Twin Earth

“Tom!” Rachel screamed at me.

I awoke to the sudden noise, my heart racing and grabbed for the nearby lamp switch.

“For fuck sake,” I mumbled to no-one, getting out of bed and walking to the window.

It was morning in Scotland, but still dark. Opening the window I breathed in the fresh air and tried to wash away the image of Rachel screaming at me for whatever reason. I had gone to sleep worrying excessively about where she was and what state Mochuvia was in, but it had surprised me how much I actually cared about them all. Being home, everything about the second planet felt alien and unreal, as if I had imagined the whole thing.

A cold breeze entered my room and I shivered. I could hear the gentle hum of the kitchen generator still running downstairs and I wondered if breakfast was already being prepared. The smell of stagnant beer and over-cooked food from the night before hung in the air and I wondered how anyone could live and work in a pub. The view outside was beautiful though, bleak, but even under stormy grey clouds its remoteness was stunning.

Disturbed by a quiet knock on my door I pulled the window closed and grabbed a t-shirt. One thing for sure, I was glad to be wearing normal clothes again.

“You look like you had a rough night,” James stated as I opened the door.

“You could say that,” I muttered, letting James in the room as I went to wash my face. “What time is it?”

“Half past six,” James replied as I pulled on an over-sized sweater.

“How come you’re up so early?” I asked.

“Yuki wants us up and about as soon as possible. Apparently we can come back for breakfast.”

”Geez, she doesn’t let up, does she?” I replied good humouredly.

“She’s just passionate about her work that’s all, and anyway I’m keen to get up there. Aren’t you?”

In some ways I was, but if I was honest with myself I wasn’t really expecting much to happen. It was the twenty first century, not biblical times. Miracles and ancient discoveries were things of the past. By now we pretty much knew everything about the earth and its secrets. Even ninety percent of the deepest oceans had now been explored. ‘What was there left to find?’ I thought.

“Don’t you think that if there was anything to find up there it would have been found already?” I replied, checking my appearance in the mirror and wishing I hadn’t.

“True, but you have to understand the experiments we’ve been doing on dark matter. I’m confident, and so is Yuki, that if we run these same experiments on the rock formations here, we could find more hidden messages.”

Unsure in James’ confidence I frowned. “Pass me your notes again. I want to understand these experiments you’ve been doing.”

“Sure, sure,” James replied, quickly searching his bag with enthusiasm.

“You say the explosion of me entering the sphere sent you data back that was dark matter? How did you even pick this up?” I asked, scanning through some papers James had now passed me.

“Well, the new Hadron facility, the one I think they were planning before you left? Well, they got a surprise visit one day. They were running a test on super-symmetry in their snake cake…”

”Sorry, snake cake?” I queried in surprise, looking up at James.

Laughing, James nodded. “It’s a term for their new collider. Its shape resembles a figure of eight and well, the head scientist there…”

”Don’t tell me, he likes cake?” I replied sarcastically.

“Lemon drizzle to be precise,” James laughed. “But the cake part has another meaning as it symbolises the layers of the figure of eight in the collider. It allows the heavy particles to decay downwards rather than in a circular motion into jets of quarks and leptons etcetera as well as the all-important neutralinos.”

”Neutralinos? But they’re only theoretical,” I exclaimed.

”Not any more. When you hit that barrier it sent a stream of neutralinos towards Earth. Normally yes, you wouldn’t detect these particles. It’s stable, heavy, neutral, doesn’t react electromagnetically, virtually illusive and undetectable, but when they hit the snake cake during an experiment they caused a flurry of detections.”

“That’s incredible! But how did you know it was from the sphere or that it was dark matter?”

“Well, at first they thought it was from their own experiment. The energy and momentum from the particle collision was not equal to what they had expected and even though they had produced some neutralinos directly, there were still way too many hidden particles.”

“The jigsaw puzzle theory,” I pondered.

“Exactly. When they added up all the energy and momenta there was an imbalance in the collision they were running. Particles were flying out in one direction, but way more in the other. The energy didn’t add up and was inconsistent with previous experiments. These additional jigsaw pieces meant there was excess energy and momentum.”

“And the other particles weren’t just hidden down in other areas of the collider?” I asked curiously.

“No, the snake cake is perfection in itself. A marvel of engineering and calorimetres.”

”As long as Magnus didn’t build it,” I mused.

Laughing, James collected the papers I now passed back to him and looked at me excitedly.

“That’s not all though. These additional neutralinos? They weren’t like previously detected ones, erratic and chaotic. They had structure.”

”Structure?”

“Yes, many of them were joined or designed engineered as if uniformly stuck to each other. They may not be dark matter, we still don’t know exactly, but we have never seen anything like this before. It was as if the particles were attracted to each other and for a moment they would combine to form a thin layer before collapsing into regular particles.”

“Like the black box which covered the black hole,” I whispered to myself intrigued.

“When this is all over I’m planning on heading out to the NHC in Geneva. It would be great if you joined me?”

“One thing at a time,” I sighed loudly.

I watched as James got up and pulled his bag over his shoulders. “You coming?”

“One question first, how did you run these experiments on the meteorite back in Swindon? How many people know about the sphere if they’re running experiments in Europe?”

“Well, we took one of their miniature snake cakes back to the lab…”

”And how did you achieve that?” I interrupted, surprised. “They let you just have it?”

”Hmm, Yuki arranged it. She has a colleague who works at the NHC.”

”So do they know about Mochuvia?”

”I think she explained to them that we were still running experiments on the meteorite, although I think that excuse is wearing thin. They’ll probably want it back soon.”

“So you used a miniature snake cake on the remnants?” I asked in awe, urging James to continue.

“Yes, it’s not as accurate, but it allowed us to discover that the meteorite was still emitting remnants of this supposed dark matter from the sphere and we picked up these structured neutral particles in our own experiments.”

“Did you bring it here? The snake cake thing?” I asked, frowning at the ridiculous name.

“Hayden has it and by the looks of it, he should be downstairs by now,” James replied, looking at his watch. “We need to go.”

Following James out the room I could feel a familiar feeling of scientific excitement building up in me. I had to give it to James, he knew how to get me excited about physics. I was also curious to see exactly what this snake cake looked like. I knew they had been developing ever smaller colliders out in Switzerland ever since the cost of running the large one had struggled with finance after the collapse of the EU from the disaster, but to have a hand held one? Well, that was blowing my mind already and frankly was making me a little suspicious.