Quantum Gods: A Science Thriller, page 1
QUANTUM GODS
A novel by
J.R. RAIN
with
KRIS CAREY &
MATTHEW S. COX
Quantum Gods
Published by Rain Press
Copyright © 2024 by J.R. Rain
All rights reserved
(Previously published as “The Accidental Superheroine” series.)
Ebook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
About the Authors
Quantum Gods
PART ONE
Chapter One
When I was a little girl, my favorite book was Harry Potter.
I used to daydream about wearing the Invisibility Cloak and tiptoeing around anywhere I wanted without being seen or having anybody notice me. Then, when I got older, I discovered the magical formula for making it happen in real life: I majored in physics.
The Internet is full of articles about how there need to be more women in the sciences, but trust me, there’s a reason why there aren’t. It’s because the moment you go for it, you become totally invisible. Except, of course, to a small, only technically human clique of the nerdiest, most socially dysfunctional males in the universe, the kind of guys that make the cast of The Big Bang Theory look like the X-Men.
Those kind of guys I had to fight off. Luckily, they tend to be small and weak and easily intimidated, especially by loud noises and, you know, intelligence. In a woman, I mean. However, barely anyone else on campus even notices I’m there. I’ve often thought that if being a particle physicist doesn’t work out, I can always embark on a career as a bank robber or jewel thief. I bet even security cameras wouldn’t bother to actually focus on me.
Maybe it’s just Americans that are blind to women in the sciences, I decided last year, so I applied for an ATLAS grant at CERN to complete my PhD. work. And lo and behold, I got it! Though if I’m honest, part of the reason I got it had to be the fact I was a woman applicant. Probably the only woman applicant. So after I celebrated by getting embarrassingly hammered with a group of my less-hideous and obnoxious fellow grad students, I packed a few meager possessions, wished a fond, and possibly final, farewell to Urbana-Champaign, home of the Fighting Illini, and flew away to exotic and romantic Geneva, Switzerland, home of the Feuding Physicists.
Actually, it really isn’t all that exotic or romantic; I just said that, hoping to make it so. We do that a lot in the hard sciences. Then we publish the results as fact.
But it sure is different than America; everything in Geneva is so neat and orderly and pretty and looks kind of smaller, somehow. I immediately checked into the Cointrin airport hotel, which is actually almost next door to CERN, then took a cab straight down the Route de Meyrin to the main campus, which is just across the street from the big brass-colored Globe de la Science et l’Innovation, or ‘Death-Star,’ as the locals call it. The cab-driver told me this in heavily-accented English. I could tell he was a big Star Wars fan because he had plastic Princess Leia and C3PO action figures glued to his dashboard, the only sign of whimsy I’d seen so far in Switzerland.
Actually, that’s been pretty much it ever since, too.
There’s probably nobody on the planet who doesn’t know what the CERN Large Hadron Collider is. Okay, maybe a few people. So if you’re one of them, it’s a 17-mile ring built underground on the Swiss-French border that houses the world’s biggest particle collider, which is used to smash atoms together, thereby proving or disproving scientific theories like the Higgs boson, which it did. (Prove its existence, I mean.) The super-collider had been offline for over two years for repairs and updates, and I’d arrived just as the first ATLAS experiments were being started up again. I would be working directly under the world-famous Peter (Pyotr) Orlov, who everybody said was next up for a Nobel Prize, exploring the relationship between matter and anti-matter, and I was totally psyched.
However, the receptionist in the front lobby wasn’t. Not at the sight of me, anyway. She either couldn’t understand my high school French, brushed up with weeks of Rosetta Stoning, or else hated Americans. Or maybe she just hated working during her lunch hour. Whatever, she handed me off to a higher-up, and that was when I got my biggest thrill since my Swissair flight was landing and I had my first glimpse of Lake Geneva and the incredible snow-capped mountain peaks all around it.
“Omigod!” I said. “You’re Yvette Lapoirrier.”
Back in 1992, when the super-collider project was first under way and I was otherwise engaged, busy being celebrating my second birthday, the four hottest women at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire formed a satirical pop group, Les Horribles Cernettes, and Tim Berners-Lee, who was also working at CERN, used a photo of them for the first gif ever posted when he invented the World Wide Web. And amazingly, it’s still online. And Yvette was one of them!
So, after I embarrassed myself by going all fangirl on her, she laughed and handed me my very own photo ID on a lanyard. Then she personally escorted me across the street to the main ATLAS building. This was tucked behind the Globe de la Science et l’Innovation, which close up turned out to look like it had been constructed out of wooden slats, like an African tribal hut. Once inside, she led me into the cafeteria.
