Something to Tell You

David Edwards

Description

Something to Tell You follows the two families of Bert Leinster and his best friend Sam Murray, as the earth comes under bombardment by a Higgs Boson particle storm. The Central Control of the World council insists that survival depends on living underground, protected by The Envelope. As CCOW persuades humankind to hide in the Deeps, Bert cannot challenge CCOW nor comprehend why people cannot see the truth behind the lies.Everything changes when he meets Her. Lily, a plant who becomes his enemy in the battle to save humankind, to save you... although 99.9% of you is empty space. Do you deserve saving?

Sujets

• Speculative fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838599393
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 David Edwards

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781838599393

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For mum and dad and all my family lost.
Watching us through space and time.
Memories and loves across many universes.
Eternally there for me and mine.

David Edwards
February 2019
Contents
[1] In the Beginning God Created the Heavens and the Earth
[2] Denial of Reality
[3] Lies and more Lies
[4] Pain and Guilt
[5] Anger and the Bargain
[6] Lonely Reflection
[7] The Upward Turn
[8] Working Through
[9] Acceptance and Hope
[10] Now the Earth was Formless and Empty
Author’s Note [Cern]
[1] In the Beginning God Created the Heavens and the Earth
It was Lily who first noticed the brewing storm in the universal ether of which earth is a minuscule participant. She had been the first to exist and She hoped She would be the last to die. Existence as ordained by God and the Devil in the instance of the Big Bang. When Good and Evil were created as opposites and when plus balanced minus. She, a prime mover of the 4% of matter that exists and of the 96% dark energy and dark matter that does not.
This disturbance was an invisible strangulation upon Man, who felt nothing. She surveyed him on the tiny earth; a void in empty space, who artificially filled himself with feelings and emotions. The cleverest species of his world, or so he thought. She saw that Man was 100% certain that it owned and controlled its destiny; the poor fools, Lily knew the true answer, pure vanity was an ill-conceived confidence.
* * *
Pink Bermudas and a yellow polo shirt clung to Sam Murray as he scanned the computer print-out in front of him. He smacked his head onto the pile, creating a speckled shroud that stared back at him, mocking his efforts. Still as the silence, he listened for guidance, a gift from his God, but the control room denied him. For the first time in five days the drone of the aircon had petered out and his discordant team had escaped to the fresh Swiss air. The dark art of colliding particle matter had been left with the boss, whose blackened feet were flung onto his desk. Bemused by the test results, he watched his blue flip-flops dangle off the end of his toes. Sam pivoted his heels left then right, a human metronome to calm his fear.
Crashing forward he slammed his laptop closed and rolled his chair away from the table at speed. Sam addressed the roof through his grimace, ‘Hell, there has got to be a logical reason;’ he stood and wobbled, there was no reply. Slapping his dead thighs the words boomed around the dingy Portakabin, mocking his efforts. It hung dusty and grey in the cave set on a heavy framework of girders. A low tech demoralising shell, a husk containing the kernel, the Large Hadron Collider; the highest of high tech instruments known to man. The dreariness was marginally improved by the lighting, his top half was sodium bright and his bottom half a dull orange. Looking out, he saw the giant lights cabled to the invisible roof like the sun hung above the earth. ‘Logic, only logic counts, nothing can be so impossible.’ He stretched to press his palms against the scant window, staring at his small world through the greasy smears. Turning away with a sigh, he slid back into his chair and rubbed his eyes with a damp shirt collar; searching for inspiration but there was none to be gathered from the place itself.
Sam’s hand hovered over the phone. How to break the news to his boss? What would his best friend ask him, because Bert Leinster knew everything; the God of particle physics and the discoverer of the Higgs Boson particle in 2012. Sam’s chest was tight and his breathing shallow, he finally picked up his mobile. Bert would know what to do. He remembered their time since Manchester University. They were still a perfect working couple, despite their very different marriages and disparate lifestyles.
