Time Crystal

In Time Crystal, the ATLAS detector captures a cosmic monopole which then accretes protons to become transformed into a persistent black hole. The scientists and engineers who built the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and ATLAS are not fools. They have already considered the possibility of a black hole being created, and what the dangers would be if it was.

But still not everyone is convinced. Here I give links to both sides of the safety argument, so you can make your own mind up.

Those who think it’s safe

Among the many reports on the safety of this and similar installations, the following reports have concluded that there are no appreciable risks.

Review of Speculative Disaster Scenarios” at RHIC

In Time Crystal, Maria uses cosmic rays to show how low the risks are. This is echoed in the explanation given on the CERN web site, which says: Despite the impressive power of the LHC in comparison with other accelerators, the energies produced in its collisions are greatly exceeded by those found in some cosmic rays. Since the much higher-energy collisions provided by Nature for billions of years have not harmed the Earth, there is no reason to think that any phenomenon produced by the LHC will do so.

Even if a black hole is created, it would not last very long. It should (in theory) immediately evaporate by Hawking Radiation, as Francesco Romani explains in Time Crystal.

There are a couple of safety reports that can be downloaded as follows:

• specialist report published in the United States (also available from RHIC site above)
• specialist report published in Europe

Those who think it’s dangerous

They include LHC Concerns who think the LHC is dangerous, and The Legal Defense Fund Site who want money to defend the legal action in Hawaii.

My Conclusion

So is there any danger? I’m sure that if they do make a black hole it won’t last long enough or be big enough to create any danger. As for the Well probably not. Unless, by some freak accident, a cosmic monopole happens to wander past while the experiment is running. But, of course, there’s no scientific basis for the idea of it’s being transformed into a persistent black hole, or even for their existence. It’s just a fantasy. There same goes for Strange Matter, Bubble Nucleation or any of the other theories that some people might try to scare you with.

But of course it makes a darn good story!

One of the premises of Time Crystal is that a persistent micro black hole is created in the European Center for Nuclear Research, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, following the capture of a cosmic monopole by the ATLAS detector. Of course, this is pure fiction. However the fear people have of black holes is reflected in a lawsuit started in Hawaii.

According to the International Herald Tribune, Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce a tiny black hole which, they say, could eat the Earth or spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said “There is nothing new to suggest that the LHC is unsafe,” adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6 2008.

The law suit will have no effect, however. Hawaii courts have no jurisdiction over CERN. Since it is an international body, there might not be any legally constituted entity which actually does have control over it.

For more information about the risks, see this page.

This version created 26 March 2008

‘I can see Maria.’
‘Call me Lord.’
‘I can see Maria, Lord.’
‘Is she alive?’
‘Yes. She opened her eyes for a second.’
‘What’s she doing?’
‘She seems to be resting.’
Michael’s eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Can you kill her?’
Sam froze. The excitement of seeing somebody still alive instantly
evaporated, turning instead to a feeling of cold dread. ‘I can’t do
anything to her at all, Lord. All I can do is see her.’
‘Is she still in the stretcher?’
‘Yes, Lord.’
‘What state is she in?’
‘She’s not good. She’s been injured.’
‘Good. She might die anyway. Have you looked through all the
other crystals?’
‘Not yet, Lord.’
‘Look through them all, Samuel. See if anyone else is alive.’
What kind of monster are you, Zhang, Sam thought as he strained
to look through the remaining crystals. First you want to kill me,
then you want me to kill Maria. You might be as wise as a god but
you’re as wicked as a devil. He felt vulnerable and helpless as he
moved across the slippery crystal faces, leaning and stretching to
position his head to see down their very centres. He was still
working his way methodically through them when he heard a voice,
faint but very clear, as if it was inside his own head.
‘Wie gehst du, Liebling? Bist du ganz rechts?’
Sam was so surprised he slipped on the ice-smooth crystal,
slithered to the bottom of his little blue cell and lay still, listening
intently. He could hear nothing but his own breathing. The voice
had sounded very much like Maria, soft and throaty with a foreign
accent, so that–
‘What are you waiting for? Get up, Samuel. We don’t have much
time.’ Michael did not seem to have heard anything.
Sam decided to say nothing about it. He struggled to his feet and
resumed his survey of the other crystals, still listening and looking
occasionally into Maria’s crystal, trying to see who she was talking
to.

