Sunfall

by Jim Al-Khalili

  She watched as street traders tried to catch the eye of anyone venturing close enough to their colourful displays of traditional Peruvian hats, ponchos and pan pipes alongside hastily manufactured miniature models of the giant magnet and other Project-related souvenirs, all laid out on makeshift tables. The tourist industry seemed to be thriving, and it gave her an odd sense of faith in humanity. She even spotted tourists paying locals to take their picture posing with docile and cute-looking llamas. Even during such uncertain times, some things don’t change.

  Qiang laughed. ‘The circus has come to town.’

  ‘The biggest circus South America has ever seen,’ agreed Diaz-Torres. ‘And over there is the main attraction.’

  Sarah followed his gaze beyond the crowds and the high-security fence towards a giant grey dome in the distance, inside which Mag-4 was being built.

  ‘If this is a circus, then that is the Big Top, yes?’ said Diaz-Torres. ‘Did you know the locals already have a name for Mag-4? In our native Aymaran and Quechuan languages, they call this place Ukhupacha waka, which means “Temple of the Inner Earth”.’

  Sarah watched Qiang practise the words under his breath; then, turning to Diaz-Torres, he said, ‘I’m afraid the only words I know in Quechuan are Machu Picchu.’

  The Peruvian smiled. ‘We are still proud of our Incan heritage, you know. Locals have great affection for Pachamama, the Earth Mother, our ancient deity, and many in my country believe the dying of the Earth’s magnetic field is due to mankind’s misuse of Nature, which has been an affront to Pachamama.’

  ‘They’re not the only ones,’ agreed Sarah. ‘Everywhere you look, new and old religions are gaining followers. We’ve raped and pillaged our planet; we’ve changed our climate; we’ve destroyed so much. You’d think people would be losing faith.’ Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she added, ‘I suppose it’s only natural, given the threat we’re facing right now. People want to trust the science, but if there’s a chance that a higher power can lend a hand …’ She turned back to look out of the window.

  Driving through several gates with increasing levels of security, including biometric checks and sniffer bots, they finally entered the vast compound and a wide, newly tarmacked road that led in a straight line to the Mag-4 facility. From this distance, its scale was deceptive since it was dwarfed by the mountains behind it, but Sarah realized that it must be further away, and therefore much larger, than she had first estimated. As if reading her mind, Diaz-Torres said, ‘The reason it has to be so big is because of all the shielding.’

  Sarah nodded. ‘And at the risk of sounding naive, that’s presumably to block all the synchrotron radiation produced when the charged particles are bent by the magnets, right?’

  ‘Precisely,’ enthused Diaz-Torres. ‘This is basically the world’s biggest X-ray machine, but it has nothing to image. The X-rays are an unavoidable by-product when the charginos are forced to change direction. But we still need to stop this radiation from zapping everything in its path.’

  They pulled up outside the front of the dome. Sarah stepped out of the car into the bright sunshine and quickly reached for the sunglasses in her pocket. She looked back along the road they had come, to the perimeter fence and the crowds outside it. They were too far away for their sounds to carry and all she could hear was the faint whistle of wind around the dome and a deep hum of machinery coming from within. She arched her neck back to look up at the structure and, despite her sunglasses, still needed to squint. It was huge.

  She turned to see Marc and Qiang already following Diaz-Torres towards the entrance and hurried to catch up with them. Just outside the door they were met by a young man who handed them hard hats.

  Sarah donned hers and removed her sunglasses. ‘Hard hats suit you,’ smiled Marc as he adjusted the strap on his. ‘You look like you mean business.’

  ‘I always mean business, Bruckner. And don’t you forget it.’

  They followed Diaz-Torres in. Sarah had expected to walk into semi-darkness after the bright daylight outside, but it was quite the opposite – the centrepiece of the vast chamber was illuminated by powerful LED floodlights from all angles, giving it an almost supernaturally bright aura.

  ‘Oh, my God …’ she whispered. Her two companions also stopped suddenly in their tracks, speechless.

