Patrick Lee - The Breach

Someone leaned in and told Paige the transport was thirty minutes out. She seemed to disconnect from all the talk at that point, thinking hard about something.

"That's enough time to show him," she said, her eyes finding Travis.

"Show him what?" a woman next to her said.

Paige considered her decision a few seconds longer, then solidified it. "Everything." A moment later he and Paige were in the corridor, moving away from the office while the others stayed behind. Travis heard them making calls, finalizing details of supplies and ground transportation in Zurich.

The silent corridor was a welcome change. Dimly lit, mostly deserted. The place felt like a high school after hours.

A red-haired woman, early fifties, hustled by toward the office behind them. She caught Paige's eye as she passed, then stopped.

"Is it true?" the woman said. "He can read it?"

Paige nodded.

The woman glanced at Travis, her expression mixed, as if he were either a B-list celebrity or an escaped specimen from a plague lab. Maybe both. Then she nodded, touched his shoulder, and continued on.

Paige led him farther along the hall.

"I know this all must feel like cleaning your contact lenses with a hose," she said. "I'll try to put it in order for you. A lot's going to depend on your being up to speed."

She went quiet just long enough to assemble her thoughts. "Right now, the business of running the world is on hold. Right now, the most powerful people on Earth are sitting by their phones. Including the American president. Who just lost his wife. He can't focus on that, any more than I can focus on what happened to my father, because right now the worst-case scenario we've ever imagined is threatening to come true. And until you read that text on my wall, I didn't see any real way to stop it."

They came to an elevator. She pressed the call button pointing down.

"This building is called Border Town. Tangent's home. It's in eastern Wyoming, seventy miles from the nearest anything."

The doors opened with a chime, and Travis followed her in. Turning, he saw a panel of floor buttons that started with B1 and descended all the way to B51. B10 was presently lit. He thought he knew which button she'd press, even before her hand went to the array. He was right. A few seconds later they were dropping toward the bottom of what was essentially a buried skyscraper.

"What's Border Town on the border of?" Travis said.

As evenly as she might have said Nebraska or South Dakota, Paige said, "Another world." B51 was nothing like the corridor they'd left above. Concrete floor, walls, ceiling. From the elevator it extended sixty feet and then opened up to an undefined space beyond, vast and pitch black. The tunnel might have led onto a darkened football field.

Paige moved toward the open end, but turned in at a doorway thirty feet shy of it. Travis followed her into a room that looked like a bunker that scientists would've sheltered in during atom-bomb tests in the fifties. Like the hallway, everything was concrete. Antiquated computer terminals hunkered at the far end of the room. Nearer to the door, current issues of Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal lay on some of the desks. Despite the place's mausoleum atmosphere, it apparently saw some use.

Paige opened a cabinet and withdrew a tan spiral notebook.

"At one time, only this floor of the building existed. It was the site of a Department of Energy project, the Very Large Ion Collider. Sixty billion dollars and ten years to build. It went operational on March 7, 1978. It was used exactly once."

She handed him the notebook. Up close he saw rust-brown fingerprints on it that could only be blood. Similar stains had soaked deep into the pages at the book's edge.

"Read this," she said. "It won't take long, and it speaks for itself better than I can."

With that she took out her cell phone. Travis opened the notebook while she called upstairs to catch up with the preparations going on in her office.

The blue lines on the paper had faded almost to nothing, but the text, handwritten in black ink, remained sharp and easily read:

VLIC GENERAL COMMENTS LOG

(SEE DATA LEDGERS FOR ALL SCIENTIFIC RESULTS)

MARCH 7, 1978-14:33 UTC

Well, it begins today. We're all so excited we can't put it into words.

I'll make this opening entry quick, since we have a lot going on. First, the point of this ledger: to record the human story of this place. Someday we may want to write a popular book about the VLIC, in the style of Feynman or Sagan. A log of people's personal experiences here would be great for that. So no pressure, guys. Just jot down what you're feeling. Anticipation, frustration, anything.

Here's today so far. Very, very exciting around here. Many of us have been on board this project for the entire decade that VLIC has been under construction, so to finally be just hours from the first shot is a kind of excitement I've never felt before. About twenty DOE people will be here for it, including Secretary Graham. He met with us earlier. Nice enough. He seems to have a good grasp of what this place means to physics and all science, in passing anyway, although after he stepped out someone said he probably would think an off-shell W boson was something at Taco Bell, haha. (No offense Mr. Secretary if you ever read this, we kid around a lot.)

Predictions for the first shot? Ha, not on your life. Obviously there's the expectation that we'll raise the lower bound on the Higgs by another percent of the standard model's prediction, but no one's saying it'll happen on the first shot! I would stick my neck out and say I hope, in time, we get an even more significant result than that, but I don't want to look back on this entry and think I was an idiot, so I'll just say I'm proud to be here, and to be part of this team trusted with something this special. We all are. This is Dave Bryce.

MARCH 7, 1978-PROBABLY A QUARTER AFTER 18:00 UTC

This is Dave Bryce again. This account of the shot is for investigators in case we all die down here before anyone gets to us. None of the machine-collected data survived, I'm sure, because of what happened with the metal. I don't know how we lived through it, it seems like the iron in our blood or the trace copper in our neurons should have been affected, and killed us instantly. Maybe it did get affected, and we're just not symptomatic yet. We're all very upset and scared. Here is the record, what I know at least, so whoever finds this will have somewhere to begin.

The shot happened at 17:40 UTC as scheduled. At the instant of collision, everything metal here in the bunker took on luminescence, different colors depending on the metal, but generally blues, greens. Something inside the wall phone was shining bright yellow, not sure what it was. The DOE undersecretary, Porter, collapsed, and there was no pulse at all, even right away. Two of the DOE people who knew him said he had a pacemaker. That seems pretty irresponsible to have him down here for this, even though we wouldn't have guessed there was any danger, I think I would have advised against it if I'd known. Laid the body at back wall of bunker, does not seem very dignified but nothing else would be any better.

Ruben Ward collapsed also, but for a different reason. He had both hands resting on the metal housing for the ring switches at the time of the shot. Don't know if he got a jolt from it, or what it might have been, but he lost consciousness and fell. He's still unconscious, we have him on the floor with a couple sweaters for a pillow.

Luminescence faded after about thirty seconds. At that point we had no information to go on, all electrical systems were out, computers, temp gauges, everything. The lights in the bunker were out, too. The only way we could see anything was a bright light shining down the hallway from the shot chamber, right past the doorway. It's very bright, and a lot of it comes in here, indirectly. Because of the angle, we can't see far enough down the hall to see into the chamber. We don't know what's going on in there, or where the light is coming from. I know we don't have anything that bright installed out there. It is still shining now, thirty or forty minutes after the shot.