Catriona O’Brien

Catriona is fourteen on Crystal Day. She was born on 21 April 1997. Her father John O’Brien died in 2005 when she was eight. Luckily for Catriona, Sam Fitzpatrick was her teacher and he fell madly in love with Catriona’s mother Brigit. They were married within a year of John’s death.

Sam has been like a father to Catriona, and loved her utterly. Instead of going for more senior teaching posts, which his talents fitted him for, he preferred to spend time looking after Catriona and bringing her up.

Catriona is a firm believer in God and a Catholic. She has no doubt that God exists and that He created the world and everything in it.

 

Brigit Fitzpatrick

Brigit was born in Dublin on 12 August 1975. She is aged 36.6 on Crystal Day

She was born of a rich father and went to a private school. She had her own horse and lived in a large house. She was deeply attached to her mother but as Brigit grew into a beautiful young woman her mother, apparently jealous of the attention she was getting, shut her out of her emotions. To try to win back her mother’s love, Brigit abandoned her real self and sought to become a person her would admire and love. But she failed. Try as she might she could not win back her mother’s love.

This separation had a profound effect upon her. She is now very dependent on what others think of her, and seeks constantly to maintain an image that will attract others. This false image she presents to the world has resulted in a lot of failed relationships when others find out she is not what she seems. However she is very good at hiding her real self and tends to reject people, cutting them out if they get too close in the same way her mother cut her out of her life.

In 1994 she went to Trinity College, Dublin to study media and politics not realising that she was already pregnant by a boy John O’Brien she had met during the summer holiday. Her father forced him to marry her to save face. Catriona was born 21 April 1995. Brigit continued her studies despite having a baby, with the support of her father.

Brigit started doing TV work while still at Trinity and in 2000 she got a job with Irish TV. At work, Brigit is creative and expressive and needs to be respected for her personal vision and ideas. If the respect isn’t there, she can become moody and self-involved. She’s attracted to emotionally intense work or creative jobs. She became a presenter on Irish TV within a year, at the age of 25 their youngest ever presenter. John O’Brien died in 2003 in a horse-riding accident. Sam Fitzpatrick was Catriona’s primary school teacher and she married him knowing he would be a loving and giving father.

Brigit was very popular on TV, met all the top Irish politicians and began to get political ambitions. Early in 2012 when she was 37, with her TV popularity declining, she was invited to be Irish Ambassador to the UN in Geneva. There would be no salary but she is wealthy from her TV work so she gladly accepts.

Sam and Catriona did not go with her. Catriona is in her final year of her school leaving certificate and Sam is teaching.

 

Dr Seline Soubes

Seline was born on 28 October 1974. On Crystal Day she is aged 37.

As the second child of a rich country doctor and school teacher. She had a comfortable middle-class childhood. She grew up disconnected from both parents and did not identify with either of them. She felt different from them, as if she didn’t belong in that family. She had an unhappy and solitary childhood as a result of her parents’ marital problems and divorce.

Lacking a definitive role model she turned turned inward to her own feelings and imagination as the primary sources of information about herself from which she tried to work out who she was. She felt essentially alone in life. It seemed to her that, for some reason she could not understand, her parents had rejected her. She therefore felt that there must be something deeply wrong with her, that she was somehow defective because her parents didn’t give her the kind of loving attention she needed.

Self-knowledge became her most important goal. She wanted to find out who she was and where she had come from in the widest sense of the term. She hoped this would show her how she fitted into the world.

She studied psychology to understand herself. From there she studied anthropology, geology, biochemistry. She holds a PhD in psychology and a masters degree in several other branches of science. However she feels as if she has been held back by her gender and by her lack of interpersonal skills. She finds it hard to form relationships with people. Few people realise she of the most widely educated people in CERN.

She never married. She worked as an ATLAS programmer for 6 months then was promoted to Run Co-ordinator during the winter shutdown 2011-2012. She excels in her ability to write intricate code which nobody else can understand.

 

Sam Fitzpatrick

Sam is 53 years old on Crystal Day. Husband of Brigit and step-father of Catriona.

His father was a farmer who had no time to care for Sam. Sam always tried to win back his father?s love and protection by being good. This was successful and became a habit, so he learned to win love of all people by being good to them. He loves being able to control people without their realising it.

His worst moment was when he found that boys cannot be mothers. That was the only thing in life that seemed worth doing. So he resolved to became a primary school teacher and let women give him their children to teach. He became a primary school teacher and met Brigit when Catriona came into his class.

He met Brigit when Catriona came into his class. He was unmarried at the time, Brigit was fifteen years younger than him, very attractive and needed someone to look after Catriona while she perused her TV career. Sam has no ambition apart from winning the love of those around him, and is quite happy to look after Catriona and support Brigit, whom he adores.

 

Dr Michael Zhang

Michael Zhang is an Irish physicist of Chinese extration. He was born on Wednesday 3 January 1988. Michael’s genius at mathematics was obvious from a very young age. But the gifted and talented have problems of their own, dark secrets that they are unwilling or unable to share. In many ways Michael was disconnected from both his parents. He began to search for own understanding of the world. He seemed profoundly detached from the world, indifferent to his own physical comfort, lost in physics as if the quality of material existence was irrelevant.

Michael worked for a while at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies before moving to the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University, England. Now he spends most of his time at CERN. He lives alone in a caravan in the Bois du Chateau, not far from the River Rhone.
On Crystal Day he was aged 24.

 

Maria Kissov

Maria Kissov is a German who works in CERN as a visitor guide. She was going out with both Danny Kissov and Alex Karolyi when she first joined CERN. Eventually she set her cap at Danny, became pregnant and they were married on Sat 11 February 2012.

Maria sees depths in Danny that nobody else seems to see. However, the early days of her marriage have not gone well in every respect. Danny is distant and withdrawn, seeming to be more worried about the baby than about Maria and the baby.

 

George Gabor

George Gabor is 43 on Crystal Day. He is Hungarian by birth and joined the army soon after leaving school. He enjoyed the comradeship and discipline but did not really like the idea of killing people, however. He wanted to help them if possible and saw fire-fighting as a way to do this. He left the army to join the Hungarian Fire Service and immediately loved the work. He is passionate about doing good for others through this vital and exciting work. He has been working in CERN since 2010 and is now Green Team Leader. His call sign is “papa seven”.

 

Professor Francesco Romani

Francesco is the Director General of CERN. He is nearing the end of his term in office. However at 52 years old he still has plenty of ambition for what he will do afterwards, provided ATLAS is a success. He is a tough-minded leader who knows exactly what he wants and is determined to get it.

 

Danny Kissov

Danny is a Bulgarian engineer. Real name Danail. On Crystal Day he is 35, and has worked at CERN for three years looking after various systems and working his way up to his present position: Shift Leader on ATLAS.

He looks conventional in his green sports jacket and tie. He recently married another member of staff, Maria.

He is highly principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and perfectionistic. He leads his team with cold discipline, demanding the same level of perfection he himself brings to the job. Needless to say they often let him down.

 

Curtain Call

During a break in composition Wyken took his characters down to the famous clock in the English Garden in Geneva for a photo shoot.