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wall of LED screens arrayed before her. Matthew Coppens and the rest of her deputies and staff members were at their work stations deployed in a theatrical layout of concentrically elevated semi-circles. Henry Quint had no direct responsibilities during the start-up procedure except for authorizing the final countdown and he stood at the top tier fingering his tie and obsessively clicking his ballpoint pen.
    “What’s our temperature?” Emily called out, the tension in her voice barely disguised.
    “We’re stable at 1.7 K,” her coolant specialist replied.
    “All right. Let's power-up the synchrotron.”
    MAAC was now officially the coldest place on Earth, colder than outer space.
    Approximately forty thousand tons of liquid nitrogen had cooled five hundred tons of helium down to 4.5 K, or
    -268.7ºC. The super-cooled helium had then been pumped into MAAC’s twenty-five thousand magnets where the refrigeration units took the magnets down to the operational temperature of 1.7 K, just above absolute zero.
    Each magnet was fifteen meters long and weighed thirty-five tons. The magnetic coils were made of coiled niobium-titanium filaments seven times thinner than human hairs. If unraveled the fibers would stretch to the sun and back twenty-five times. At 1.7 K they became superconducting, conducting electricity without resistance, and creating the powerful magnetic fields needed to bend the proton beams around the massive oval.
    Lead ion gas would be injected into boosters and channeled into the synchrotron where they would be accelerated and transferred into the MAAC where two beams of proton particles, one clockwise, the other counter-clockwise, would be further accelerated within minuscule cavities to their collision speed of 20 TeV, making the one hundred eighty kilometer circuit around London at near light speed, or eleven thousand times per second.
    As the beams approached the collision point within the muon spectrometer detector, a seven-story tall behemoth located only three meters below the well of the Dartford control room, they would be squeezed to about sixteen millimeters, a third of the width of a human hair, to increase the chance of proton-proton collisions. And when the beams collided they would produce a collision energy of two thousand TeV, the highest ever achieved in an accelerator, each lead-ion collision generating temperatures five hundred thousand times hotter than the center of the sun.
    John was surveying the control room and various points around the lab’s perimeter from a bank of CCTV monitors in his office. He watched the media gathering in the visitor’s center and a scrum of satellite trucks in the car park. But mostly he watched Emily and he had turned up the volume to capture the control room chatter.
    At T-minus-five minutes Emily called out, “All right, let me know when the synchrotron is at full power.”
    “Full power, two hundred GeV acceleration,” a technician soon replied.
    “Okay then,” she said. “We’re on the final four-minute count till MAAC injection.”
    She shifted to French to ask David Laurent, her spectroscopy chief, whether the muon detector was online. It was a running joke between them. Her German was excellent as she had done a post-doc in Ulm, but her French was more rudimentary. Laurent smiled at her and said his systems were operational.
    At T-minus-one minute Emily initiated the injection and filling of the particle guns with the lead gas, and at thirty seconds she formally asked Henry Quint for the final authorization to launch the beams.
    At ten seconds Quint simply said, “Proceed.”
    Emily gave Matthew Coppens a quick nod.
    John watched her lips on the monitor as she intoned the final countdown and wondered if he’d ever kiss her again.
    “…four-three-two-one. Initiate firing.”
    On the elliptical map of MAAC displayed on the largest of the control-room screens, two dots, one red, one green appeared at the synchrotron’s location just west