This version created Easter Day 2008 and updated on 26 March.

Maria awoke with pain throbbing in her abdomen. Instinctively
she tried to feel the baby but her right arm wouldn’t move. Then she
remembered. There was a blue flash. Something had flown up from
below, very fast. It had hit the beam pipe shield overhead, making a
pinging sound. It had bounced off and come flying down, missing
Robert’s helmet, and hit her bump, where the baby was. There had
been an unbelievable pain. I must have passed out, she thought.
She tried to move her left arm but that was stuck too. She guessed
they were being held by the enfolding plastic flaps of the orange
stretcher cover. Was she still in the cavern, or had they reached the
helicopter while she was unconscious? She didn’t seem to be
moving. She opened her eyes.
The firefighter, Robert, was still hanging beside her. She could see
his grey uniform and the tangle of straps and ropes surrounding his
chest. They must still be in the cavern, but all she could see was a
faint green, red and black pattern. It was shifting about, the green
and black areas growing and shrinking, the red bands moving
sideways. I must be having a migraine, she thought. After all the
stress of this morning it was not surprising to get one. This didn’t
look like the normal flickering migraine pattern, but then it was very
dark in this cavern.
She closed her eyes, her anxiety growing, and waited for the
migraine to go away. She would not be able to see anything clearly
until it had gone off. They usually lasted an hour or so. By then she
should be in the hospital. Her real problem was the pain in her
abdomen, where the baby was. Robert couldn’t help with that.
She began breathing deeply, trying to relax. She was exhausted.
She hadn’t slept much last night, worrying about what the doctor
would say this morning at the antenatal clinic. Danny couldn’t go
with her; he had been working all night on the ATLAS start-up shift.
She had known there was something wrong with the baby even
before she went to the clinic. She hadn’t said anything to Danny
about it of course. He had enough to worry about with his job.
As she thought about the morning’s events, Maria felt herself relax.
She began to think about them in detail, trying to forget about the
delay in getting to the hospital. And it will be good to remember
what happened today, she thought. I want to tell you all about it
when you grow into a big boy. She breathed deeply and sank into a
reverie.
# # # #
What the doctor told her had not been as bad as she had feared, but
he kept her talking and she was late getting to work. All she wanted
now was to go and see Danny and tell him the news, but the Director
General, Francesco Romani, was waiting to go into the Globe of
Innovation, so she had to park in the visitor’s car park and hurry
across the road to unlock the gate. Normally she would have worried
about being late, but this morning she had too many other things on
her mind.
Romani had introduced her to a VIP, the Irish Ambassador Brigit
Fitzpatrick and her husband and daughter. Maria had known there
was something wrong with the Ambassador’s daughter as soon as
she saw Catriona. Her wild ginger hair, the surly expression on her
pretty face and her whole demeanour showed she was full of teenage
angst.
The girl’s worries became manifest while Maria was giving her
welcoming speech in the centre of the circular wooden hall, with
everyone gathered to listen.
‘On behalf of the European Organization for Nuclear Research I
would like to welcome you all to the Globe of Innovation. This
exhibition shows you how the discoveries made here at CERN are
bringing benefits to the lives of people all over the world.’
She had just begun to repeat herself in French when Maria heard
Catriona say ‘Oh how lovely,’ in a stage-whisper.
Sam hissed ‘Shh’.
‘So you think everything they do here is good, do you Sam?’ the
girl said, speaking even louder. ‘No dangers or risks to anyone, eh?’
‘No, I mean yes, I do.’ Sam glanced at Maria, obviously
embarrassed.
She ignored them and began speaking in English again. ‘From the
invention of the World Wide Web, to improvements in medical
devices such as PET scanners, a wide range of discoveries made here
have improved the quality of all of our lives.’
‘But what about the risks?’ Catriona said so loudly that Maria
stopped speaking and everyone turned to look at her. Francesco
Romani was staring at her with a surprised expression, and the look
her mother gave her could have set her hair on fire.
Catriona made no more comments during the rest of the speech and
afterward Maria went over to speak to her.
She heard Sam say ‘What on Earth do you think you’re doing? No,
don’t tell me. I get it. You’re trying to embarrass your Mum and
make her send you home in–’
Maria hadn’t time to wait. She wanted to go and talk to Danny as
