Down: Trilogy Box Set Read Free Page B

of Dartford. Each dot began to travel in opposite directions around London. Although the paths of the proton beams were graphically portrayed with a periodicity of one orbit per second, every sweep represented ever-increasing thousands of orbits.
    There were cheers around the control room but Emily quieted everyone by calling out the rising collision energies.
    This time in English she asked Laurent, “David, how does the detector look?”
    “We’ve got the first collision tracings appearing.”
    “One down, hundreds of trillions to come,” she replied.
    John had kept the camera zoomed in on her. He thought she looked sublimely happy.
    She kept relaying the energy read-outs. “Fifteen TeV, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty TeV. We’re at full power!”
    There was a smattering of applause in the room.
    Suddenly Emily gasped. Her monitor was showing a rising energy level.
    “Matthew!” she said. “What’s going on? We’re at twenty-two TeV and climbing?”
    Matthew looked at her and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”
    “What do you mean you’re sorry? Who authorized this?”
    From the top of the theater, Henry Quint said, “I did, Dr. Loughty.”
    “Why wasn’t I informed?” she demanded.
    “Let’s discuss this later, in private, shall we?” Quint said.
    “That’s not acceptable. Tell me now. Why wasn’t I informed?”
    “Because you wouldn’t have agreed. This was my decision and my decision alone,” Quint said. “It’s necessary for the operational survival of MAAC. Now please carry on to thirty TeV.”
    Emily looked at Matthew furiously. “You went behind my back?”
    “He forced me, Emily,” he said mournfully. “He told me I’d be dismissed if I told you.”
    Up in his office John’s blood boiled. He could see the hurt and betrayal on Emily’s face. Henry Quint was John’s boss too and he shared Emily’s dim opinion of him. Now he wanted to sink a fist into that face.
    Hovering over him, Trevor Jones asked, “Is this safe, guv?”
    John mumbled, “It doesn’t look like Emily thinks so.”
    Emily watched mutely as the collision energy crept upwards. The primary goal of Hercules I was to gauge the safety of 20 TeV before upping the threshold. She knew exactly what Quint was doing. In one fell swoop he had thrown safety out the window for the sake of politics.
    She whispered, “Twenty-six TeV, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine.”
    When the system read-out 30 TeV she walked down into the large crescent-shaped well and turned her back on the LED screens to address Quint and her hushed team of scientists. John tracked her on one of the cameras, alarmed by the fear on her face.
    “We need to dial this back to twenty TeV immediately,” she said evenly. “Matthew, please take it down.”
    “Overruled,” Quint said. “I take full responsibility.”
    “Dr. Quint, if you don’t allow Dr. Coppens to power-down or abort I have no choice but to tender my immediate resignation.”
    “You do whatever you need to do, Dr. Loughty, but this experiment will proceed at thirty TeV,” Quint said, his voice rising.
    Around the control room heads were pinging from Emily to Quint. No one seemed to be paying attention to the monitors until David Laurent noticed that his muon spectrometer was going crazy.
    “Hey! The detector is going off the charts!” he yelled in his high-pitched accent. “I don’t understand this activity.”
    Emily was about to sprint up the stairs to his screen when something happened.
    John saw it on his monitor and blinked in confusion and disbelief. Before he could say anything he heard Trevor shouting, “Jesus! What the fuck just happened?”
    Emily was gone.
    And someone else was standing in her spot.
    Over the next hours and days they would play the recordings of that moment over and over, thousands of times, reducing them to extreme frame-by-frame slow-motion. The HD cameras recorded at sixty frames per second. Whatever happened had taken place during the