and curious onlookers to demonstrators and religious fanatics – including a group of end-of-the-world doomsayers in their long grey gowns and shaven heads, who were being watched carefully by the soldiers lining the fence. All these people mixed with the locals, and all seemed curious to witness the wonder of engineering in the distance that was part of the plan to save the world.