Bretigny

"Science has now entered new and unmapped territory, and we can only hope that the horror of the Bretigny Event will not be its defining trait." ~Dr Richard Fleming, preliminary report, December 2012.

"Oh, the places you'll go" ~Dr Seuss

In a dark room full of blue shadows, Louie looked down at the stylised image of a single atom of hydrogen projected onto the surface of a sphere. The sphere was touch-sensitive and further controls were embedded into a narrow shelf that ran round its edge. Louie began to cautiously use them to manipulate the atom as he familiarised himself with the interface.

He opened a virtual tool-draw, selected a particle-gun and loaded it with a nuclei from the gun's ammunition palette. He aimed the gun and fired. The particle shot from the muzzle, skipped past the electron orbiting the target's nucleus, smashed into the nucleus itself and was absorbed. A single proton was ejected and spun away.

"Sick" whispered a voice from behind.

Louie Gage lifted his gaze from the display and looked round at the speaker. "Nerd" he said with exaggerated contempt. The whisperer, a boy named Ray Morgan, laughed. "You're looking in the mirror, right?"

Louie and Ray were close friends and, at fourteen, this meant that most of their conversations still started and usually ended with some sort of insult, generally aimed at either the physical or mental shortcomings of the other, peppered with a few swipes at the other's taste in music, films, television, games, books, hobbies and, more recently, girls. The latter was handled with caution, as neither felt as confident in that area as they liked to pretend.

In appearance and character, the two friends were a mass of contrasts. Ray was a solid, muscular boy, although a little short for his age. He had inherited his stocky build and the surname of 'Morgan' from his Welsh father, and a wide west-African face from his mother. As well as being bright, he was a keen footballer and one of the rising stars of the school team. He was, by and large, an unremarkable looking boy, but easy-going, popular, and with a ready smile, who treated work and play with the same relaxed good-humour.

Louie on the other hand was an oddity. Pale, tall and long-limbed, he had an unruly mess of floppy, thick black hair that he was constantly pushing away from a pair of dark, rather mournful eyes. A huge, sharp beak of a nose overhung a thin, delicate mouth. He mostly resembled the rather bedraggled string-puppet of some kind of bird. A cormorant perhaps. This similarity was enhanced by the sudden and rather restless intensity that he would bring to any task or problem that grabbed his attention.

His height was a relatively new phenomenon. Up until the start of their teens, Ray had been marginally taller, but then Louie's bones had decided to head into strange and not entirely welcome territory. As a result, the last two years had been a chaos of loose-limbed flailing as he attempted to keep track of exactly where any particular leg, arm, elbow or knee was likely to end up when he moved it. His movements had consequently become rather cautious, although things could still go badly wrong for anything close by and breakable if he became excited.

The boys, along with their teacher and ten other students, had arrived in Switzerland late last night after sailing away from a rainy England early yesterday morning. The long drive through France had seen the weather slowly improve, and this morning they had woken to a view of the Alps, snow-capped and shining beneath a crisp blue late September sky.

Tomorrow they were going out on a boat on Lake Geneva so, from the student's point of view, that was basically a day-off. Today - ostensibly the reason for the trip - they were visiting CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. The school had felt that CERN might not survive an encounter with their entire year, so had just sent those in the top stream - a relatively manageable party of a dozen.

So far they'd visited the Microcosm museum, which had been okay, and had a tour of the site, which had been a bit boring - or at least the bits they'd been allowed to see. They were now exploring the Globe of Science, and in a while they were due to attend a lecture.

The globe had opened in 2005, seven years ago and, despite its age, both boys had to acknowledge the exhibition was alright.

The room was like an aquarium - full of hushed voices, dim blue light, shadows and bright displays. Almost everything was spherical or rounded. Consoles, like the one Louie had used, were scattered everywhere, and the centre was dominated by a wide, circular table with an aerial view of CERN projected onto it. A couple of Louie and Ray's fellow students were manipulating the image and zooming in on one or more of the particle accelerators and labs.

A swirl of music indicated that the light-show, "Birth of a Galaxy", was about to begin again. The two had seen this already, but it was nice to sit back and watch the images leap and dance between the screens and spheres. They settled into a pair of adjacent egg-shaped chairs as stars formed, dust cooled and gathered, and planets coalesced all around them.