  A hundred different sounds assaulted their ears. A huge drilling rig at the centre of the dome was the loudest, but backing support was provided by the hum of other machinery, the throb of electric currents, the shouts of the workers, and the incessant sirens and alarms of equipment – ranging from low-frequency horns to high-pitched, ear-piercing bleeps.

  Sarah realized Diaz-Torres was smiling broadly as he watched them, clearly happy with their reaction. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the cacophony of sound. ‘The roof of the dome is as high as a thirty-storey building,’ he shouted, ‘just over a hundred metres. As you can see, the concrete shielding is not yet in place, but you get to see the magnets for now. There are twelve dipole magnets, each one forty-two metres in length and five metres in diameter.’

  It felt to Sarah almost like a spiritual experience, here inside this vast cathedral to science. The magnets, suspended high above their heads, resembled black missiles arranged along three separate arcs, one above the other, each arc consisting of four magnets, and all held in place by high-tensile carbon nanotube scaffolding.

  Sarah put her mouth close to Marc’s ear and shouted, ‘It looks like some crazy art installation.’ He grinned at her.

  ‘As you can see,’ continued Diaz-Torres proudly, leading them further in towards the magnets, ‘the beam, which will have travelled here from Fermilab in Chicago, comes in from over there.’ He waved his hand vaguely.

  Sarah and Marc had followed him, but Qiang remained rooted to his spot near the entrance, staring up as though hypnotized by the structure.

  Diaz-Torres, now in full flow, continued his lecture. ‘And the beam, as it comes in, has three opportunities to be bent. The neutralinos that decay quickly into charginos will get bent by the first set of four magnets in sequence, with each one in turn deflecting the particles by thirty degrees, until they are travelling downwards towards the centre of the Earth. For those neutralinos that decay a little later and which pass straight through the first array of magnets, the second and third set provide further opportunities to catch and bend them. And so—’

  Sarah interrupted him. ‘Sorry, I thought you said each magnet bends the beam by thirty degrees,’ she shouted. ‘There are four magnets, and four times thirty makes a hundred and twenty degrees. But don’t you need to bend the beam by a right angle: just ninety degrees? So why use four magnets when only three should be enough?’

  ‘You are correct, Dr Maitlin, but don’t forget the curvature of the Earth. The beam coming from Fermilab is actually travelling along the shortest path to get here – a perfect straight line – and since it does not have to follow the curvature of the Earth’s surface it can tunnel straight through the ground. This means it arrives here from underneath us at an angle of just under thirty degrees to the horizontal. So, it has to be bent back by the magnets by more than a right angle – in fact, by a hundred and twenty degrees, which makes our job even harder.’

  With the impromptu geometry seminar ended, Sarah excused herself and wandered over to the giant drilling rig positioned directly below the magnets at the very centre of the dome. A circular barrier stopped her from getting too close, but she could see the hole it was boring into the ground. It looked to be about a metre in diameter. So, this was where the beams from all three sets of magnets would be focused and combined as they began the vertical leg of their journey. She recalled the latest Project plans: the early estimates of a one-hundred-metre borehole had been deemed too conservative. Unless the charginos decayed back to neutralinos quickly, they wouldn’t get very far once they hit solid matter. So, to be safe, it was decided that five-hundred-metre-deep vertical shafts would be created at
each of the eight facilities to accommodate the beam pipes, which would be maintained under vacuum as empty as interstellar space, so as not to disturb the beams. Then once the charginos decayed back to neutralinos the world would suddenly become invisible to them again. Sarah felt she was getting the hang of all this dark-matter physics.

  She heard Marc, Qiang and Diaz-Torres come up behind her. Diaz-Torres was still proudly explaining the workings of the facility to Marc and Qiang. He had to shout even louder over the noise of the drilling. ‘All the shielding, along the quadrupole focusing magnets, goes in next week, and once that is calibrated we can start our first test run.