soon as possible. ‘Excuse me, she said. ‘I understand you have
some strong opinions about what we do here at CERN?’
‘I’m so sorry about this,’ Sam said, blushing slightly. ‘She’s very
upset about something else and is just using–’
‘Please don’t apologise,’ Maria said. ‘She is perfectly entitled to
her opinions.’ She turned to Catriona. ‘I’d just like the chance to talk
to you about them, if you don’t mind?’
‘No, no, I’d…I’d be glad to talk,’ Catriona stammered. She looked
embarrassed, but also defiant. ‘Is it true that you might create a black
hole here?’
‘Yes,’ Maria said. ‘We might create a micro black hole, if we’re
very lucky.’
‘But isn’t that dangerous? I saw a black hole in a movie once and
it swallowed this man. I think it’s really scary.’ There was a little
tremor of fear in her voice, but Maria couldn’t decide whether it was
real or just added for dramatic effect. The girl looked like a bit of an
actress, with that bright green blouse and the ring in her nose.
‘Now calm down Catty,’ Sam said.
‘Well of course we don’t know exactly what is going to happen,’
Maria said. ‘If we did there’d be no point in doing the experiment.
But I can assure you, there’s no danger. The risks involved have
been very carefully assessed.’
‘But how?’ Catriona said. ‘How can you assess something when
you don’t know what’s going to happen?’
‘I’m not a scientist so I can’t go into detail,’ Maria said, as she
always did when people asked this question, ‘but the idea is that we
use evidence from cosmic rays.’
‘Oh really?’ Sam sounded fascinated.
‘Cosmic what?’ Catriona looked confused.
‘Cosmic rays. Look, I’ll show you.’ Maria led them to a poster that
showed dots and squiggles coming down through the Earth’s
atmosphere. ‘Cosmic rays come from outer space. Millions of them
are hitting the Earth every second. In fact they’re passing through
your body right now, and the point is that some of them have far, far
greater energy than any of the particles we use here.’
Catriona shivered. ‘I’ve never heard about this before.’ She
sounded genuinely worried now.
‘And are those cosmic rays exactly the same as the particles you’re
using?’ Sam asked.
‘Yes, most of them are protons, the same as in the LHC. Actually
there are other things in cosmic rays beside protons but nevertheless–
’
‘But what I want to know is,’ Catriona butted in, ‘if you create a
black hole then surely it could absorb stuff? Like even the whole
planet?’
Maria turned to her calmly and smiled. ‘But if that was going to
happen it would have happened already, with these cosmic rays.
They’ve been hitting the Earth for thousands of millions of years,
with far more energy than any we can make, without creating any
black holes, so I don’t think we’ll create one today. And do you
really think I would bring my baby here if there were any danger?’
Catriona glanced at the bulge hanging out of her gaping navy
jacket, stared straight into Maria’s eyes for a long moment, then
shrugged. ‘I guess not.’
# # # #
Maria glanced up out of the stretcher. The strange, coloured
pattern was still there. She sighed, closed her eyes and tried to relax.
How ironic that the little Irish girl had been right about the black
hole while the world’s best scientists had been completely wrong.
She wondered why nobody had ever predicted that ATLAS might
capture a cosmic monopole, but then perhaps it wasn’t so surprising
since she had never even heard of a monopole before this morning.
Even now she knew very little about it. She breathed deeply, trying
to remember when she first heard about it.
# # # #
She had escorted Sam and Catriona from the Globe to the ATLAS
Control Building. When she got there Alex told her that Francesco
and Madame Fitzpatrick had already gone into the Control Room.
She had left the two visitors with him while she went through to see
Danny, but wasn’t in the Control Room.
The went to ask the shift leader, the dark-haired French woman
Seline Soubise, where he was. Soubise must have taken over when
Danny’s shift ended. With her usual sour expression, Soubise told
her that there was a fault with the Muon Spectrometer and that
Danny and Michael Zhang had gone down into the USA15 cavern.
Then Francesco Romani came over. ‘I am taking Madame
Fitzpatrick down to see Michael Zhang,’ he said, his fat red face
beaming. ‘Please collect her famiglia and bring them to the lift.’
Maria got the impression from the twinkle in his eye that Romani
was up to something, probably trying to get money out of Ireland,
but Maria was happy since it meant she would soon see her husband.
She hurried back to collect Sam and Catriona. They were sitting
before a computer screen beside a young man in a bright yellow shirt
with designer sun-glasses perched on his thick black hair. Typical
Alex Karolyi, Maria thought. Dressed for the beach on a cold April
