The God Particle (30 page)

“The human brain’s greatest ability—pattern recognition—is both an asset and a liability. We easily make associations that for a computer are enormously complex, but we also tend to see patterns that aren’t there. Like when people experience life-threatening trauma, the brain often assigns religious emphasis to ordinary events, because we’ve been conditioned to believe it.”

“That’s a very clinical way to look at something that might be much larger than us,” Kelly says. “That might not be measurable in a laboratory.”

“I know it is. But I’m a physicist, remember? Science may not be romantic, it might not make it easier to sleep at night, but it gets things done. We’re able to fly around the world and send e-mail and cure disease because of science. Maybe there is something else, some kind of transcendental reality, collective, whatever. But how do we know if we can’t measure it somehow?”

“So you think his ability to read thoughts, to dissolve that glass, can be explained purely with science.”

“Of course,” Mike says. “Any physical phenomenon can be explained with logic if you can gather enough information.”

Steve opens his mouth to say something, but Kelly is quicker.

“He came all the way across the country to see you, Mike. And when he couldn’t get to you, he came to my house, convinced me to bring him here. Isn’t it possible there is something larger at work?”

“Not necessarily. He saw us on television. The Higgs discovery struck a chord with him, so he found us.”

“Struck a chord? It happened within weeks of his head injury! It’s at least possible that he was brought here. I mean, if you ever wanted a case for that collective reality—”

“Kelly.”

“I’m just saying that it doesn’t seem very scientific to take one of the possible explanations for his ability and dismiss it. I thought scientists were supposed to consider everything, regardless of whether it fit into your expected outcome.”

“But I can’t consider this collective reality if I can’t measure its effect. Yes, maybe that’s the reason, but I have to operate as if it isn’t, because otherwise I have to throw out the entire experiment.”

“He’s not an experiment!”

“Hey,” Steve says. “Do you guys want to hear what
I
have to say about it?”

Mike and Kelly look at him, then at each other.

“Of course,” Kelly says. “Sorry.”

Steve thinks of the first day, when he woke up, and tries to find that uniquely skewed perspective again. “I can tell you this much: the field, or fields, these things I experience, that my brain tries to ‘see,’ that is one thing. And it’s local. It’s like looking at the world in a different way. I think of it like a soup of particles, mass and energy all interacting. Everything is connected. Bound together. Like everything that happens influences something else.”

“Isn’t that sort of like chaos theory?” Kelly asks. “The butterfly effect? Tiny changes have a ripple effect and eventually add up to large, unpredictable events at a great distance?”

“Maybe,” Steve says. “But maybe the effects aren’t unpredictable. Maybe they are measurable with the right perspective.”

“Chaos theory renders the effects unpredictable because it’s impossible to measure any complex system with infinite accuracy,” Mike says. “You can’t begin with perfectly knowable conditions, so determinism—the idea of absolute cause and effect—is basically made irrelevant. Even the smallest difference in initial conditions produces dramatically different results.”

“Okay, so maybe they are predictable in the short term,” Steve suggests. “Or maybe it’s possible to read patterns in the chaos.”

“You may be right on that note,” Mike says. “Part of the theory postulates that chaos on a microscopic scale could be necessary for larger-scale patterns to arise.”

“But the particles,” Steve says, “they’re only part of it. The presence is something else. Well, that’s not exactly right. It’s like . . . it’s like the presence is the same stuff as the particles, but also more. In the business world we call it synergy, where something as a whole is more than the sum of its parts. Like a photograph is more than just the grains of color that comprise it.”

Mike opens his mouth to say something, but Steve stops him.

“Svetlana, the prostitute? When she came to me in dreams, you know what it felt like? It felt like
she
was the presence. Like she had . . . I don’t know . . . condensed from it.”

“That’s interesting,” Mike says. “I may have heard of a theory that could support an idea like that.”

“What?” Kelly and Steve ask at the same time.

“It’s the idea of the universe itself being a living entity. Alive. Evolving.”

Steve says, “I don’t—”

“Well, if you consider that the Big Bang spawned the universe, that all matter and energy, that even space and time are its consequence, then even we, humans, are basically an extension of that universe. I mean, you look into the night sky, at pictures of galaxies, and you say, ‘Hey, that’s the universe.’ Well, people are also the universe. We are, literally, stardust. And since we are also sentient, since we’ve evolved enough to ponder our own existence, then by definition so has the universe. The universe itself could be considered alive, to have evolved over time, and now, through the use of a small, sentient device in its metaphorical brain—us—it’s able to ponder its own existence.”

