The room looked a lot different at the start of the power up phase of the experiment the next day. Scientists and technicians moved from desk to workstation and back again in no apparent pattern. The room seemed smaller to Alain Benoit as it filled with people. He spotted Roger Pendragon at the large Directors workstation across the far side of the room. His own chair was still where he had left it the night before.

He made his way over to the monitor.

“Good morning Roger.” Roger Pendragon had obviously been at his desk all night. He was unshaven, his shirt sported the creases of a night spent in the chair. Alain knew that any expression of surprise or concern would be hardly acknowledged. He sat down beside Pendragon.

“Any problems?” He asked.

“Glad you could make it Alain.” He smiled at Alain, looking far chirpier than he had any right to be after a night on the chair. “It’s a great day for science Alain. A great day. Everything is perfect, right on target.” He beamed.

“We’ve initiated?”

“Ten minutes ago, went like a dream. We should be up to par in about an hour, fancy a coffee?” He stood up and took Alain’s arm, leading him towards the coffee machine.

Alain carefully sipped the scalding coffee. “So, what about afterwards, what then?” he asked between sips.

Pendragon sighed. “There’ll be years of work for both of us here. The grants that we can apply for after today will keep us going forever. That’s if you want to stay on of course.  You could do worse.”

“Of course I do, I’d be a fool to turn an offer like that down.”

“Good!” said Pendragon. Let’s get back to work then. “Come on.”

For tiny fractions of seconds, the LHC created and contained temperatures which far exceeded anything that our corner of the galaxy had experienced since the time of the big bang.  Inside a doughnut shaped chamber that completed a circle which had a diameter of seventeen miles and straddled national boundaries, energies far in excess of those produced by the sun flashed briefly into existence and died away in an instant.

The very fabric of the universe was torn apart, only to crash back together in the same moment. The only evidence of these momentous events lay in the outpouring of debris which was collected by the four detectors spaced around the colossal ring of metal and concrete lying fifty meters under the earth.

The firing was over, the technicians had managed to find other work out of the spotlight. After the congratulations and backslapping had subsided only a few directly involved scientists and data specialist remained in the control room.

Roger Pendragon was finally beginning to succumb to the lack of sleep from the long night before. Alain Benoit still sat next to him, working at his own terminal.

“So Alain, what have we got so far?”

“We achieved 14 TeV, there were fourteen hundred bunches at 75 nanoseconds apart” He said. “It looks good from here.”

“Excellent, how long for the preliminaries?” Pendragon yawned wearily.

“They’re being rendered now, but it will take some time. Why don’t you go get some rest, I’ll wake you when the first batch comes down.”

“Yes, I rather think I will. Be sure to call.”

“Of course, just go, rest” Alain insisted.

Pendragon stood and stretched his stiff joints to the limit. He mumbled a weary goodbye and left the control room.

Alain Benoit waited until he was sure that Pendragon had left the building before he took out his flash drive and connected it to his terminal. He brought up the screenshot he had taken and copied it to the drive before deleting the original securely from the computer. If anybody else had seen it then that was just too bad, but he doubted it. Unless somebody else was watching the raw data being assembled then it was unlikely that anybody had seen it. The virtual interpretation of the data would not accept such a result. The final data collected from the firing would be useless. It would be recorded as a failure. They had failed to find the Higgs Bosun, the God particle. There would be more tests, but not for Alain Benoit. He would resign his position the very next day, much to the consternation of Roger Pendragon.

That night Alain Benoit sat before his personal computer and tried to make sense out of what he had seen as the preliminary data came directly into his station after the firing.

He had made the right decision, he was sure of that. Roger Pendragon had held scientific reasoning up as his God. He would never accept what Alain had witnessed as truth. To do so would destroy him completely. As far as he knew, Alain Benoit was the only person on the Earth who had witnessed this terrifying event. Let it stay that way, at least until the next firing, and possibly well after that one too.

The initial results from the firing had been spectacular, if disappointing. The tracks and spikes had confirmed his worse suspicions. The computers showed hundreds, if not thousands of new particles flying out from the centre of the impact zones. It wasn’t this disappointment of the failure of the experiment that had caused him to embark on this course of deception and lies. It was something else, something so completely insane that nobody in the scientific community would ever believe it.

But Alain Benoit believed it, he was conditioned to believe it, all those centuries of the church in his family’s bloodline demanded that he believe it.

He tried once more to put the events in order.

The room had seemed to be in uproar around him as he sat transfixed on the virtual representation playing out on his screen. His terminal was in split screen mode, with one half showing tracks and the other displaying the graph-like spikes which represented particle interaction over time.

Both screens had shown the impossible journeys of the particles as they flashed around the screen, reversing direction and transforming into wavelike structures before his astonished eyes, everything seemed to be coalescing in toward the centre of the screen in a strange, almost directed manner. Suddenly, there it was in front of him.

It was over in a few seconds but he was able to hit the capture key before the shimmering image dissolved into chaos once more.

He stared at that captured image displayed now on the screen of his personal computer In the centre of the hail of chaotic motion on the screen, glowing with an impossible light, sat three words.
 

Three words written in English.

It was a warning.

It read; “Go No Further”

Alain Benoit hung his head and cried.

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