day in Switzerland. The two guests were staring at his computer
screen and laughing. Curious, Maria walked closer and saw a
simulated aeroplane fly through the middle of ATLAS.
‘So that shows you how big ATLAS is,’ Alex was saying.
Catriona seemed to be enjoying herself now. Maria watched her.
Had she fallen under Alex’s spell too? Maria had never met a
woman who didn’t have strong feelings about him, one way or the
other, so why not this teenage girl? ‘I’m sorry to spoil the party,’
Maria said, ‘but there’s a fault with the Muon Spectrometer.
Danny’s gone–’
‘Are you sure it’s a fault?’ Alex had said. ‘I know there are a lot of
missing energy events but I thought the cosmic ray had kicked off
something big.’
‘Cosmic ray?’ Maria said in surprise. ‘What cosmic ray?’
‘You haven’t seen it?’ Alex clicked the Mercator menu, entered a
number he had scribbled on a bit of paper and the record of an event
appeared on the screen, blue lines curving and spiralling inside
ATLAS. ‘This happened just after half-past nine.’ He zoomed out to
reveal a thick curved track with lots of short tracks coming off it.
Maria wasn’t a Mercator expert but even she could see how odd the
track looked, like a wide tapering strand of hairy wool.
‘I’ve never seen an event with this much energy,’ Alex said. ‘It
was only after this that all these missing energy events started. The
only explanation I can think of is that some sort of cosmic particle
was trapped by ATLAS.’
‘Seline didn’t mention it,’ Maria said. ‘I wonder if Danny knows
about this?’
Alex clicked the menu again. ‘I don’t think so. The only person
who has ever accessed this StoreGate record apart from me is
Michael Zhang.’
‘Hmm. I suppose he would have told Danny.’
‘Might have, might not. Michael’s in a world of his own most of
the time.’
‘True. I think you should let Danny know about it,’ Maria said.
‘Have you finished here?’
‘Yes, Mercator’s working fine now,’ he said, picking up the paper
then standing and stretching. His refined, musky smell reached her,
taking her back to that night on his boat late last summer. She felt
herself blushing at the memory of it but Alex did not seem to notice.
‘I’ll send you the bill when I get back to Budapest,’ he yawned and
waved the piece of paper. ‘I’ll just take this through to the Control
Room.’
‘No, Danny’s gone underground with Michael Zhang to check
ATLAS, and Professor Romani is taking Madame Fitzpatrick down
to see him.’
Alex gave her the paper. ‘Better give him this then. Tell him
that’s the StoreGate key.’
‘Actually that’s why I’ve come back,’ Maria said. ‘He’s invited
Catriona and Mr. Fitzpatrick to go down as well.’
Catriona went pale. ‘Is that…Will it be safe?’
‘Oh come on, Catty,’ Sam said quickly. ‘Don’t start that again.’
‘What’s the problem?’ Alex frowned.
‘Catriona’s afraid we’re going to all get sucked into a black hole,’
Maria said.
Catriona looked embarrassed. ‘Well I was sort-of worried when
we first got here and I found out you were trying to create a black
hole.’ She was talking very quickly, facing Alex but looking down at
the desk. ‘But then Maria explained that it was safe because of these
cosmic rays and everything.’
‘Cosmic rays?’ Alex looked mystified.
‘I explained that our protons have far less energy than many
cosmic rays. Come on, folks. Time to go.’
Sam and Catriona stood up.
Alex was looking at the screen. ‘You’re right, of course, but by the
look of that track I’d say we’ve somehow captured an ultra-highenergy
cosmic particle. But nothing bad’s happened, has it, Kata?
We haven’t created a black hole, have we? I think you’ll find you’re
safe enough.’
‘So, just a minute,’ Sam said to Alex. ‘You’re saying that ATLAS
captured a high energy cosmic ray?’
‘That’s what I think, Mr. Fitzpatrick.’
‘And you’re saying,’ Sam turned to Maria, ‘that afterwards ATLAS
developed some sort of hardware fault?’
‘Apparently,’ Maria said.
‘So has the cosmic ray damaged ATLAS?’ He was looking from
one to the other.
‘I’d say that’s possible,’ Alex said. ‘What do you think, Maria?’
‘All I know is that Danny and Michael have gone down to check a
fault. Nobody said anything about any damage. Come on now,
please.’
She led the guests towards the door. Alex stood and followed.
‘I’d quite like to go down and see what they’ve found,’ Alex said.
‘Would you mind if I come with you, Maria?’
Maria shook her head. ‘No, I don’t mind, but we’ve got to go now.
Professor Romani and Madam Fitzpatrick are waiting for us in SDX.
Here, you want to look after this?’ She gave him back the piece of
paper.
‘Come on then, little Kata, let’s you and I stick together.’ Alex
looped his arm through Catriona’s. ‘Then if the scientists do create a
black hole, it will have to absorb both of us.’
She turned pink with pleasure and Maria heard Mr. Fitzpatrick give
a sort of snort as he followed them through the door.