When the light-show ended, Maggie Burke, their form-teacher, began to gather the group together. It didn't take long and, when the last pupil had been found, they all left the exhibition and made their way up a winding wooden ramp to the lecture hall on the upper floor of the building. Once inside, the students found places in the rows of seats arranged before a lectern while a woman with salt-and-pepper pinned-back hair smiled and nodded at them. Behind her, projected onto a white screen, was a slide that said "CERN - The European Organisation for Nuclear Research". The background for the slide was a series of circles and pathways that Louie recognised as a map of the various accelerators on the site.

The auditorium lights dimmed and the woman introduced herself as Dr Clara Lahr. She proved to be a good speaker, enthusiastic and brisk - an impression that was somehow enhanced by her German accent.

After a brief bit of background on the history of CERN, which even she couldn't make that interesting - built on the border of Switzerland and France in 1954, international cooperation, and so on - she began to talk about the work they did and the equipment they used.

"In Hindu mythology, the god Shiva is both creator and destroyer - one cannot have one without the other. If you carve a statue, you destroy a block of marble, if you destroy the statue, you create the ruins. Here at CERN we can never forget this. Every act of creation we undertake - and we undertake many - is based on using immense energies to destroy minute particles that have, in many cases, existed since the birth of the universe."

"Our job is to dream of new forms of matter and then summon them from the reality around us. We are not very good at this and in most cases our creations have vanished almost as soon as they have been born, and it is only their footprints that we get to measure and see."

"So how do we perform these miracles? Well, like wizards in a fairytale, we perform them in caves and tunnels underground. This was the first such tunnel we built."

On the screen an aerial view of the surrounding countryside appeared. A circle, probably twenty metres or so across, was sketched in.

"This is the proton synchrotron. We built this in 1959 and it is still in use today."

Further rings appeared along with further histories and explanations. Finally, a ring over eight kilometres wide slowly materialised.

"This is the large hadron collider - the LHC. It is twenty-seven kilometres long and contains over one and a half-thousand superconducting magnets and nearly a hundred tonnes of liquid helium. It was completed four years ago in 2008."

"Using this - and the other rings to feed it - we can accelerate fragments of matter to nearly the speed of light. In doing so they acquire extraordinary energy and mass. At the speeds we reach within the LHC they will weigh a thousand times more than normal - you have Mr Einstein to thank for that bit of information. The energies held by a single particle at this speed - even a tiny particle such as a proton or electron - will be enormous."

"And what do we do with these little bullets, these energies?" She looked around the room at the students. "We drive them towards other bullets, other energies and, BOOM!, we destroy them." Here she clapped her hands together, making the audience jump.

"And then? Then we sift through the wreckage left behind by these extraordinary collisions, looking for the faint traces of our hoped-for creations. We look for things that could not, should not be there, unless they were created by our destructions and games."

"Gluons, quarks, bosons, gravitons, tachyons - these are the things we hunt. They are smaller than atoms, smaller even than the parts that make up an atom. We cannot catch them or see them, only track and follow them. This is what we do, and this is where we do it."

Lahr finished speaking and looked down, pretending to tidy her notes while the visitors clapped and the auditorium lights were raised. Lahr took a moment to collect herself and then looked up again. "Thank you. So - do any of you have questions?" The students looked self-consciously at each other, wondering who would be the first to raise a hand.

"Yes," said Lahr, pointing in Louie's direction. "What is your question?"

Startled, Louie glanced at Ray and saw that his hand was up.

"Could you make something dangerous?" said Ray.

"Ah - this is the black holes and such that you have read about, yes?"

"Yes," said Ray.

"My instinct is to say 'No' and laugh at the idea," said Lahr. "However I think this instinct is wrong. We do play with the same forces and we don't always know exactly what we're doing. So - could we do it? Could we end the world?"

Lahr looked at the students. The question was almost always the first that was asked whenever she gave these talks. She still hadn't decided whether it was spurred by curiosity or fear.

"I believe the answer is 'no'. We are not, I think, clever enough or powerful enough to do something so impressive. For us to create a black hole by mistake would be like one of you going shopping one day, and finding that you had accidentally climbed Mount Everest."

