Daimones - Book 1 of the Daimones Trilogy. Booktrope Publishing Edition

The Lab

Not Now

CERN laboratory was like a small town, services included. Actually, not even that small as it consisted of an eight-thousand-large community, much larger than many of the little villages in the area, in both the French and Swiss territories. The main lab site expands across the national border, part in Switzerland and part in France.

A number of villages are inside the circle of its accelerators complex, the largest one built inside a twenty-seven kilometers tunnel, and hosted the most powerful hadrons collider in the world. Protons or lead ions smash together at the site of its major experiments detectors, deep down below the surface. That infrastructure was now bound to be the ultimate one, unmatched by any other lab in the world. Competition was over.

I reached the entrance in the French territory, at the doorstep of the village closest to our house. I didn't take the expressway; I wanted to avoid going through the linear cemetery made of car wrecks, a multitude of open-air tombs with their macabre display of long-gone owners.

The laboratory was a 24/7 institution, with its few access barrier gates operated by the guard on duty while all buildings inside the compound could be accessed at all times. I stopped right in front of the security booth with its tinted glass and got out. The barrier remained lowered and blocked the entrance. I tried the door of the booth. It wasn't locked, though some obstructions inside blocked it from fully opening.

I couldn't see clearly inside, even when pressing my face against the glass pane of the door. I went back to the car and took the flashlight from the glove compartment, returned to the booth and forced the door. It opened a bit so I pushed harder and with all my weight. Something gave way and crushed. The nauseating stench of a decomposed body greeted me.

Covering my mouth, I entered the booth. The flashlight's beam traced the dusty air inside the booth. Particulate matter floated in the air. When I was a child, I played with tiny little movements of my hand to create swirls in the air, watching how that translated into a dancing dust in the sunbeams.

Behind the door, the crushed skeletal mummy of the guard last on duty stared at me with its empty orbits. I gagged in repulsion. The flashlight showed me the location of the control box for the barrier. I pushed the button and the bar raised only to stop halfway with a grinding noise. Another damaged piece of engineering that no one will ever repair. Entropy was at work, the gentle degradation of a dead civilization.

I drove through. The lab was a familiar place for me. I worked there for almost a decade. I knew well where my first stop would be: the main building—or the "500"—hosted an area where a few computers were devoted for public access. It was a quick and easy plan with a high chance for success.

Before that moment, I never gave much thought to all of the people who died at CERN that February. Technicians, Ph.D. students and fellows, researchers—all gone. All ideas, efforts, passion and imagination obliterated by someone's decision. By then, I had stopped thinking Mother Nature had betrayed us in some mysterious way.

From the entrance, I went straight and kept to the right at every intersection, following the perimeter road. The main building was in front of Building 2, separated from Building 1 by Building 52. Funny enough, at CERN numbers didn't help you to find a building.

I stopped the car right in front of the main building entrance, at the place where CERN shuttles made one of their stops. None was parked there nor would any appear later. Everywhere was now a perfect spot to leave a car, anywhere in the world. Someone had solved for us every traffic congestion problem on earth, an unpleasant thought.