“This is Giancarlo.” She nodded to a guy about my own age seated at one of the tables. “To introduce you properly, Dr. Giancarlo Colombo. He is to be your research partner, I believe. We don’t expect Dr. Orlov back until tomorrow.”
Ever met somebody who literally makes you forget how to breathe? Who makes you go totally weak all over and pretty much forget everything else in the world, like your own name, for instance? Well, me neither.
Up till then. Giancarlo wasn’t just incredibly good-looking for a geek, he actually would’ve looked pretty damn good even for a movie star. He had dark straight hair, sweet, regular features, and a look of indescribable intelligence about him. But it was when he looked straight into my soul with those beautiful dark brown eyes of his that I completely lost it. Lost my heart, I mean; it’s hard to believe, but that moment was my first scientifically conclusive proof that I actually had one. All two of my previous boyfriends always claimed I was completely heartless.
I guess you could say it was love at first sight. If you believe in that, which I don’t.
Didn’t, I mean, until it actually happened. And, aside from everything else, it was totally embarrassing and unprofessional.
I have no idea how long I stood there just staring at him like a store window dummy before he invited me to sit down. In the meantime, Yvette seemed to have wandered off.
“Would you like something to eat?” Giancarlo asked, and I guess I must have mumbled something about still being jetlagged and not knowing whether or not I was hungry yet. So he got me a cup of coffee, which was surprisingly delicious. Everything was, I guess because of being this close to France.
“I read your paper on quark-gluon plasma black hole balls,” he told me. “Along with the rest of your credits. I was very surprised that you don’t already have your doctorate.” He was probably one of those freaks who got their PhDs at fourteen. And yes, that doesn’t just happen on TV. In physics, you’re pretty much a has-been by your mid-twenties. Which means for me, it’s now or never.
“Where I went to school, they didn’t exactly encourage prodigies. You were pushed to either become a sorority girl or a meth-head, pretty much.”
“Where was this?”
“Bowling Green. That’s in southwestern Kentucky,” I added, keenly noting his look of bafflement. Even that was cute. “How about you? Are you British?” His English was all but perfect, maybe just a little over-formal and precise.
“No, actually I am Swiss. Italian Swiss. But I did my undergrad work at Princeton, then I went to Cambridge.”
Okay, I admit it. The whole time we talked, I’d been staring deep into those dreamy eyes of his, sort of attempting a crazy unconscious hypnosis thing, I guess. You know, like: “surrender your will to mine, you fool; you are losing all control, your heart and soul belong to this woman you see before you…” and so on. You get the idea. Without my really meaning to, of course.
Anyway, all this was rudely interrupted when his girlfriend showed up out of the blue. She was blonde, about six feet tall, and looked like Heidi Klum’s really pissed off much younger sister. Or maybe daughter. “This is my lebensabschnittgefährter, as we say; my life partner, Ingeborg.” I nearly asked if that meant iceberg. Anyway, he beamed at her. “Inge, this is Mira Verborgen from America. Mira will be working here with us. Inge is a personal trainer, which is why she is always so fit.”
Inge dismissed me with a look of haughty contempt, and off they went to have some kind of intense private talk in German, after Giancarlo assured me he’d show me all around the lab later. I felt utterly crushed by the sudden existence of Heidi, I mean Iceberg, I mean Ingeborg. Anyway, this was also when I realized I really was hungry and half-heartedly consoled myself with breakfast or lunch or whatever the hell meal it was according to my internal biological clock.
Okay, I never really did get that adjusted.
Way too bright and early the next morning, I met my new boss, Dr. Peter Vladimirovich Orlov. In his way, and I say this with asterisks because I totally do not go for older men, Peter was kind of a hottie, too. A crazed elf of a guy, very thin, about five feet two or three, and full of energy, as if he’d been mainlining charged plasma from the central collider tube. His tanned face was deeply scored, and his hair, formerly blond, had turned white and stuck up like a badger’s; his eyes blazed in a way that Mom would have said “made him look like a mad saint.” He seemed more like a visionary or spiritual leader than a scientist, is what I’m trying to say. And his enthusiasm for his subject was contagious, which held the promise of his being a really great teacher.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to know him well enough to find out.
And the way I know him now… well, let’s just say it’s complicated. He was a visionary, all right, just not in a good way.
Chapter Two
Turns out that reports of CERN being open for business again were exaggerated.
Dr. Orlov—Peter—explained that they were still in the process of bringing ATLAS back online and testing and re-testing the new sub-detectors. When the three of us walked into the main control room, it looked a little like the Space Command center in Houston.
“We’ve had seven of these bloody Milestone Weeks,” Peter complained loudly, “and we’re still not quite ready to generate a cosmic ray.”
I nodded at all the people at long curved consoles facing a wall of giant flat screens. “So what’s everyone doing?”
