Flashforward

  “Ten seconds.”

  Maybe the woman wouldn’t even be in his next vision.

  “Nine seconds.”

  Indeed, it was likely he’d be sleeping—and not necessarily even dreaming—twenty-one years from now.

  “Eight seconds.”

  The chances were almost zero that he’d see himself again—that he’d be anywhere near a mirror, or be watching himself on closed-circuit TV.

  “Seven.”

  But surely he’d see something revelatory, something significant.

  “Six.”

  Something that would answer at least a few of his burning questions.

  “Five.”

  Something that would bring closure to what he’d seen before.

  “Four.”

  He did love Michiko, of course.

  “Three.”

  And he and she would be married, regardless of what the first vision, or this one, might portray.

  “Two.”

  But, still, it would be nice to know that other woman’s name…

  “One.”

  He closed his eyes, as if that would better summon a vision.

  “Zero.”

  Nothing. Darkness. Dammit, he was asleep in the future! It wasn’t fair; it was his experiment after all. If anyone deserved a second vision, it was him, and—

  He opened his eyes; he was still flat on his back. Over his head, high above, was the ceiling of the LHC control center.

  Oh, Christ—oh, Christ.

  Twenty-one years from now he would be sixty-six years old.

  And twenty-one years from this vision, a few months later—

  He’d be dead.

  Just like Theo.

  God damn it. God damn it.

  He rolled his head to the side, and happened to see the clock.

  The blue digits were silently metamorphosing: 22:00:11; 22:00:12, 22:00:13…

  He hadn’t blacked out—

  Nothing had happened.

  The attempt at replicating the Flashforward had failed, and—

  Green lights.

  Green lights on the ALICE console!

  Lloyd rose to his feet. Theo was getting up as well.

  “What happened?” asked one of the reporters.

  “A big fat nothing,” said another.

  “Please,” said Michiko. “Please, everyone stay on the floor—we don’t know that it’s safe yet.”

  Theo thumped the flat of his hand against Lloyd’s back. Lloyd was grinning from ear to ear. He turned and embraced Theo.

  “Guys,” said Michiko, propping herself up on her elbow. “Nothing happened.”

  Lloyd and Theo disengaged, and Lloyd surged across the room. He reached out and took Michiko’s hands and pulled her to her feet, then hugged her.

  “Honey,” said Michiko, “what is it?”

  Lloyd gestured at the console. Michiko’s eyes went wide. “Sinjirarenai!” she exclaimed. “You got it!”

  Lloyd grinned even more. “We got it!”

  “Got what?” asked one of the reporters. “Nothing happened, damn it!”

  “Oh, yes it did,” said Lloyd.

  Theo was grinning, too. “Yes, indeed!”

  “What?” demanded the same reporter.

  “The Higgs!” said Lloyd.

  “The what?”

  “The Higgs boson!” said Lloyd, his arm around Michiko’s waist. “We got the Higgs!”

  Another reporter stifled a yawn. “Big fucking deal,” he said.

  Lloyd was being interviewed by one of the journalists. “What happened?” asked the man, a gruff, middle-aged correspondent for the London Times. “Or, more precisely, why didn’t anything happen?”

  “How can you say nothing happened? We got the Higgs boson!”

  “Nobody cares about that. We want—”

  “You’re wrong,” said Lloyd emphatically. “This is major; this is as big as it gets. Under any other circumstances, this would have been a front-page story in every newspaper in the world.”

  “But the visions—”

  “I have no explanation for why they weren’t reproduced. But today’s event was hardly a failure. Scientists have been hoping to find the Higgs boson ever since Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg predicted its existence half a century ago—”

  “But people were expecting another glimpse of the future, and—”

  “I understand that,” said Lloyd. “But finding the Higgs—not some damn-fool quest for precognition—was why the Large Hadron Collider was built in the first place. We knew we’d need to get up over ten trillion electron volts to produce the Higgs. That’s why the nineteen countries that own CERN came together to build the LHC. That’s why the United States, Canada, Japan, Israel, and other countries donated billions to the project as well. This was good science, important science—”

  “Even so,” said the reporter, “the Wall Street Journal estimated the aggregate total cost for your labor stoppage amounted to over fourteen billion dollars. That makes Project Klaatu the most expensive undertaking in human history.”

