CERN-II Deep Facility – Geneva, Earth
Present Day (October 15, 2030)
The ring was awake.
Beneath a hundred meters of reinforced concrete and silence, the world's most powerful particle collider thrummed to life. Not like a machine—but like something ancient stirring for the first time.
A tunnel nearly 40 kilometers wide. Cryogenic chambers at absolute zero. Superconducting magnets aligned to impossible precision.
And at its core, Hydron Collider-X, now operating at energy levels no human machine had dared attempt before.
On the observation deck, Dr. Lena Mikhailov adjusted her headset, hands clasped behind her back. Her eyes scanned the data streams bleeding across a twelve-panel array. Heart steady. Breath shallow.
"All systems green," came a voice from Control. "Energy levels climbing... 9.7 TeV... 9.9..."
Lena blinked once.
"Holding at 10.0 TeV per beam. Final synchronization commencing."
10 TeV per beam.
A threshold never crossed before.
This wasn't replication anymore.
It was exploration.
The physics teams had called it Project Shiva — a quiet nod to the god of creation and destruction.
But it wasn't the collision that worried her.
It was the background noise.
Her gaze slipped to the diagnostic threads in the lower right. QNR-17. The Quantum Noise Register. Designed to pick up vacuum fluctuations so faint they were measured in attoteslas and femtowatts. Static.
Always static.
Until now.
The numbers were climbing.
Rhythmic. Building.
Not random.
"Beam bunch alpha synchronized. Magnetic containment stable. Preparing for collision."
"Run the beam," she said.
A hiss. Then silence.
Then the hum — deep, low, growing.
Light curved in the vacuum chamber. Particles accelerated to near light-speed. The beam spiraled tighter, tighter—
Then:
Impact.
It should've been ordinary.
Another collision. Another petabyte of data.
But something gave.
On the screens, space twisted—not graphically, not metaphorically. Literally. A dark lens bloomed mid-chamber, like a sphere made of fractured light. It was small. Barely visible. But the sensors knew better.
Then came the spike. Six backup sensors. Triple-shielded. Independently clocked.
All recorded the same waveform.
Almost like...
...a heartbeat.
"Wormhole?" someone gasped.
"No—there's no gravitational lensing—it's not behaving like—"
And then it screamed.
Not sound. Not radiation.
But something deeper.
A pulse across Veyuun.
All at once, the minds attuned — those few humans who'd always felt just a little out of step, a little too in tune — they heard it.
Felt it.
Ishaan Ren Vale, standing on the rooftop of his university's engineering building in Bristol, froze as something hollow opened in his chest. A silence that rang.
Elsewhere, a monk meditating in a Tibetan cave wept blood. A UFC fighter mid-fight dropped to his knees, clutching his chest. A serial killer in a maximum-security prison smiled with sudden clarity.
And they were not alone.
Across the planet, a hundred million people paused — some gasping, others convulsing, most unable to explain why — as the ripple crossed their minds like a silent tide.
Because something had touched them back.
Back at CERN II, the sphere collapsed. Alarms blared. Lights died. The data core went dark.
And the hole—
—vanished.
Not gone.
Moved.
They thought the experiment had failed.
But across the planet, pockets of space had been altered.
Invisible to most.
Waiting.
And far away — in the deepest, wildest regions of a broken world — the other side of those wormholes howled with soullight.