Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Two decades of life gone, excised from his memory.

  He wanted to scream, to shout, to protest the unfairness, protest the loss, demand an accounting from the universe—

  But he could do none of that; he had no control. His body continued its slow, painful shuffle to the bathroom.

  As he turned to enter the room, he glanced back at the old woman on the bed, lying now on her side, her head propped up by an arm, her smile mischievous, seductive. His vision was still sharp—he could see the flash of gold on the third finger of her left hand. It was bad enough that he was sleeping with an old woman, but a married old woman—

  The plain wooden door was ajar, but he reached a hand up to push it open the rest of the way, and out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a matching wedding ring on his own left hand.

  And then it hit him. This hag, this stranger, this woman he’d never seen before, this woman who looked nothing like his beloved Michiko, was his wife.

  Lloyd wanted to look back at her, to try to imagine her as she would have been decades younger, to reconstruct the beauty she might have once had, but—

  But he continued on into the bathroom, half turning to face the toilet, leaning over to lift the lid, and—

  —and, suddenly, incredibly, thankfully, amazingly, Lloyd Simcoe was back at CERN, back in the LHC control room. For some reason, he was slumped in his vinyl-padded chair. He straightened himself up and used his hands to pull his shirt back into position.

  What an incredible hallucination it had been! There would be hell to pay, of course: they were supposed to be fully shielded here, a hundred meters of earth between them and the collider ring. But he’d heard how high-energy discharges could cause hallucinations; surely that had been what had happened.

  Lloyd took a moment to reorient himself. There had been no transition between here and there: no flash of light, no sense of wooziness, no popping of his ears. One instant, he’d been at CERN, then, in the next, he’d been somewhere else, for—what?—two minutes, perhaps. And now, just as seamlessly, he was back in the control room.

  Of course he’d never left. Of course it had been an illusion.

  He glanced around, trying to read the faces of the others. Michiko looked shocked. Had she been watching Lloyd while he was hallucinating? What had he done? Flailed around like an epileptic? Reached out into the air, as if stroking an unseen breast? Or just slumped back in his chair, falling unconscious? If so, he couldn’t have been out for long—nowhere near the two minutes he’d perceived—or surely Michiko and others would be looming over him right now, checking his pulse and loosening his collar. He glanced at the analog wall clock: it was indeed two minutes after five P.M.

  He then looked over at Theo Procopides. The young Greek’s expression was more subdued than Michiko’s, but he was being just as wary as Lloyd, looking in turn at each of the other people in the room, shifting his gaze as soon as one of them looked back at him.

  Lloyd opened his mouth to speak although he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. But he closed it when he heard a moaning sound coming through the nearest open door. Michiko evidently heard it too; they both rose simultaneously. She was closer to the door, though, and by the time Lloyd reached it, she was already out in the corridor. “My God!” she was saying. “Are you okay?”

  One of the technicians—Sven, it was—was struggling to get to his feet. He was holding his right hand to his nose, which was bleeding profusely. Lloyd hurried back into the control room, unclipped the first-aid kit from its wall mount, and ran to the corridor. The kit was in a white plastic box; Lloyd popped it open and began unrolling a length of gauze.

  Sven began to speak in Norwegian, but stopped himself after a moment and started over in French. “I—I must have fainted.”

  The corridor was covered with hard tiles; Lloyd could see a carnation smear of blood where Sven’s face had hit the floor. He handed the gauze to Sven, who nodded his thanks then wadded it up and pressed it against his nose. “Craziest thing,” he said. “Like I fell asleep on my feet.” He made a little laughing sound. “I had a dream, even.”

  Lloyd felt his eyebrows climbing. “A dream?” he said, also in French.

  “Vivid as anything,” said Sven. “I was in Geneva—over by Le Rozzel.” Lloyd knew it well: a Breton-style crêperie on Grand Rue. “But it was like some science-fiction thing. There were cars hovering by without touching the ground, and—”

  “Yes, yes!” It was a woman’s voice, but not in response to Sven. It was coming from back inside the control room. “The same thing happened to me!”

