“Using hyperlight velocities we could telegraph into the past.” - Albert Einstein, 1910
“What the hell?”
Lyra blinked at her terminal as the particle accelerator wound down around her. What she was looking at was impossible. Tachyons, the elusive, special-relativity-breaking faster-than-light particle, existed. Dozens of UHD pictures confirmed the optical “sonic boom” of Cherenkov radiation—wormy tendrils of electrically charged particles moving faster than light in a clear medium. By itself, the finding was enough to revolutionize both her career and humanity’s understanding of physics. She should have been preparing her Nobel speech.
Only, it wasn’t by itself.
At most, the radiation could have appeared patterned; the unlikely product of multiple clean proton collisions. In zero computer models, however, did the tendrils appear…designed. It went against all Lyra believed, and the message it created was one that drove her mind to entropy. In the freeze-frames of radiation moving through empty air, shaky words read:
“You’re going to die - RF”
“This…isn’t possible,” Lyra said aloud this time, hoping her undulating sound waves would somehow shake order into the mad universe she found herself in. And who the hell is RF?God?
Uninterested in being tamed, the universe replied to her questions with further madness: a squeak. Someone had just opened the door to her lab. A locked door in a sealed facility. Driven by a superstitious urge she had gone so much of her life without, Lyra ducked beneath the ledge of her observation window. When she snuck her head back up, angry eyes met hers from across the room.
“What you’re doing here is wrong!” the intruder screamed. He was wearing an oversized hockey jersey with stains so dark they nearly camouflaged the Flyers logo embroidered on its front. Nearly every inch of his exposed skin appeared to be covered in fresh rashes. Are those…sunburns? Lyra thought before her attention was arrested by the object in his hand.
The pistol’s polished chrome appeared to be the most well-kept thing about the man wielding it. Its muzzle traced small, invisible infinity signs on the floor to the man’s right, then it rose.
Pistol and man disappeared as Lyra ducked back beneath the window. As quickly as she could, she reached for her terminal and set the cameras to record in real time. The man had moved from where he had been standing at the door, and was stepping over the four-foot collider tube. He strode with deadly purpose, mere feet from clearing the chamber. When he did, there would be little separating her from the evil end of the weapon he carried.
“Shut it down, you bitch!”
She had dealt with these kinds before; ones with low scientific literacy, who believed CERN or Fermilab would create a black hole or gamma ray burst capable of ending life on earth. It was true their Fiensman Collider produced analogues of those things, but nowhere near the monstrosities fretted over. Explaining it didn’t matter though; math fell on deaf ears. Violence was their language of choice instead, and too many scientists like her had been targeting by self-righteous ignorance.
“No,” Lyra whispered, punching the activation sequence that had punctuated her research for over a decade. “Not today. Not me.” For the first time ever, she ignored the safety checklist.
Whirring began again from the machine she likened to an infinity symbol tucked in on itself—a machine designed to explain the hidden structures of the universe. The machine that had given so much purpose to her life was about to save it.
Sirens and emergency locks activated. Magnets far stronger than those inside an MRI powered on, ripping the firearm from the man’s hands with a force that may have removed fingers. A loud bang occurred a fraction later as gun met electromagnet. Additional warnings and sirens followed; the vacuum tube had been damaged and rapidly depressurized.
Lyra heard cursing over the sounds of the machine. In one of the cameras, she watched as the man dove toward where the gun had been pulled. Bloodied hands searched for a weapon that was now indecipherable from surrounding metal. Still, the madman continued his search. He bent forward, toward where a large hole now gaped in the drift tube.
“Oh God, no,” Lyra whispered.
She watched in horror as his head entered the tube… and took the full force of particles moving at relativistic velocity.
In 1978, Lyra knew, Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski became an accidental example of what happens to the human body when it enters an active particle accelerator. High-energy protons obliterated the meat between his left ear and nose, releasing a massive dose of ionizing radiation and evaporating all it came in contact with. Miraculously, Bugorski survived.
The man in the Flyers jersey did not.
§
This Robert looked different from the signature suit-and-tie, well-manicured Adonis he had built his brand around. According to reports, he had been watching a hockey game with friends at his house when the injuries began. The rashes were no sunburns: they were radiation burns, each appearing from thin air and showcasing a separate line of script.
“Shut it down.”
“End it.”
“You’re going to - ”
Lyra froze. The man who had tried to kill her—her employer and the benefactor of the collider—was Robert Fiensman. RF. Lyra raced to the pictures on her terminal. Results from the collider’s more recent “test” were visible as well. Just as she thought, they matched the readings to her previous results far more accurately than her earlier test had.
The messages, produced by a particle that broke causality and violated spacetime, had been a warning from a reverse ghost. Only, the warning hadn’t been for her.
“You’re going to die, RF”
Andrew Akers (He/Him) is a forest ranger and emerging writer from Pennsylvania, USA. His work will soon be appearing in Stupefying Stories Magazine, Fabula Argentea, Black Hare Press, and in Book XI. When he isn’t working or writing, Andrew is running marathons, playing Dungeons & Dragons, or raising his son with his far more talented half, Kylie. If you want to check out more of his stuff, go to www.andrew-akers.com.
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- Made in DNA - “Something CUTE This Way Comes”
- Cass Sims Knight - “Slugging”
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- Beth Cato - “Water in the Bones”
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- Chana Kohl - “Murder in the Shuk”
- Patricia Miller - “An Absence of Shadow”
- Robert Hobson - “Watershed”
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