"So, are we going to kill you all? No. Today you are safe - tomorrow, who knows?" she finished, and smiled at Ray to show that she wasn't that serious.

Understandably, given what happened later, Lahr was to remember this last exchange many times during the rest of her life. For the first few years, it would inevitably lead to tears. Later, she would remain dry-eyed as she struggled to hide from all those lost faces.

"Any other questions?" said Lahr, and other hands started to go up, and other queries made, until finally there were no more. The lecture was called to an end with a final round of applause, and Lahr thanked them for their attention before leaving.

The small coach was already waiting for the students when they left the dome. Louie and Ray raced each other to the door, laughing as they ran, barging and shoving. Maggie Burke called out to them to slow down, but without much conviction and the boys raced on.

Louie reached the steps slightly ahead of Ray and almost fell up them. At the top he tripped and stumbled towards the driver's dashboard. The driver had gone into the building to find a toilet but, unfortunately, had already dug his sat-nav out of the locked glove-compartment and plugged it in. Louie's arm caught it, pulling it free from its holder and sending it crashing to the floor, tearing a wire loose. Louie put out his arms to stop himself falling any further, scraping a set of knuckles on the base of the driver's seat.

As Ray came up behind him, Louie climbed to his feet and felt himself going hot. His face prickled with shock. "Oops," said Ray.

By now Ms Burke and the other students had reached the coach. The students could see that a crisis was developing and held back from boarding, although they peered in with interest. Ms Burke pushed her way to the front, climbed onto the coach, and surveyed the situation. Louie liked his teacher and hated the idea that she was going to be angry with him. Ray stayed by his side, sharing responsibility, although he could have easily moved away. Louie felt ridiculously grateful.

"I'm really sorry, miss. I just tripped."

"Because you were running when I'd asked you to stop?"

Louie sighed. "Yes miss."

Maggie sighed as well, looked at the fallen sat-nav, and then looked back towards the building. The driver - a middle aged man called Charley Morgan - had just emerged and, spotting the huddle of pupils, was walking quickly towards them to find out what the problem was. For a coach driver he had been fairly friendly on the long drive from England, but Maggie suspected that his affability was about to end rather suddenly.

The crowd of students parted and the driver climbed into the coach and inspected the damage. "Well, which bloody idiot did this then?" he growled.

Louie swallowed. "It was me, Mr Morgan - I'm really sorry."

The driver sighed and picked up the sat-nav and turned it over in his hands. Then he examined the torn wire.

"Well, with any luck, it'll just be this connection. I'll have a fiddle with it tonight." He looked up from the dead sat-nav at Louie. "You really are a prize plonker."

The driver dropped the device into the glove-compartment and settled into his seat. The two boys made their way up the aisle, exchanging rueful glances while Ms Burke went back outside to hustle the rest of the students onto the bus. Within a few minutes they were all seated.

Feeling somewhat bereft without his sat-nav, Charley Morgan studied his map, puzzling over the route back to the hostel where the pupils were staying, and then closed the doors, turned on the engine and set off.

Still fretting over his broken navigator, Charley turned right when they drove out of the site instead of left as he should have done. At CERN, the proton synchrotron was being prepared to fire a stream of particles that would eventually enter the large hadron collider. The experiment was routine - essentially a test of some recently replaced dipole magnets - and no one at CERN had any reason to expect anything out of the ordinary.

For understandable reasons, high energy physics research all over the world was to proceed much more cautiously following what would become known as the Bretigny event, so it would be some time before anyone came up with a working theory about what might have happened, and even then they would be wrong.

Suffice to say that what had mostly happened was bad luck. It was bad luck that Louie had broken the sat-nav, it was bad luck that the driver had turned right instead of left, and it was bad luck that there was a lay-by at pretty much the exact geographical centre of the LHC ring. Finally, it was very, very bad that one of the particles soon to be caught up in the test at CERN came from a type of matter almost never found in Earth's solar system, for the simple reason that life would never have had a chance to evolve if there had been much of it lying around.

A quarter of an hour later, Charley Morgan braked, pulled over into a small lay-by and stopped the coach. "I'm lost, and you can blame the clumsy bugger that broke my sat-nav." He said it with good humour and without malice, and people laughed at Louie rather than scowled at him.