This version was written on Easter Day, 2008 and modified on 26 March, following feedback from Tehun and others.

‘Get up, Samuel,’ Michael said.
Sam ignored him. He lay on his back trying to work out where he
was. Layer upon layer of transparent blue polygons overlapped
above him, crossed and twisted at crazy angles. They must be solid
objects, Sam thought, but their transparency made it impossible to
work out their shape.
Over them all arched the black dome of the sky. It was dotted with
thousands of pink planets. Most were tiny but one was so close he
felt he could reach out and touch its little blue clouds, could dip his
fingers into its pink ocean. Wherever this is, it’s certainly not the
Earth, Sam thought.
‘I know you can hear me, Sam,’ Michael said. ‘Come on, get up!
We don’t have much time. Don’t you want to save the world?’
Sam’s rage boiled over. ‘That’s rich, coming from you!’ he
screamed. ‘It was you put the Earth in danger in the first place!’ Sam
lifted his head and looked round. He did not see Michael, but what
he saw sent a shiver of fear down his spine.
He was balanced precariously on the tops of several long thin
slivers of crystal. Looking down through their transparent blueness
he could see them tapering away below him, like the legs of a
gigantic insect. Their feet rested on an irregular scaffold of long blue
threads which, Sam assumed, were more crystals. They formed an
enormous crystal network, like a web woven by a drunken spider. It
faded into the distance, too transparent to see, but he guessed it
probably surrounded the whole planet.
Far below he could see the pink ocean. From up here it looked as
smooth as a billiard ball. Sam wondered whether this planet might
be the same as the ones above him. This one had no blue clouds, and
those others had no framework like this; or perhaps they did, but too
faint to see.
Looking down at the ocean he saw a long oval shadow, bending
with the curvature of the planet. It was the only feature visible from
this height. Sam remembered vividly how it felt on his face, cold,
slimy and suffocating. He shivered again as he imagined what
would happen if the crystals moved and he fell through the gap.
‘I’m over here, Sam,’ he heard Michael say. Sam looked the other
way. A gigantic oval body hung, white and bloated against the black
sky. Hundreds of blue crystals enclosed it, trapping it like a fish in a
net. Sam could see two tiny arms and legs sticking out of the smooth
curving flanks like fins. A gondola hung down near the back in the
shape of a man’s private parts. A monumental face was carved on
the front like a ship’s figure-head. It still belonged unmistakably to
Michael Zhang. Then the heavy, oriental eyes turned towards him,
the thin cruel lips opened and Sam heard Michael’s voice say ‘Now
stand up. I need your help and there’s not much time.’
‘My help?’ Sam said in disbelief. ‘I’m not helping you, Zhang,
after everything you’ve done–’
‘Do not use that name!’ A darkness suffused Michael’s gigantic
face. ‘I used to be Michael Zhang, but now you will call me Lord.’
‘You? I certainly will not!’ You were odd before, Sam thought,
but now you’ve gone totally insane.
Michael’s eyes narrowed. ‘I am as wise as what you would call a
god. You don’t believe me? I can easily prove it. For example, I
know everything about you. You are Samuel James Fitzpatrick.
You were born at 23 Old Blackrock Road, Cork, at 2:54 in the
afternoon of 7th of July 1959. You were the second child of James
Rossiman Fitzpatrick and Irene Juliet Fitzpatrick, nee Blanding.
Your family lived there for the first six years of your life. Then on
August 9th, 1965 they moved to Limerick and you went…’
Sam couldn’t believe it as every detail of his past was reeled out,
including many facts he didn’t even know himself but which all had
the ring of truth. And when Michael described his father’s infidelity
with a neighbour, a close family secret, and correctly stated the
woman’s name, Sam was convinced. ‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘How do you
know all this?’
‘I know everything, Samuel. Everything! The things I have told
you so far are trivial. I know the deepest secrets of what man calls
the Universe. Every secret that science struggled to understand has
been revealed to me. Now call me Lord.’
Sam stared at Michael’s bloated body, oval as an airship, large as a
planet, naked and obscene. How could he use such a word for such a
monster?
‘If you do not acknowledge me as your Lord then when I get free
from this mesh I will destroy you.’
‘Please do! I don’t care. I’ve lost everything. Death would be a
mercy.’
‘So you do not want to save the world? You do not care about
your wife and family?’
Michael’s words cut into Sam’s heart. He suddenly saw his stepdaughter’s