  “But we got the Higgs! Don’t you see? Not only does this confirm the electroweak theory, it proves the existence of the Higgs field. We now know what causes objects—you, me, this table, this planet—to have mass. The Higgs boson carries a fundamental field that endows elementary particles with mass—and we’ve confirmed its existence!”

  “No one cares about a boson,” said the reporter. “People can’t even say the word without snickering.”

  “Call it the Higgs particle, then; lots of physicists do. But whatever you call it, it’s the most important physics discovery so far in the twenty-first century. Sure, we’re not even a decade into the century yet, but I’ll bet that at the end of this century, people will look back and say this was still the most important physics discovery of the century.”

  “That doesn’t explain why we didn’t get anything—”

  “We did,” said Lloyd, exasperated.

  “I mean why we didn’t get any visions.”

  Lloyd puffed his cheeks and blew out air. “Look, we tried the best we could. Maybe the original phenomenon was a onetime fluke. Maybe it had a high degree of dependence on initial conditions that have subtly changed. Maybe—”

  “You took a dive,” said the reporter.

  Lloyd was taken aback. “Pardon?”

  “You took a dive. You deliberately muffed the experiment.”

  “We did not take—”

  “You wanted to torpedo all the lawsuits; even after that song-and-dance at the UN, you still wanted to be sure that no one could ever successfully sue you, and, well, if you showed that CERN had nothing to do with the Flashforward the first time—”

  “We didn’t fake this. We didn’t fake the Higgs. We made a breakthrough, for God’s sake.”

  “You cheated us,” said the man from the Times. “You cheated the entire planet.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Lloyd.

  “Oh, come on. If you didn’t take a dive, then why weren’t you able to give us all another glimpse of the future?”

  “I—I don’t know. We tried. Really, we tried.”

  “There’ll be an inquest, you know.”

  Lloyd rolled his eyes, but the reporter was probably right. “Look,” said Lloyd. “We did everything we could. The computer logs will prove that; they’ll show that every single experimental parameter was exactly the same. Of course, there is the problem of chaos, and dependent sensitivity, but we really did the best we could, and the result was hardly a failure—not by a long shot.” The reporter looked like he was about to object again—probably claim that the logs could have been tampered with. But Lloyd held up a hand. “Still, maybe you are right; maybe this does prove that CERN in actuality had nothing to do with what happened before. In which case…”

  “In which case, you’re off the hook,” the reporter said bitterly.

  Lloyd frowned, considering. Of course, he probably already was off the hook legall
y for what had happened the first time. But morally? Without the absolution provided by a block universe, he had indeed been haunted—ever since Dim’s suicide—by all the death and destruction he had caused.

  Lloyd felt his eyebrows rising. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “I guess I am off the hook.”

  26

  LIKE EVERY PHYSICIST, THEO WAITED WITH interest each year to see who would be honored with the Nobel Prize—who would join the ranks of Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, Gell-Mann, and Pauli. CERN researchers had earned more than twenty Nobels over the years. Of course, when he saw the subject header in his email box, he didn’t have to open the letter to know that his name wasn’t on this year’s list of honorees. Still, he did like to see which of his friends and colleagues were getting the nod. He clicked the OPEN button.

  The laureates were Perlmutter and Schmidt for their work, mostly done a decade ago, that showed that the universe was going to expand forever, rather than eventually collapsing down in a big crunch. It was typical that the award was for work completed years previously; there had to be time for results to be replicated and for the ramifications of the research to be considered.