Sam had left home in Blonay at six precisely. The continuum of time was important in his theoretical world. An exact reality based on a future event or a very instant past, namely his alarm clock. It took nearly two hours by rail to reach CERN in Geneva, The European Organisation for Nuclear Research and the Large Hadron Collider or LHCb. The entrance was sited above the twenty seven kilometres torus that lay hidden in the earth. His expensive train set where particles were collided at close to the speed of light and absolute zero, -273 degrees C. A replication of when the universe began, or so the theory dictated.
He dumped his mobile in exchange for an elastic band and ping’d it through the hot air of the LHCb. The “b” represented beauty, the type of protons that were generated in their billions by the collider. But it wasn’t very beautiful in his hole and the lure of a family weekend poisoned his latest analysis. Results that needed to be exact before sharing it with an exacting Bert. He had compared the background Higgs Boson count that morning with results from when they had discovered it. He needed the static level to calibrate the detector for the new project. The first result was nonsensical, so he had spent another six hours to check it again and to double-check his method; it was still grossly inflated.
He belched, his guts ached, and he thought again about Bert; successfully finding the “glue” that holds the universe together was never enough to satisfy Bert’s craving for knowledge. His overwhelming desire to understand Mankind’s start and also its potential end. Bert had a new theory, where there was less “glue” and fewer HBs. Sam had told his wife, Briony that it was like boiling rice in water, and Bert wanted to know what happened if there was less and less water. A theory that Sam had christened “Back to Big Bang,” a pun on the “Back to the Future” film, his implication being the theoretical impossibility of a stupid theory. He had told his wife this but never Bert. Sam thought it a waste of CERN time; the existence of a fifth world, a parallel universe created at the Big Bang, was of no value to society. But the HB discoverer was famous enough to have as much funding as he desired and that made Sam jealous as he struggled on with his old and now unfashionable research.
He sighed and stretched his leg muscles from a horizontal squat, threatened by the fifty computer eyes staring at him. There was a perfect silence in his small cage as the screens watched his every move. He could hear his heart palpitating as he contemplated the right action. On Monday, the team would recommence the next set of experiments. They would be colliding matter and antimatter hydrogen particles to create mini black holes. Logically, that gave him the rest of the weekend to collect new data on the background level of HB’s. He nodded to himself. He was glad no one else had seen the latest iteration; he didn’t want wild rumours circulating around the campus. Dragging his wild grey hair into a pony tail, he secured his locks using an elastic band that lay with countless others spewed across his desk. Ammunition that remained to be flicked at the inert beasts. Sam stabbed speed dial four on his mobile and waited.
The clipped but soft Mancunian accent answered without any preamble. ‘You never ring me, never; only emails.’
‘Bert, I think we have a problem.’ Sam rubbed his red eyes again. He thought about the cold beer sitting in the fridge at home, the laughter and fun of his two kids and the love of his wife. He decided the beer would come first to help lower his stress levels; a few beers, not one or two.
‘What?’
Sam accepted his friend was invariably rude, an introverted personality who lived life by his rules. That was his mate, Bert, the scientist who didn’t really care about much other than his particle universe and his garden. It went through Sam’s mind that Bert’s attention span followed the Pareto rule. Particles were 80% of his thoughts and his plants, wife and kids in that priority fitted into the 20% remaining. Lately Sam had noticed an imbalance; Bert was giving even less time to his wife, Natalia. At least according to Briony and she had recently told him the discord was worsening; like their breakdown before and that worried him.
Sam sighed. ‘This can’t be discussed on the phone, Bert; it’s between you and me.’ He gushed on. ‘Can we meet? Maybe a beer on your veranda later tonight?’
‘What can’t be said over the phone?’
‘Trust me, Bert.’
‘I always have, apart from on my stag night.’ Sam dropped his forehead into his hand and waited. ‘Tonight is a really bad night. The kids are due home from boarding school soon, Natalia