  Lloyd re-entered the dimly lit room. “What happened, Antonia?”

  A heavyset Italian woman had been talking to two of the other people present, but now turned to face Lloyd. “It was like I was suddenly somewhere else. Parry said the same thing happened to him.”

  Michiko and Sven were now standing in the doorway, right behind Lloyd. “Me, too,” said Michiko, sounding relieved that she wasn’t alone in this.

  Theo, standing next to Antonia now, was frowning. Lloyd looked at him. “Theo? What about you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  Theo shook his head.

  “We all must have passed out,” said Lloyd.

  “I sure did,” said Sven. He pulled the gauze away from his face, then touched it against his nose again to see if the bleeding had stopped. It hadn’t.

  “How long were we out?” asked Michiko.

  “And—Christ!—what about the experiment?” asked Lloyd. He sprinted over to the ALICE monitoring station and tapped a couple of keys.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Damn.”

  Michiko blew out air in disappointment.

  “It should have worked,” said Lloyd, slapping an open palm against the console. “We should have got the Higgs.”

  “Well, something happened,” said Michiko. “Theo, didn’t you see anything while the rest of us were having—having visions?”

  Theo shook his head. “Not a thing. I guess—I guess I did black out. Except there was no blackness. I was watching Lloyd as he counted down: five, four, three, two, one, zero. Then it was like a jump cut, you know, in film. Suddenly Lloyd was slumped over in his seat.”

  “You saw me slump over?”

  “No, no. It’s like I said: one instant you were sitting up, and the next you were slumped over, with no movement in between. I guess—I guess I did black out. No sooner had it registered on me that you were slumped over than you were sitting back up, and—”

  Suddenly, a warbling siren split the air—an emergency vehicle of some sort. Lloyd hurried out of the control room, everyone following. The room on the opposite side of the corridor had a window in it. Michiko, who had got there first, was already hoisting the venetian blind; late-afternoon sun streamed in. The vehicle was a CERN fire truck, one of three kept on site. It was racing across the campus, heading toward the main administration building.

  Sven’s nose had apparently at last stopped bleeding; he was now holding the bloody mass of gauze at his side. “I wonder if somebody else had a fall?” he said.

  Lloyd looked at him.

  “They use the fire trucks for first aid as well as fires,” said Sven.

  Michiko realized the magnitude of what Sven was suggesting. “We should check all the rooms here; make sure everyone is all right.”

  Lloyd nodded and moved back to the corridor. “Antonia, you check everyone in the control room. Michiko, you take Jake and Sven and go down that way. Theo and I will look up this way.” He felt a brief pang of guilt at dismissing Michiko, but he needed a moment to sort out what he’d seen, what he’d experienced.

  The first room Lloyd and Theo entered contained a downed woman; Lloyd couldn’t remember her name, but she worked in public relations. The flatscreen computer monitor in front of her showed the familiar Windows 2009 three-dimensional desktop. She was still unconscious; it was clear from the massive bruise on her forehead that she’
d pitched forward, hitting her head on the metal rim of her desk, knocking herself out. Lloyd did what he’d seen done in countless movies: he took her left hand in his right, holding it so that the back of her hand was face up, and he patted it gently with his other hand while urging her to wake up.

  Which, at last, she did. “Dr. Simcoe?” she said, looking at Lloyd. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I had this—this dream,” she said. “I was in an art gallery somewhere, looking at a painting.”

  “Are you okay now?”

  “I—I don’t know. My head hurts.”

  “You might have a concussion. You should get to the infirmary.”

  “What are all those sirens?”

  “Fire trucks.” A pause. “Look, I’ve got to go now. Other people might be hurt, as well.”

  She nodded. “I’ll be all right.”