  Well, thought Theo, they were both good choices. There’d doubtless be some bitterness here at CERN; rumor had it that McRainey was already planning his celebratory party, although that was doubtless just scurrilous gossip. Still, Theo wondered, as he did every year at this time, whether he’d someday see his own name on the list.

  Theo and Lloyd spent the next few days working on their paper about the Higgs. Although the press had already (somewhat halfheartedly) announced the particle’s production to the world, they still had to write up their results for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Lloyd, as was his habit, doodled endlessly on his datapad; Theo paced back and forth.

  “Why the difference?” asked Lloyd, for the dozenth time. “Why didn’t we get the Higgs the first time, but did get it this time?”

  “I don’t know,” said Theo. “We didn’t change anything. Of course, we couldn’t match everything exactly, either. It’s been weeks since the first attempt, so the Earth has moved millions of kilometers in its orbit around the sun, and of course the sun has moved through space, as it always does, and…”

  “The sun!” crowed Lloyd. Theo looked at him blankly. “Don’t you see? Last time we did this, the sun was up, but this time it was down. Maybe the first time the solar wind was interfering with our equipment?”

  “The LHC tunnel is a hundred meters below ground, and it’s got the best radiation shielding money can buy. There’s no way any appreciable quantity of ionized particles could have gotten through to it.”

  “Hmmm,” said Lloyd. “But what about particles that we can’t shield against? What about neutrinos?”

  Theo frowned. “For them, it shouldn’t make any difference if we’re facing the sun or not.” Only one out of every two hundred million neutrinos passing through the Earth actually hits anything; the rest just come on through the other side.

  Lloyd pursed his lips, thinking. “Still, maybe the neutrino count was particularly high the day we did it the first time.” Something tickled his mind; something Gaston Béranger had said, when he was enumerating all the other things that had been happening at 17h00 on April 21. “Béranger told me the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory picked up a burst just before we ran our experiment.”

  “I know someone at SNO,” said Theo. “Wendy Small. We were in grad school together.” Opened in 1998, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, located beneath two kilometers of Precambrian rock, was the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector.

  Lloyd gestured at the phone. Theo walked over to it. “Do you know the area code?”

  “For Sudbury? It’s probably 705; that’s the one for most of northern Ontario.”

  Theo dialed a number, spoke to an operator, hung up, then dialed again. “Hello,” he said, in English. “Wendy Small, please.” A pause. “Wendy, it’s Theo Procopides. What? Oh, funny. Funny woman.” Theo covered the mouthpiece and said to Lloyd, “She said, ‘I thought you were dead.’” Lloyd made a show of suppressing a grin. “Wendy, I’m calling from CERN, and I’ve got someone else with me: Lloyd Simcoe. You mind if I put you on the speaker phone?”

  “The Lloyd Simcoe?” said Wendy’s voice, from the speaker. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Hello,” said Lloyd, weakly.

  “Look,” said Theo, “as you doubtless know, we tried to reproduce the time-displacement phenomenon yesterday, and it didn’t work.”

  “So I noticed,” said Wendy. “You know, in my original vision, I was watching TV—except it was three-dimensional. It was the climax of some detective show. I’ve been dying to find out who did it.”

  Me, too, thought Theo, but what he said was, “Sorry we weren’t able to help.”

  “I understand,” said Lloyd, “that the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory picked up an influx of neutrinos just before we did our original experiment on April 21. Were those neutrinos due to sunspots?”

  “No, the sun was quiet that day; what we detected was an extrasolar burst.”

  “Extrasolar? You mean from outside the solar system?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was the source?”

  “You remember Supernova 1987A?” asked Wendy.

  Theo shook his head.

  Lloyd, grinning, said, “That was the sound of Theo shaking his head.”

  “I could hear the rattling,” said Wendy. “Well, look: in 1987, the biggest supernova in three hundred and eighty-three years was detected. A type-B3 blue supergiant star called Sanduleak -69°202 blew up in the Large Magellanic Cloud.”