“But how does that relate to his ‘presence’?” Kelly asks.

“Think of that collective reality idea, where consciousness itself may not belong to us. I mean, I don’t believe this, there is nothing in science to support it, but it would be like all the particles of the world make up a sort of relational database. In the computer world a relational database is a set of tables that allows the user to manipulate data in many and complex ways based on the data’s structure and a set of rules. So in this case, for the sake of analogy, you’d be talking about a sort of universal relational database. And I suppose if you know the rules, how the relations are made, if you have access to the data—which in this example might be the collective, perceived reality of all matter and energy in our universe—then you can know almost anything, even make predictions based on the data. Perhaps you could tell the future. Or with enough energy at your disposal, make dramatic physical changes to the world.”

“Changes to the world?” Kelly asks. “What do you mean? And where would this energy come from?”

Mike looks at Kelly and then at Steve, who has obviously made the same connection.

“From something like the super collider,” Mike says. “A machine powerful enough to create small-scale collisions at energy levels similar to the Big Bang.”

From the beam, Steve thinks.

“Do you want to go there?” Mike asks him. “I can hardly believe I’m asking you this, but I saw what happened to the glass with my own eyes. Do you want to visit the super collider while the beam is on and see what happens?”

Steve nods.

7

By now Larry’s hangover has grown huge, woolen legs, legs that are stomping around inside his mouth, rattling the throbbing cage of his skull. He’s eaten a handful of Advil over the past three hours and has forced down a gallon of water. They’re speeding down 251, nearing the entrance to the NTSSC administrative complex, and Larry is fairly sure he’s going to throw up any minute.

“How can you possibly know if he’s coming here tonight?” he asks Samantha.

“He’ll be here,” she says. “What I don’t know is where. I don’t know if he’ll go to the administrative offices or over to the GEM building. We never really could tell if proximity to the collisions made a difference.”

Larry watches her speak these words with complete sincerity. Proximity to the collisions. Insanity. It’s his proximity to
her
that’s the problem. Sucking him further into madness than he already was.

“You really think he’ll be here tonight. Not tomorrow? Not next week? We run the beam all the time.”

“I was told he’s coming tonight. Besides, if he doesn’t, then no harm done, right?”

Larry grins. Says nothing.

“Let’s try the administrative offices first,” Samantha says.

1

For a while Donovan drives alone with his thoughts as Allgäuer and Dobbelfeld sit in the backseat and speak to each other in German. He hates it when people do that, converse in a foreign language in his presence, fully aware that he can’t understand them. On the other hand, a man of his intelligence and stature ought to speak multiple languages, something he cannot do, something that is a constant source of embarrassment to him.

Finally, as they near Olney, Allgäuer switches to English and says, “Donovan, are you familiar with the Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman?”

“No. Should I be?”

“My experiments with derivatives of certain hallucinogenic drugs were inspired by his work. I was very interested in the altered mental state produced by these drugs, in how that state might be connected to possible extrasensory ability, and in 1941, after studying with Hoffman for several months, I administered a derivative of ergot alkaloids to an eighteen-year-old male whose reaction was dramatic and remarkable. He was given the drug while asleep, but within ten minutes he awoke and began scrambling around the laboratory, screaming about monsters and ghosts and such. This patient expired before he could be subdued—cardiac arrest was the apparent cause of death—and we would have assumed his experiences to be hallucination if the lights and several sensitive electronic instruments in our laboratory had not been mysteriously (and indirectly) damaged during his struggle. This proved nothing by itself, of course, but when a similar incident occurred with another patient two years later, I began to really wonder if these patients were somehow affecting their environment by indirect means. The Allied victory in World War II ended my research for a while, but later I began it again in the United States. Very near here, as a matter of fact.”

“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here now,” Donovan says.

“I experienced sporadic success for many years, mainly due to a lack of available test subjects. Without a properly controlled scientific environment, it was difficult to separate success from coincidence, and since this drug was similar to but chemically distinct from LSD-25, some of my colleagues were inclined to believe the phenomena were somehow acute hallucinations. Still, we continued our experiments, eventually acquiring patients suffering from mental illness—especially schizophrenia—and in 1964 and 1979 there were dramatic demonstrations of possible telekinesis and even environmental control on a large scale. But still we could not be sure, and besides, the patients always died soon after the compound was administered. Success is irrelevant if no practical application emerges from it. Eventually I returned to Europe, settling in Switzerland, and it was there that I experienced my most promising success yet.”

