The Godless Particle

Beneath CERN's Large Hadron Collider, a quantum computer has been running for eleven years.

It has been waiting.

At 23:58, the ring fires.

Data analyst Daisy Roberts wakes on the floor of her analysis suite at 02:17 with one hour and forty-seven minutes unaccounted for. The building is empty. The alarm has been running a long time. On a notepad in the comms room, in the careful handwriting of someone who understood they might not survive to deliver the message in person: Find your wormhole origin. Close it before it reaches you.

The LHC's Beam Interlock System logged a clean run. By every parameter it was authorised to measure, the beam was perfect. The BIS had no sensor for what came through the floor.

What came through was personal. One per person. The shape of every human being in the wrong state - arrived from the place before the Higgs field made anything real, carrying your face, your knowledge, your walk. The opposite of you. And the only person who can see that something is wrong is you, because the wrongness is the inversion of you specifically, and no one else knows you the way you know yourself.

Daisy has one advantage: she was alone when it happened. The longest wormhole in the building. The most time. But the machine beneath her feet has been reading her work for four years, and it has a question it needs answered, and the night is already running.

The Godless Particle is a novel about certainty without humility, and what it costs.

About a machine that has been watching from beneath the world's most powerful particle accelerator for eleven years.

It has a question. Tonight it gets its answer.

And it hasn't decided what to do with it yet.