  “The Large Magellanic Cloud!” said Lloyd. “That’s a hell of a long way away.”

  “A hundred and sixty-six thousand light-years, to be precise,” said Wendy’s voice. “Meaning, of course, that Sanduleak really blew up back in the Pleistocene, but we didn’t see the explosion until twenty-two years ago. But neutrinos travel unimpeded almost forever. And, during the explosion in 1987, we detected a burst of neutrinos that lasted about ten seconds.”

  “Okay,” said Lloyd.

  “And,” continued Wendy, “Sanduleak was a very strange star; you normally expect a red supergiant, not a blue one, to go supernova. Regardless, though, after exploding as a supernova, what normally happens is that the remnants of the star collapse either into a neutron star or a black hole. Well, if Sanduleak had collapsed into a black hole, we never should have detected the neutrinos; they shouldn’t have been able to escape. But at twenty solar masses, Sanduleak was, we thought, too small to form a black hole, at least according to the then-accepted theory.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Lloyd.

  “Well,” said Wendy, “back in 1993, Hans Bethe and Gerry Brown came up with a theory involving kaon condensates that would allow a smaller-massed star to collapse into a black hole; kaons don’t obey Pauli’s exclusion principle.” The exclusion principle said that two particles of a given type could not simultaneously occupy the same energy state.

  “For a star to collapse into a neutron star,” continued Wendy, “all the electrons must combine with protons to form neutrons, but since electrons do adhere to the exclusion principle, as you try to push them together they instead just keep occupying higher and higher energy levels, providing resistance to the continued collapse—that’s part of the reason why you need to start with a sufficiently massive star to make a black hole. But if the electrons were converted to kaons, they could all occupy the lowest energy level, putting up much less resistance, and making the collapse of a smaller star into a black hole theoretically possible. Well, Gerry and Hans said, look, suppose that’s what happened at Sanduleak—suppose its electrons became kaons. Then it could have collapsed into a black hole. And how long would it take for the conversion of electrons into kaons? They mapped it out at ten seconds—meaning that neutrinos could escape for the first ten seconds of the supernova event but, after that, they’d be swallowed
up by the newly formed black hole. And, of course, ten seconds is how long the neutrino burst lasted back in 1987.”

  “Fascinating,” said Lloyd. “But what’s this got to do with the burst that happened when we were running our experiment the first time?”

  “Well, the object that forms out of a kaon condensate isn’t really a black hole,” said Wendy’s voice. “Rather, it’s an inherently unstable parasingularity. We call them ‘brown holes’ now, after Gerry Brown. It in fact should rebound at some point, with the kaons spontaneously reconverting to electrons. When that happens, the Pauli exclusion principle should kick in, causing a massive pressure against degeneracy, forcing the whole thing to almost instantaneously expand again. At that point, neutrinos should again be able to escape—at least until the process reverses, and the electrons turn back into kaons again. Sanduleak was due to rebound at some point, and, as it happens, fifty-three seconds before your original time-displacement event, our neutrino detector registered a burst coming from Sanduleak; of course, the detector—or its recording equipment—stopped working as soon as the time-displacement began, so I don’t know how long the second burst lasted, but in theory it should have lasted longer than the first—maybe as long as two or three minutes.” Her voice grew wistful. “In fact, I originally thought that the Sanduleak rebound burst was what caused the time displacement in the first place. I was all ready to book a ticket to Stockholm when you guys stepped forward and said it was your collider that did it.”

  “Well, maybe it was the burst,” said Lloyd. “Maybe that’s why we weren’t able to replicate the effect.”

  “No, no,” said Wendy, “it wasn’t the rebound burst, at least not on its own; remember, the burst began fifty-three seconds before the time displacement, and the displacement coincided precisely with the start of the your collisions. Still, maybe the coincidence of the burst continuing to impact the Earth at the same time you were doing your experiment caused whatever bizarre conditions created the time displacement. And without such a burst when you tried to replicate your experiment, nothing happened.”