  Theo had already continued on down the corridor. Lloyd left the room and headed down, as well. He passed Theo, who was tending to someone else who had fallen. The corridor made a right-hand turn; Lloyd headed along the new section. He came to an office door, which slid open silently as he approached it, but the people on the other side all seemed to be fine, although they were talking animatedly about the different visions they’d had. There were three individuals present: two women and a man. One of the women caught sight of Lloyd.

  “Lloyd, what happened?” she asked in French.

  “I don’t know yet,” he replied, also in French. “Is everyone okay?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “I couldn’t help overhearing,” said Lloyd. “The three of you had visions, too?”

  Nods all around.

  “They were vividly realistic?”

  The woman who hadn’t yet spoken to Lloyd pointed at the man. “Not Raoul’s. He had some sort of psychedelic experience.” She said it as if this was only to be expected given Raoul’s lifestyle.

  “I wouldn’t exactly say ‘psychedelic,’” said Raoul, sounding as though he needed to defend himself. His blond hair was long and clean, and tied together in a glorious ponytail. “But it sure wasn’t realistic. There was this guy with three heads, see—”

  Lloyd nodded, filing this bit of information away. “If you guys are all fine, then join us—some people took nasty falls when whatever it was happened. We need to search for anyone who might be hurt.”

  “Why not go on the intercom, and get everyone who can to assemble in the lobby?” said Raoul. “Then we can do a head count and see who’s missing.”

  Lloyd realized this made perfect sense. “You continue to look; some people might need immediate attention. I’ll go up to the front office.” He headed out of the room, and the others rose and entered the corridor as well. Lloyd took the shortest path to the office, sprinting past the various mosaics. When he arrived, some of the administrative staff were tending to one of their own who’d apparently broken his arm when he fell. Another person had been scalded when she pitched forward onto her own steaming cup of coffee.

  “Dr. Simcoe, what happened?” asked a man.

  Lloyd was getting sick of the question. “I don’t know. Can you operate the PA?”

  The man looked at him; evidently Lloyd was using a North Americanism the fellow didn’t know.

  “The PA,” said Lloyd. “The public-address system.”

  The man’s blank look continued.

  “The intercom!”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, his English harshened by a German accent. “Over here.” He led Lloyd to a console and flipped some buttons. Lloyd picked up the thin plastic wand that had the solid-state microphone at its tip.

  “This is Lloyd Simcoe.” He could hear his own voice coming back at him from the speaker out in the corridor, but filters in the system eliminated any feedback. “Clearly, something has happened. Several people are injured. If you yourself are ambulatory—” He stopped himself; English was a second language for most of the workers here. “If you yourself can walk, and if people you’re with can walk as well, or at least can be left, please come at once to the main lobby. Someone could have fallen in a hidden place; we need to find out if anyone is missing.” He handed the microphone back to the man. “Can you repeat the gist of that in German and French?”

  “Jawohl,” said the man, already switching mental gears. He began to speak into the mike. Lloyd moved away from the PA controls. He then ushered the able-bodied people out of the office into the lobby, which was decorated with a long brass plaque rescued from one of the older buildings that had been demolished to make room for the LHC control center. The plaque spelled out CERN’s original acronym: Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire. These days, the acronym didn’t actually stand for anything, but its historical roots were honored here.

  The faces in the lobby were mostly white, with a few—Lloyd stopped himself before he mentally referred to them as melanic-Americans, the term currently preferred by blacks in the United States. Although Peter Carter, there, was from Stanford, most of the other blacks were actually directly from Africa. There were also several Asians, including, of course, Michiko, who had come to the lobby in response to the PA announcement. Lloyd moved over to her and gave her a hug. Thank God she, at least, hadn’t been hurt. “Anybody seriously injured?” he asked.

  “A few bruises and another bloody nose,” said Michiko, “but nothing major. You?”

  Lloyd scanned for the woman who had banged her head. She hadn’t shown up yet. “One possible concussion, a broken arm, and a bad burn.” He paused. “We should really call for some ambulances—get the injured to a hospital.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” said Michiko. She disappeared into the office.