face, her ginger hair sticking out in wild disarray, her eyes
lost and confused. ‘You mean the world hasn’t been destroyed?’
‘Not yet, but it will be if we do not act fast. Now are you going to
help me or not?’
‘Is Catriona still alive?’
‘That’s one of the things I want you to find out. Stand up!’
Sam had no choice. If the world could still be saved, if Catriona
was still alive, then he had to help her, no matter how much he hated
Michael. He pushed against the smooth crystal faces and tried to get
to his feet. Immediately he slipped and fell heavily back into the
little valley between the huge crystals. He lay as still as he could,
terrified they would separate and he would fall through the gap.
‘Take your shoes and socks off,’ Michael said softly.
Sam removed his footwear and managed to stand with one foot on
each crystal face, afraid his weight would push them apart and much
relieved when they did not move. He was at the junction of dozens
of blue crystal shards.
‘Look down the middle of each crystal,’ Michael told him.
As Sam looked around he began to understand what he was seeing.
He was inside a hollow crystal ball with flat faces, like a large
football but with many more sides. It was formed by the flat ends of
dozens of crystal shards which pointed inwards towards him. Their
edges fitted neatly together except for a gap just above his head,
where one crystal appeared to be missing. He could see the black
sky through the triangular hole. He guessed the absent crystal was
the one that Michael had smashed.
‘Look into the centres of the crystals, Sam. What can you see?’
Sam’s eyes moved across the crystal faces, uncertain what he was
supposed to see. To his astonishment he caught a glimpse of a small
rectangular shape floating like a ghost far down inside one of the
crystals surrounding him. He leaned sideways to get a better view
and lost sight of it. It was only visible when his head was in exactly
the right position, looking straight down the centre of the shard.
Was it flat or solid? Carefully, trying not to overbalance, he felt
inside his jacket. He was surprised and somehow comforted, to feel
his spectacles still safely tucked away in his shirt pocket. He put
them on and saw a blue metal cabinet with two doors, the sort you
might see in a smart garage workshop, either very small or very far
away. He could just make out that its doors were dented, as if they
had been hit several times.
It was obvious he was seeing something that belonged on the Earth.
At the sight of it Sam’s heart leaped. This was beyond his wildest
hopes. Eagerly he turned and looked into another crystal. At first he
saw nothing but by moving his head and closing one eye he found a
red metal box with a cone sticking out of one end and some pipes out
of the other. It was fixed to a white concrete wall.
Sam felt a strong mixture of apprehension and excitement. How
could he see things which seemed so earthly, so human, when he
clearly was not on the Earth? He longed to see more. He began to
glance quickly into the other crystals. In one he saw a yellow metal
girder, in another some tapering flat brown plates. Other crystals
showed thick cables and a blue metal balcony. The more he saw, the
more he had a feeling these were parts of the ATLAS cavern. It was
not a place he was familiar with. He had only spent a half-hour or so
in there, it had been dark and a lot had been going on, but when he
saw a red cabinet with the word ‘Savox’ on the door he was sure it
must be the cavern. They had passed a cabinet like this when they
had first come into the cavern and walked along the balcony. These
were almost certainly images of the same place. He was astonished.
How was it possible–
‘What can you see, Sam?’ The anxiety in Michael’s voice was
palpable.
‘I think I can see the cavern.’
‘Call me Lord.’
‘I think I can see the cavern, Lord.’
‘I knew it!’ Michael’s voice was triumphant. ‘Which parts?’
Sam was beginning to tire, his legs spread between the sloping
crystal faces, his arms outstretched to balance, but he managed to
find again the blue cabinet with the dented doors, the red box
hanging from the wall, the yellow girder, and described each one in
turn. He was still looking for the Savox cabinet when his legs gave
way and he fell, trembling with exhaustion, to the crystal floor.
‘Did you see any people?’ Michael asked.
‘No.’
‘Have you looked through every crystal?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You must look into all of them.’
Sam longed to see Catriona. If only she was alive, it would give
him something to live for. Once again he struggled to his feet,
wondering why there was this urgency, and began to peer into the
crystals, moving around and trying to check them all methodically.
It was after about ten or a dozen crystals that he saw Maria Kissov.