  ‘Eventually, when we have to synchronize with the other seven beams we will need to control the pulse energy very carefully. Did you know we are twenty kilometres further from the centre of the Earth here than Mag-5 in Norway?’

  Sarah watched Marc’s carefully modulated reaction. Of course they knew. He and Qiang must have been through the geometry a thousand time, so it was sweet of him not to wish to hurt Diaz-Torres’s feelings. ‘Ah yes, of course, we are on the bulge of the equator here,’ he shouted back, nodding his head gravely.

  ‘As well as being at high altitude,’ said Diaz-Torres, ‘which means our beam heading into the Earth must travel further, so we must give it an extra boost of energy to make sure it arrives at Point Zero at the same time as the other pulses.’

  Then he added with a flourish, ‘In fact, even the tidal forces due to the Moon’s gravity are included.’

  He stood back, hands on hips, seemingly taking a personal pride in having surmounted so many difficulties.

  Sarah was keen to find out what the next stage in testing was. As a solar physicist used to studying whatever the Sun deemed fit to produce and send Earthwards, she wasn’t accustomed to designing this sort of experiment and found it fascinating to be reminded of the many problems that had to be overcome. She walked closer to Diaz-Torres, so he could hear her. ‘What is this first test designed to check?’

  ‘Ah,’ replied the Peruvian enthusiastically, ‘if all goes to plan, a pulse of heavy neutralinos fired from Fermilab will be sent here to see if the magnets can do their job. Of course, with just the one beam, it should travel straight through the Earth to the other side, coming out in the South China Sea.’

  Qiang nodded vigorously. ‘Of course. And that’s where Darklab will be waiting!’ he shouted. Sarah now remembered why he was so excited. His institute in China had been developing a mini dark-matter accelerator for the past five years and he’d been heavily involved in getting it funded. Now it seemed that it would play its part in the latest test of the Odin Project. It was to be placed on-board a ship that would float above the point where this beam would emerge on the other side of the planet. Darklab would itself produce a small amount of dark matter and fire it down into the sea to meet the Mag-4 pulse head-on. The tiny energy created would then be picked up by the vessel’s detectors.

  She turned to Qiang. ‘But if it’s just to see if two colliding dark-matter beams can create energy inside the Earth, wasn’t that what the Antarctic tests confirmed last month?’

  As soon as she said it, she realized she knew the answer. She held up her hand to Qiang, indicating she didn’t need him to respond. Of course, this test was to do two things: firstly, to make sure the magnets were doing their job of bending the beam and that neutralinos were indeed being created; and secondly, to check that they were being sent in precisely the right direction through the Earth.

  Unbidden, the sheer scale, complexity and downright conceit of the entire Odin Project hit her, sending her mind reeling. Is humankind truly capable of pulling this off? Maybe we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can play God with our planet. It was an unexpected notion. She came from a long line of agnostics and atheists and had always dismissed the term ‘playing God’ as nonsense. And yet, and yet … All the time the Project had been just an idea in Marc Bruckner and Qiang Lee’s heads – a set of equations and computer simulations – she’d been fine, but seeing it take shape like this now suddenly unsettled her. A billion things could go wrong, a malfunction in a small component somewhere, one simple miscalculation, a bug in a line of code – and it would be curtains. She looked up at the giant magnets suspended high above her head. What the hell were we thinking?

  33

  Tuesday, 10 September – Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, England

  A faint breeze ruffled the tops of the trees lining the cycle path, but the sky was clear and blue. It was going to be another hot day. The temperature in western Europe had broken all records this summer and had nudged above 40˚C in Britain for the third year running. Now, the country was in the middle of an early-autumn heatwave. As she cycled to her new job, Shireen wondered what Majid would say if he saw her now, working at one of the world’s top cybersecurity organizations. Her old friend had gone back to his university studies after his release. They constantly chatted, but everything they said was now closely monitored and she couldn’t tell him any details about where she was or what she was working on.