  The assembled group was getting larger; it now numbered about two hundred people. “Everyone!” shouted Lloyd. “Your attention, please! Votre attention, s’il vous plaît!” He waited until all eyes were on him. “Look around and see if you can account for your coworkers or office mates or lab staff. If anyone you’ve seen today is missing, let me know. And if anyone here in the lobby requires immediate medical attention, let me know that, too. We’ve called for some ambulances.”

  As he said that, Michiko re-emerged. Her skin was even paler than normal, and her voice was quavering as she spoke. “There won’t be any ambulances,” she said. “Not anytime soon, anyway. The emergency operator told me they’re all tied up in Geneva. Apparently every driver on the roads blacked out; they can’t even begin to tally up how many people are dead.”

  2

  CERN WAS FOUNDED FIFTY-FIVE YEARS previously, in 1954. Its staff consisted of three thousand people of which about a third were physicists or engineers, a third were technicians, and the remaining third were split evenly between administrators and craftspeople.

  The Large Hadron Collider was built at a cost of five billion American dollars inside the same circular underground tunnel straddling the Swiss-French border that still housed CERN’s older, no-longer-used Large Electron-Positron collider; LEP had been in service from 1989 to 2000. The LHC used 10-Tesla dual-field superconducting electromagnets to propel particles around the giant ring. CERN had the largest and most powerful cryogenic system in the world, using liquid helium to chill the magnets to just 1.8 Celsius degrees above absolute zero.

  The Large Hadron Collider was actually two accelerators in one: one accelerated particles clockwise; the other, counterclockwise. A particle beam going in one direction could be made to collide with another beam going in the opposite direction, and then—

  And then E=mc2, big time.

  Einstein’s equation said simply that matter and energy are interchangeable. If you collide particles at high enough velocities, the kinetic energy of the collision may be converted into exotic particles.

  The LHC had been activated in 2006, and during its first few years of work it did proton-proton collisions, producing energies of up to fourteen trillion electron-volts.

  But now it was time to move on to Pha
se Two, and Lloyd Simcoe and Theo Procopides had led the team designing the first experiment. In Phase Two, instead of colliding protons together, lead nuclei—each two hundred and seventeen times more massive than a proton—would be rammed into each other. The resulting collisions would produce eleven hundred and fifty trillion electron volts, comparable to the energy level in the universe only a billionth of a second after the big bang. At that energy level, Lloyd and Theo should have produced the Higgs boson, a particle that physicists had been pursuing for half a century.

  Instead, they produced death and destruction on a staggering scale.

  Gaston Béranger, Director-General of CERN, was a compact, hairy man with a sharp, high-bridged nose. He had been sitting in his office when the phenomenon occurred. It was the largest office on the CERN campus, with a long real-wood conference table directly in front of his desk, and a large, mirror-backed, well-stocked bar. Béranger didn’t drink himself—not anymore; there was nothing harder than being an alcoholic in France, where wine flowed with every meal; Gaston had lived in Paris until his appointment at CERN. But when ambassadors came to see what their millions were being spent on, he needed to be able to pour them a glass without ever once showing how desperately he would have liked to have joined them.

  Of course, Lloyd Simcoe and his sidekick Theo Procopides were trying their big experiment in the LHC this afternoon; he could have cleared his schedule to have gone and watched that—but there was always something major going, and if he went to watch every run of the accelerators he’d never get any work done. Besides, he needed to prepare for his meeting tomorrow morning with the team from Gec Alsthom, and—

  “You pick that up!”

  Gaston Béranger had no doubt where he was: it was his house, on Geneva’s Right Bank. The Ikea Billy bookcases were the same, as were the couch and the easy chair. But the Sony TV, and its stand, were gone. Instead, what must have been a flat-panel monitor was mounted on the wall above where the TV used to be. It was showing an international lacrosse game. One team was clearly Spain’s, but he didn’t recognize the other team, clad in green-and-purple jerseys.