They pass through Olney and now approach the super collider on 251. Donovan can hardly believe what he is hearing, Allgäuer’s claims of fatal ESP experiments on human subjects. It’s nothing at all like what he expected to hear. Or wanted to hear. Because as much as he longs to understand the invisible power structure from which he has been so conspicuously barred, Donovan doesn’t want to hurt anyone, regardless of what abilities might emerge from the research.

“It happened that I was fortunate enough to procure a high-functioning autistic who also exhibited savantlike abilities. He could perform lightning-fast numerical calculation and could perfectly perceive the passage of time without a clock. Those things by themselves may sound extraordinary, but most extraordinary to me was his unique ability to somehow tolerate the psychological effects of the compound. His observations, Landon, were startling. He described what I concluded must be an interpretation of numerous vector fields in the laboratory. Electromagnetic fields, the fluid movement of air molecules, even what I believed at the time to be the gravitational field. It was remarkable. For many weeks I conducted a battery of tests, but the conclusive evidence emerged—as it often does—accidentally. Over time the subject noticed that the vector fields were altered occasionally, that these changes followed a pattern, and we eventually traced this pattern to the schedule of beam runs at the nearby CERN high-energy physics laboratory.”

“What?” Donovan asks. “He could tell when the beam was turned on?”

“There is more. When I finally arranged a visit to CERN during a beam run, the patient became quite agitated. He claimed to have experienced an intense sensation of being watched. By multiple observers. And when I asked him who these observers were, and how many, this man—who, remember, could carry out astonishing numerical calculation—this man informed me the number was ‘too many to count.’

“I asked if there was a problem seeing all of the observers, or something else that prohibited him from counting them, but his remarkable answer was—I repeat this verbatim—’the number is simply too large.’ And when I asked if he could calculate this number, given enough time, or if a fast computer could calculate the number, he answered ‘there is not enough time.’ ”

They pass through the NTSSC gate and Donovan drives them toward the administrative offices, per Allgäuer’s instructions. He asks, “What do you think it meant, Karsten? All these observers, too many to count, what did you take from that? You must have done additional research, or else we wouldn’t be here now.”

“It is a miracle,” Allgäuer says. “The universe.”

“The universe.”

“It’s a miracle, and it’s there for the taking, for whoever develops the ability to harness it. Like horses to ride, like oxen to plow. Like dogs to hunt.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s alive, Landon. The universe is alive.”

2

The three of them speed through the night in Mike’s VW Passat, bearing down on the super collider. Mike’s mind is racing, the spinning flywheel of a redlined automobile engine, as he revisits the improbable sensation of a glass ceasing to exist in his hand, as he struggles to comprehend a human being who can influence his environment in unbelievable ways. He feels like a man who is convinced beyond any doubt that he has been abducted by aliens. He sees in his future the desperate attempt to explain to his colleagues what he saw with his own eyes, what he felt with his own hands, as those cold and reasoned men and women regard him with pity. And yet Mike cannot ignore the implications of Steve’s ability, which are staggering, which are almost beyond comprehension.

If he can sense these fields, if he can detect particle interactions at the super collider, what else could he possibly know? Could he shed light on the biggest problem in modern physics, the apparent incompatibility between Einstein’s relativity and quantum physics? Could he answer basic questions for cosmologists about the origin of the universe, about the void from which time and space emerged fourteen billion years ago?

Could he give meaning to it all?

Because, let’s be honest, understanding how everything works is only a partial solution. If Mike were given a key to the city, if someone handed him a blueprint to the functional universe, would that really be the answer? Did he really think he would ever truly understand the nature of existence? Or has his life in physics simply been delaying the eventual fugue state of existential despair, a man with nothing left to research, no more questions to ask, no reason to get up in the morning and maintain relationships with the same group of unknowingly doomed people?

“I think there is a device inside my head,” Steve blurts.

“What?” asks Kelly.

“A device?” Mike says. “What makes you say that?”

“I think that’s how they’re tracking me. That’s why there was never any physical surveillance. It was always this device in my head.”

“Why do you think you have an implanted device?” Mike asks again.

“I don’t know. I just know it’s there. Somehow it allows me to decode the extrasensory input, I think. And it’s also a communication device. Except that. . . .”

“Except what?” Mike asks him.