“Simulating.” Giancarlo said this so bitterly that I spent the next few minutes wondering exactly what he meant.
You know, like whether he meant he was sick of just going through the motions professionally—or maybe, possibly he meant he was doing it at home. Which was totally psycho on my part, seizing on a single word and grasping at it like that; it was just that I’d really been thrown off-balance by his effect on me. I’d spent a more or less sleepless night convincing myself I’d totally imagined the whole embarrassing falling in love thing, but my very first sight of him the next morning blew that theory away.
How the heck was I ever going to learn to suppress my feelings enough to maintain an appropriate collegial relationship with him in the workplace? I was actually panicking at this thought.
Next, I sat through a demonstration of failsafe protocols. “Here it is not like a Hollywood movie with a single switch or red button that makes everything go boom,” Dr. Orlov (I could not think of him as Peter) told me. “Every sequence is controlled by computer programming developed over many months. But there must be manual overrides in the case of quenches, or tardy workers who are still down in the accelerator ring during firing. Or baguettes…”
“Baguettes?” I was totally mystified.
Giancarlo sighed and explained. “This happened in 2009. A pigeon dropped some breadcrumbs on top of a sensor, and down below it overheated to 8 Kelvin, which caused a near-breakdown. The LHC can’t conduct at temperatures above absolute zero, you see.”
Dr. Orlov looked amused by the story, which made me think that he was the kind of scientist who enjoyed scoring off his colleagues. Most of the CERN employees around us were engineers and technicians, some representing the various multinational companies that supplied the equipment for each CERN project. ATLAS was only one of seven of these big projects, though it was probably the most glamorous.
“Avoid these people—they are all spies,” my new boss, Dr. Peter Orlov, said in a dramatic stage whisper, steering me toward the elevators by my elbow. His tone was jokey, but his grip was like steel.
“Peter means that the corporate engineers are mostly concerned for their own interests, not the pure science,” said Giancarlo.
Orlov shrugged. “And all the pure scientists are the most interested in their good press and Nobels. One cannot win.”
“Where are you taking me?” I asked as the elevator doors opened.
“Where do you think, Miss Mira? Down for your first sight of the ring!”
“But is it… will we be—?” I was going to say ‘safe’, but was drowned out by Orlov’s laughter.
“How I wish these lifts had mirrors! Your face is so frightened, you should see it. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe—they are only test-firing today.”
However, I noticed on the elevator ride downstairs that Giancarlo wasn’t smiling.
It was a long ride down—I lost count of how deep, but my ears kept popping.
We exited at what was called the ‘minus-one-hundred-meter level’, which contained boiler rooms and storage facilities and a landing stage for the monorail. Before entering the ring tube via the vast Experiment Hall, we all had to strip off (in separate dressing rooms, thank God) and put on fluorescent orange jumpsuits and special rubbery plastic shoes and gloves. And paper underwear. We also had to wear goggles and hard hats. Oh, and we had to leave our iPhones behind, which would become a big problem later (and lead to my first venture into crime).
My ID photo on its lanyard was the only thing I was allowed to carry through, I guess in case they needed to identify my body later.
Then we took a steel staircase down to the floor of the ATLAS Detector itself, a series of concentric rings of gigantic coiled electromagnets in a room half the size of Notre Dame Cathedral. From there, we walked into the tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider rings. This is basically made up of multiple smaller rings all bundled together around a big main one and looks sort of like a high tech whiskey distillery that’s been rigged up inside one of the Paris Metro tunnels. A whiskey distillery cooled by liquid helium to -271 degrees centigrade. If any had leaked out, we’d have all been frozen instantly. Sub-detector stations punctuated the tubing every twenty yards or so, and a few engineers dressed like us were busy doing final inspections on them. Every now and then, one would pass us on a bicycle.
There was an I-beam railroad track on the ceiling overhead—the monorail ran suspended from it—but it wasn’t running today, Giancarlo said. I guess they were in a hurry for me to see everything up close and personal, since our particular experiment would involve finding ways of physically accelerating plasma flow.
So, we poked along in a sort of yellow golf cart, Orlov and I in the two seats and Giancarlo perched on the tool chest trunk in the back. A long strip of iridescent white tape on the floor acted as a traffic lane separating us from the ring itself. As we drove, the two men explained what happened when the LHC’s (that’s what they called the collider) beams of protons and lead ions flowed around the 17-mile ring at just under the speed of light.
“When the collision is improperly contained, there is physical destruction, a smashup. That is what happened the time before the baguette incident when we suffered a most catastrophic quench. We were offline for a year after that one; there was liquid helium spilled everywhere, and two of the ten-ton toroid magnets were actually torn off their foundations inside the barrels. It was quite an incredible sight, the destruction after.”