  While she wouldn’t go so far as saying she was happy – no one ever talked about being ‘happy’ these days – her life had become increasingly interesting. She still missed home terribly, of course, and had even managed to visit her parents over the summer. It had been wonderful, despite being accompanied throughout by Savak agents. Even her mother and father didn’t know what she was really working on, and although relieved that all charges against their daughter had been dropped, it still puzzled them. All she could do was reassure them that everything was fine. The official line was that she was simply helping the UN on a cybersecurity project.

  She didn’t mind that her university studies had been put on the back burner for now; it was the same for most people these days – all plans, hopes and dreams were currently on hold. It was as though nine billion humans were holding their collective breath, waiting to see whether there even was a future.

  And the world didn’t have long to wait. The Odin Project was nearing completion, and the moment when the dark-matter beams would be switched on for real, Ignition, was drawing nearer. Now it was just one week away and no one could see beyond that moment.

  For her part, Shireen had made little progress of note so far. And time was running out. Whoever the Purifiers were, they appeared to be both well organized and well funded, and her attempts at hacking into their communications network on the dark web had so far proved unsuccessful.

  After the CERN incident she had been one of an army of cyber experts assigned the job of uncovering who had been behind it. The Purifiers had not claimed responsibility, but then what group would claim credit for a botched attempt? But now, as Ignition approached, security was being ramped up to feverish levels. And work at Bletchley Park was no different. It suited Shireen just fine being able to come and go relatively freely, even though she knew that every move she made was being monitored and scrutinized. At least she’d been allowed to block out the intrusion into her augmented reality feed and get some privacy back.

  She overtook a couple of joggers. It was only a fifteen-minute cycle ride from her apartment, but she was already feeling uncomfortably warm. She wondered what the rest of the cyb community would think if they knew what she had been doing these past few months: working for ‘the enemy’ to root out cyberterrorism – poacher turned gamekeeper. But then the rules of the game had changed.

  Here at the CICT, Shireen almost felt at home. The work at the Centre for Intelligence on Cyberterrorism was in a high-security compound just outside the city of Milton Keynes, north of London, where she was part of a team of frighteningly brilliant young coders, mathematicians and cyber espionage specialists. Of course, no one ever used the organization’s unflattering acronym and the place was known locally by its more popular name of Bletchley.

  Everyone here, as far as she could tell, was doing pretty much what Bletchley Park had been famous for one hundred years ago when it was home to an equally
brilliant group of young British cryptanalysts and codebreakers led by Alan Turing. Today, Bletchley was a United Nations of geeks, all working together to monitor worldwide cyberterrorist activities.

  Most of the people seemed friendly enough. A few, like Koji, a Japanese mathematical prodigy who sat at the desk next to her, were her own age and quite fun to be around. But she seemed to have very little time for socializing.

  Arriving at the front gate, she jumped off her bike and wheeled it through the biometric scanner. She locked it alongside dozens of others in the yard, then entered the cool, air-conditioned building. She nodded a greeting to an older man who’d come in just ahead of her. All she knew about him was what Koji had told her in the staff canteen the day she’d arrived, that he had been one of the original MIT team behind the first AI Sentinel.

  For the first couple of weeks in June, after the UN had recruited her to work on protecting the Project, Shireen had been something of a celebrity herself. It seemed everyone had heard about her Trojan horse code, and everyone had ideas about how to improve it.

  But here at Bletchley she was just another cyb prodigy. The remit of the scientists at Bletchley was clear. In fact, the need for their existence had been starkly highlighted by Shireen herself: that while the AI Minds around the world that ran and protected the infrastructure of society, from transport and financial systems to defence and security, were themselves mostly adequately protected by the Sentinels, there was still a place for human ingenuity to work alongside them.

  Most of the time, of course, the Sentinels did a far better job at cybersecurity than any human ever could, since they were able to carry out tasks billions, and often trillions, of times faster, as well as being in constant communication with each other, exchanging the information content of an entire library of books in less than a nanosecond.