Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland,
In the cold night, blinking lights on the control panel informed the duty personnel there was a malfunction near the Atlas crossing point. A detector was showing odd readings, and the associated error code was obscure enough to indicate the problem would not be easily solved.
‘I'll run a quick diagnostic and dump it on the morning shift.’ The tired contractor rationalized his work ethic. He was a mechanical engineer by training, and had been sourced in to handle minor upgrades to the particle accelerator.
Securing his tool bag to the bicycle, he began pedalling to the affected site. The frustratingly generic description of the error code occupied his mind while hurried breaths frosted the air. The problem with such a complex machine was that it was easy to lose track of version control, making it difficult to grasp the changes made.
In spite of this, he knew better than to complain; because the last time something like this happened, the retrospective had revealed he had been at fault. Some might blame the test suite for not accounting for edge cases, but he knew better.
Upon reaching the designated site, he parked the bicycle against the cool tunnel wall. His mind was on autopilot as the safety lockouts were engaged and began loosening diagnostic panels connecting to the main detector.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
‘The detector looks fine…’ he thought, checking the readout from his probe, all systems were nominal. With growing suspicion, he walked over to the superconducting magnets responsible for focusing the particle beam. Their readout also looked fine, but a few magnets were running hotter than they should. He circled around to visually inspect them when his vision suddenly flared with a flash that was brighter than a thousand suns!
‘Had I forgotten the safety lockout procedure?’ Even if he had, there were multiple systems in place to prevent such a failure. The blindness he was experiencing was most likely caused by the optic nerves getting fried alongside parts of his brain.
Thankfully, he wasn’t in pain, and the confused panic gave way to a gradual sense of peace.
Only a moment had transpired since he entered the path of the proton beam before the facility entered emergency shutdown. Soon, there was only the hiss of leaking vacuum and the clicking coils of cooling compressors.
The Engineer died peacefully, with only a lingering regret about the unfinished isekai romance he had been enjoying just minutes prior. His last conscious thoughts were carried by a wave of buzzing protons and muons, piercing through the decaying shroud of reality into the worlds beyond…
----------------------------------------
[Higher resolution images can be found on Patreon for free]
Map of Ark:
[https://i.ibb.co/N2GBdwg/Ark-v4-low-res.png]
Map of Enui:
[https://i.ibb.co/Jcp9NS0/Enui-V2-Inkarnate-low-res.jpg]