Silent Ark

Chapter 2: The Death of "God"

Yao Chong later recalled that night countless times, trying to find some "unusual starting point".

It was the mushroom sauce in the cafeteria that was saltier than usual in the afternoon.

It was the third energy-saving light bulb at the end of the corridor in the laboratory building that flickered twice.

He had just run out of ink when he was signing the document, so he switched to a blue one—he always used black.

But none of that matters.

If we had to pinpoint a starting point, the real problem was that Liu Pan yawned.

November 17, 2031, CERN, four underground research institute.

After the retirement of the third generation, the accident shutdown of the fourth generation, the budget cut of the fifth generation, and the scandal of the sixth generation "almost blowing up Geneva", the seventh generation "Eye of the Abyss" of CERN's LHC was finally completed quietly.

There were no press conferences, no ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and no politicians shaking hands. Because the budget was secretly diverted from eleven other projects, the committee didn't want anyone to know about the machine's existence.

The Eye of the Abyss has only one mission: to ram protons into energy levels never before achieved by humankind, and then see what happens.

Yao Chong didn't know that the description "let's see what happens" could make a room full of Nobel laureates from various countries nod in agreement.

Yao Chong believes that this is logically the same type of behavior as "touching a running electrical switch with wet hands".

However, Yao Chong was only the last specialist in the data analysis team. He came to Europe for exchange and study with his mentor as part of a collaborative program between Sun Yat-sen University and Grenoble University. As an intern, his monthly salary was equivalent to RMB 23,000, which seemed like a lot, but rent alone took up a third of it.

He has no right to question it.

Yao Chong's job was simply to keep an eye on the screen, pick out outliers from the data, categorize and label them, and then send them to the next level.

He had been doing this job for three years without realizing it, as his doctoral studies progressed, and there had not been a single outlier in those three years.

So when Liu Pan peeked out from behind him and yawned at 2:14 a.m., Yao Chong's first reaction wasn't nervousness, but envy.

"You're not asleep again." Yao Chong didn't turn around.

"She's asleep." Liu Pan placed a can of iced Americano next to Yao Chong's keyboard. A drop of water condensed on the bottom of the metal can left a circle on the table. "She slept for forty minutes. Ten minutes more than yesterday. My body is improving."

Liu Pan and Yao Chong are the same age. He is the actual person in charge of the detector group. His nominal title is "senior researcher", but there are only three people in the entire group, including him. The other two are on vacation and hospitalized, so "actual person in charge" means "the only one who does the work".

He and Yao Chong were classmates in college.

Department of Physics, Huaxia University of Science and Technology.

Yao Chong was slightly better in theory, but Liu Pan was better at speaking than him, despite having equally excellent academic abilities.

This is a decisive difference—in academia, the acceleration of "being able to speak well" is the cube of "having good grades".

So Liu Pan is at CERN, and Yao Chong is also at CERN. Liu Pan came here because of the exchange research project between the China Institute of Atomic Energy and the University of Sarrec in France.

Liu Pan is a senior researcher, and Yao Chong is the lowest-ranking specialist.

The same basement, separated by two doors and an entire professional title system.

"The 4721st time," Liu Pan pulled up a chair and sat down. The sound of the rollers rolling on the floor echoed for two seconds in the empty control room. "Are you nervous?"

"What's there to be nervous about?"

"This time the energy was adjusted to 13.6 TeV, which is 0.2 higher than last time."

"What's the big deal about 0.2 TeV?"

"When we increased the height by 0.1 last time, the magnet in arc four jerked a bit, don't you remember?"

"That's called a perturbation. It's within the allowable threshold."

"Yes, within the permissible threshold." Liu Pan lit a cigarette, a black market cigarette he brought from China—the fourth basement level was theoretically a no-smoking area, but at 2 a.m., there were only the two of them in the control room, and there were no smoke detectors installed in the control room. "But I later checked the waveform of that shaking. It wasn't white noise."

Yao Chong's fingers paused for half a second, only half a second.

"Did you check?"

"Um."

"What does the waveform look like?"

"Periodic".

"Periodic perturbations are not abnormal. They could be power supply ripple..."

"It's not power supply ripple," Liu Pan said vaguely, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. "I've calculated it. The frequency corresponding to that period is the hyperfine structure transition frequency of a hydrogen atom divided by π."

Yao Chong turned his chair around to look at him.

Liu Pan rarely says the wrong thing.

It's not because he doesn't make mistakes, but because after he makes a mistake, he can quickly come up with a reasonable explanation that makes you think he didn't make a mistake.

But this time, he didn't make it up.

He just stood there, a cigarette dangling from his lips, looking at Yao Chong. There was a deep bluish-black under his eyes—it wasn't like the dark circles under his eyes from not sleeping well; it was more like a deeper, muddy, chaotic color.

"A natural constant divided by an irrational number," Yao Chong said calmly.

"right."

"This makes absolutely no sense in terms of physics."

"right."

"Then why are you investigating this?"

Liu Pan took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it for two seconds, and then stubbed it out. The action of stubbing it out was forceful, not like he was putting out a cigarette, but like he was putting out something else.

"Because when that perturbation occurred," he said, "I was in arc four."

"Aren't you from the detector team? What are you doing running an arc segment?"

"Go get my coat that I left there."

"Going to pick up your coat at 1:30 AM?"

"Can't I be cold?"

Yao Chong stared at him.

Liu Pan raised his hand and pointed to his left ear.

"I heard it when the perturbation occurred."

"What did you hear?"

"This frequency band shouldn't have any sound, so this thing is probably... like someone is tapping my eardrum. Tapping from inside the cochlea, very rhythmic, like rap, one tap, one tap, one tap." Liu Pan tapped his temple three times with his index finger. "My subconscious feeling is that it's exactly the same waveform."

The control room was quiet for a while.

It wasn't the comfortable quiet suitable for sleeping, but the kind of quiet in a dark corridor at night, where there was an unseen door at the end of the corridor that wasn't fully closed.

"Did you report to Professor Chen and Mr. Stark?" Yao Chong asked.

"no."

Why?

Liu Pan leaned back in his chair, looking up at the dense network of pipes and cables behind the glass partition on the ceiling.

"Because when I stopped and listened carefully to the rhythm... it changed."

"What has it turned into?"

"It became the rate at which my heart beats."

It was quiet again.

"This is a bit like infrasound; it's like a brush with death."

"Then my heartbeat started to follow it." Liu Pan's voice became very soft, not deliberately lowered, but something like fatigue had flattened his vocal cords. "Not faster, not slower. It became... more accurate. My heartbeat used to be 'almost', but it helped me calibrate it to 'precision'. Like tuning, you know that feeling when tuning a string instrument, when two frequencies are close but not quite in sync? Buzz—buzz—buzz—and then suddenly 'ding,' they're in tune."