Easter this year is just about as early as it can be. In UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) the equinox was at 05:48 on Thursday 20 March and the moon became full at 17:02 on the following day, so naturally the following Sunday has got to be Easter. I mean, it’s only logical, isn’t it?

I’ve scrapped two more chapters this week. Last Sunday I was interviewed by school children on SuperSonicFM, a temporary science radio show run by children in Leicester as part of National Science and Engineering Week, and I read the first page of TC and came home and threw it away. But I think that finally, finally, after years of effort, I have found the right place to start the story. The current version begins:

‘Open your eyes, Samuel.’
Sam lay on his back, his eyes firmly closed, trembling with shock, fear and rage.
‘I know you can hear me, Sam.’ Michael Zhang’s commanding voice seemed to be coming from far away. ‘Come on! We don’t have much time. Don’t you want to save the world?’

As well as writing and throwing away more work, I’ve also been working on a number of blogs on WordPress. I like it a lot better than Google’s Blogger. I’ll add references to them in the links on the right here soon.

In addition I’ve been wrestling with backups. I started using Carbonite, and paid for two years. This is a system for backing up your work over the Internet, and worked well until one day I got fed up with running out of space on my C drive and used Maxtor Maxblast to migrate XP to a bigger hard drive. After that, whenever I tried to back up anything on the new C drive, XP crashed. Carbonite made some recommendations but they failed to solve the problem.
For a while I just backed up from my F drive, but this week I realised that it was failing to backup files on the F drive that had changed. I uninstalled it and deleted all files with the word Carbonite, only to find I could not re-install it.

So I gave up and asked for a refund. I got no response. They claim their response time is 72 hours. Obviously getting a lot of complaints. I asked for my money back and, before they gave it me, went out and bought a 360 Gig USB hard drive which I will use for weekly backups. I’ll keep it in a friend’s house, and do daily differential backups to the internet. I’m using Cobian Backup 9 and backing up to the History of the Universe web site which has 3.5 GB free.

I wonder how authors managed before computers? They probably waited for the equinox and prayed.