“It doesn’t seem to be in any one place. It seems to be everywhere, inside my entire brain.”

“And you can sense this?” Kelly asks. “You’ve identified the very device that allows you to do the identifying?”

Mike pulls off the highway and guides his car toward the NTSSC gate. He smiles as Louis, the guard, waves him inside.

“There is a device called a neuron transistor,” Mike says. “An electronic device implanted in the brain that can cause a neuron to fire or suppress it from firing. Maybe something like that was implanted during your brain surgery.”

“But if I’m the subject of some kind of experiment, why allow me to leave the hospital? Why not keep me there to study?”

Mike pulls the VW into his parking space at the administrative office and kills the engine. He gets out of the car, Kelly and Steve do the same, and together they walk toward the administrative building. The only other car in this front parking lot is the security guard’s Olds Cutlass.

“That’s a good point,” Mike says. “But I have an even more fundamental question.”

“What’s that?” asks Steve.

“How were you selected for this? When were you identified as a candidate?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did someone at the hospital pull you into a special room and say, ‘Let’s experiment on this guy’?”

Steve doesn’t answer right away.

“Because waiting for head trauma victims would be a poor way to find subjects, if you ask me. And brain injuries might ruin their experiments.”

“I’ve never really thought about how I was selected.”

“What about this guy you struggled with at the Cabaret? Before you went out the window? What was that about?”

“The bouncer?”

“How do you know he was really a bouncer?”

“Well, I—”

“Maybe the guy wasn’t trying to kick you out. Maybe he was going to make you stay. If someone there was on the lookout for possible candidates, it might explain why they shut the place down, why everyone was gone. So you couldn’t go back and draw attention to them.”

Mike uses his keycard to unlock the glass doors, and the three of them walk through the foyer, past the reception desk, which should be manned by a security guard and isn’t. A newspaper is draped over the chair, and a half-eaten Snickers bar sits inside its wrapper on the desk. This is no good. Even though there is probably no one in the building right now—anyone working this late will be over at the detector—the security guard shouldn’t leave the reception desk.

“Right now,” Kelly says, looking at Steve, “I’m not sure it matters why you were selected. Aren’t you more concerned about what they plan to do with you?”

“They’ve been monitoring me,” Steve agrees. “There must be some kind of plan.”

“The most obvious thing would be military use,” Mike suggests. “If there really is a device in your head, and if it functions the way you’ve described, maybe you can achieve two-way communication between the electronic and neural worlds. That would open up all kinds of possibilities. Perhaps you could communicate with other people who had these enhanced brains, or even synch to your computer like a Palm Pilot.”

“Synch to your computer?” Kelly asks. “Download your brain into a computer?”

Mike considers looking for the guard—he’s probably in the bathroom—when he notices light under his office door.

“That’s one thing,” he says. “I guess if you could do that, assuming there was a powerful enough computer, it could be like a sort of immortality. Even if your body died, at least you could still be self-aware.”

Steve looks at Mike and then back at the door, as he stops, as they gather in front of it.

“We should leave,” Steve says. “It was a mistake to come here.”

“The guard—” Mike begins.

“Disposed of.”

“What?” Kelly asks.

“He’s in there,” Steve says. “I can sense him.”

Kelly looks at Mike, then at Steve. “Who? The guard?”

Mike’s office door opens, revealing a tall, silver-haired man that he doesn’t recognize. Behind him lurk Donovan and another unfamiliar man.

“Mr. McNair,” the old man says. He’s pointing a small handgun at them. “I’m Karsten Allgäuer. I’ve come to use your machine.”

3

Allgäuer waves the three of them through the door and herds them into a corner beside Mike’s desk. Steve walks as instructed but never takes his eyes off Dobbelfeld, the doctor who he thought saved his life but who apparently only loaned it to him for a while.

“Mr. Keeley,” Dobbelfeld says through the doorway. He’s holding an electronic device of some kind, like a PDA but larger. “I trust you are okay? You haven’t been injured?”

“Not since you left something in my head during surgery.”

Allgäuer laughs heartily.

“At least you still have a sense of humor,” he says, and then turns briefly toward the man Steve recognizes as Landon Donovan. “It’s almost startling, the difference between my drug therapy and this technology of Dobbelfeld’s.”

“Drug therapy?” Steve asks. “What are you talking about?”

“You may believe that yours is a singular ability, Mr. Keeley, but you are actually the latest in a long line of test subjects. The end result in a project that has spanned more than fifty years.”