Charley pressed the button that opened the door. "I can't turn round in this lane. I'm going back to that village to get directions." He climbed down and set off towards the group of houses a hundred yards or so behind them. A sign, closer by, gave the name of the place as "Bretigny". The accident was now just minutes away.

Sitting alone at the back of the bus, Louie and Ray knelt on their seats and looked out through the rear window, sharing a bottle of water and watching the driver as he made his way along the road. In the fields on the right, a small herd of cows chewed grass and stared at the coach with what appeared to be very little interest. When the driver disappeared around a bend the boys settled back down. It was Ray who first noticed something odd.

"What's up with the light? It's gone really weird."

It was true. The light in the bus had taken on a bright fuzzy quality that Louie had never seen before. He glanced outside. Everything there still looked okay, clear and sharp - the odd light only seemed to be falling inside the coach.

The cows, he noticed, were now moving away from the bus. They weren't exactly running, but something seemed to have worried them. Louie watched them curiously. After a while they stopped and turned - facing the vehicle again as though waiting for something, staring at the bus with the indifferent curiosity of cattle, breaking off their vigil to grab frequent mouthfuls of grass.

"Ow!" said Ray, and shot up. He almost fell, but then grabbed the back of one of the seats in front and gave a shocked laugh. "Pins and needles." Ray began to walk towards the head of the coach, trying to shake them off. After a few paces, he stopped and looked back at Louie. He seemed puzzled and slightly frightened. "It really hurts." He took a step towards Louie, but then fell suddenly to the floor.

Louie was now having problems of his own. His chest was hurting. He wanted to call for help but he was paralysed and couldn't move. There was a strange sensation in his mouth, as though he was chewing on sharp fur. He wondered if he was about to faint, and thought that might be quite nice if it would stop the pain in his chest. Someone, somewhere in the bus, began to cry. Others moaned. Then there was a scream.

Strange particles had started to interfere with their nervous systems. Electric signals in the body were being lost, duplicated or shifted slightly in time, and everyone was either disorientated or in severe pain. Unnoticed in the chaos, two of the students had already died from heart attacks. Louie had nearly been a third. Ms Burke was undergoing the equivalent of an epileptic fit and had bitten through her tongue.

This interference with the nervous system was one of the milder symptoms that resulted from proximity to the particles which the bus was now being bombarded with - particles that were naturally attracted to the metal frame and chassis. As the assault increased in intensity, the effects moved to a larger scale, and matter itself began to twist and stretch as it attempted to resolve the contradictory demands being made of it.

The front of the bus was suddenly compressed and pulled into a cone-shaped point, killing four more students. The point then reared up and backwards and then down, as though the coach was trying to stab itself. A mathematician might have recognised the shape as similar to a Klein bottle.

A series of convulsive ripples passed along the bus, fading as they approached the back like waves dying on a beach. All the windows on the left side suddenly shattered. All the windows on the right turned to liquid that dripped and ran.

What happened to the people caught up in this storm was far worse. The one saving grace was that most died quickly.

Louie found himself watching events unfold with a strange detachment. He seemed to be very far away from everyone and everything else, as though looking down a long tunnel. He couldn't move or speak. His body felt like it was being both pulled apart and squeezed at the same time.

In another universe - a kinder universe - Louie and Ray remained friends at school, but drifted apart when they went to different universities. Louie became a physics teacher and Ray a journalist. Louie had a major health-scare in his late-twenties, but made a full recovery after surgery. The two would meet up again in their thirties and renew their friendship. Ray would be best man at Louie's second marriage. Louie, as an old man, would read the eulogy at Ray's funeral.

In this universe, the last thing Louie saw before disappearing into thin air was his friend screaming and dying as his body flowed like melting wax.

When the driver returned to the bus a few minutes later, the storm had ended. At first he hadn't recognised the vehicle and had mistaken it for some odd sculpture that he'd somehow failed to notice before. He wondered why they'd made such a mess with all that red paint.

There had been thirteen people on the coach when the driver had left it to walk into the village - a dozen students and a teacher. It would take the investigators over two weeks, along with several DNA tests, to work out that there were only twelve bodies.

One of the students - a boy named Louie Gage - seemed to be missing.