The Higgs Boson Event

The trouble started when the Higgs Boson particle was finally discovered. The God Particle, as the press so loved to call it. I guess they were right. With the Higgs Field measured and malleable, some genius thought it would be a good idea to try to puncture it. Let me quote you from the UN report. “To date, an area of forty-three cubic kilometres has fallen into the Higgs Field Event. The anomaly has been stable for twenty-three days, with no further sign of enlargement.” In other words, our world has stopped going down the plughole. We hope.

I have seen what remains of the CERN laboratory, of the forty-three cubic kilometres of Switzerland, including villages, farms, and much of Geneva, swallowed by the event. Despite the horror, it’s a beautiful thing. I got my first glimpse while flying into Annecy Airport. From thirty kilometres away it looked like an obscenely giant marble, stuck into the ground. A hemisphere of changing colours, flashes, rainbows. Up close was even better. An ever-swirling play of light and colour, insanely big, insanely spherical.

They say there’s nothing in there but random particles. No mass, no cohesion, nothing but chaos. They say lots of things, but really they don’t know what is going on. They’re afraid to do anything to it in case it starts to grow again. Standing in front of it, I was tempted to touch it. I remember a smell, but it wasn’t so much a smell, more of a tingling in the nostrils, citrus-like, without the scent.

The security perimeter was reassuring, in a pitiable way. I was there in my capacity as a representative of the UN’s Disaster Relief Committee. During my visit, a delegation from the Pentagon was being given a tour.