Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(2)

“Rather than try to explain why I called you together, let me show you.”

Dr. Dubois thumbed a button on the small remote control unit he picked up from the table, bringing the flat-panel display on the far wall to life. The screen showed a myriad of colored lines twisting away from a central point, something a child might have produced given a full day with a Spirograph.

Dr. Dubois moved the mouse pointer on the screen, circling the central point.

“This is an ATLAS image from testing conducted just prior to the latest system shutdown, early on the morning of the last Friday in November. In fact it was still Thanksgiving night over in America when this image was captured.”

Rodger studied the screen. Without a detailed study of the complete data set he was at a loss to spot anything unusual in the image. Clearly the extreme energy released in the proton collisions had created a wide range of particles with different charges, spins, and masses, accounting for the assortment of paths that were displayed on the screen.

“Now this,” Dr. Dubois said, bringing a new image to the display, “is ATLAS data captured this very morning.”

Although the first image had been indicative of an extreme energy event, this latest image showed an order of magnitude increase in particle interactions, so many that it was difficult to discern one path from the other.

“Excuse me,” Dr. Craig interjected. “Were you using the same filter and trigger settings on this last event?”

“The ATLAS instrument settings are unchanged,” Dr. Dubois replied.

Something about that statement bothered Rodger, and he leaned forward. “But you said this was captured this morning. I didn’t realize that you had finished repairing the damaged electromagnets and restoring vacuum to the system. Have you managed to further increase beam energies beyond ten TeV?”

Dr. Dubois leaned back in his chair. “That brings us to the issue at hand. There’s really no way to put this except bluntly. There never was any electromagnet damage, or any loss of vacuum in the beam tube. That was merely a cover story issued to the press to allow us time to develop a detailed understanding of the anomaly.”

Voices rose in concert, each scientist demanding attention until no single question could be discerned above the noise. Dr. Dubois waited patiently until, at last, the scientists fell silent.

“I understand you have questions, but before I yield the floor, you need to hear the rest of what I have to present, information that will answer many of the questions you have already asked, but which will certainly raise more. Now may I continue?”

Glancing quickly around the table, Dr. Dubois encountered no objection. He rose from his chair, as if he could no longer bear the tension while remaining seated.

“As I indicated in my early remarks, the testing conducted through late November produced a series of exciting results. However, during a test conducted on the morning of the last Friday in November, we noted an odd spike in measurements across the range of ATLAS instruments. I’m talking about across the inner detector, the calorimeters, the muon spectrometer, even the outer toroid magnets.

“Even more disconcerting, the readings continued after the beam channel was shut down. Naturally, we first looked for some failure in the instrumentation, faults in the electronics or in the software responsible for collecting and processing the data.”

Dr. Dubois’s face had taken on a pallor that could not be blamed solely on the room lights. Rodger understood why. The implications were enormous. For ATLAS to record such a powerful event with no beam firing couldn’t be good.

“We shut down all further LHC testing until we could determine the exact nature of the problem. We have not done a beam firing since that day.”

“Wait one minute.” Dr. Gotlieb rose from his chair to point at the screen. “You said that image was collected this morning.”

Dr. Dubois nodded. “That is correct. That is a slice of the data collected by the ATLAS detector this morning.”

“But, if there has been no proton acceleration around the LHC, how...?”

Dr. Gotlieb’s question trailed off into horrified silence.

“Jesus Christ.” The words slipped from Rodger’s lips like a prayer. It was worse than he had thought.

“The November Anomaly, as we have come to call it, appeared at the interaction point within ATLAS and somehow achieved a semblance of stability. We immediately scrambled to isolate the anomaly in an intense electromagnetic containment field to keep it from escaping the vacuum chamber. Since that day, we have had a team of engineers working around the clock to improve the quality of the surrounding vacuum, adding multiple redundancies to prevent electromagnetic or vacuum failure.”

Dr. Dubois pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbing at the beads of sweat that dampened his brow. “I think you can see why we’ve held this information close-hold as the best minds on the program struggled to understand exactly what has happened.”

“But how is that possible?” asked Dr. Boudre. “Admittedly I’m an astrophysicist rather than a quantum specialist, but even the energies provided by LHC collisions have far too small a probability cross section to allow for stable formation of some sort of micro black hole. Besides, Hawking radiation should dissipate any black hole with a mass of less than two hundred thousand kilograms in under a second. A micro black hole such as yours should have evaporated in a tiny fraction of that time.”