Jeffrey Holmes held his key card up to the scanner. A soft beep echoed as he pushed the door open and walked through into the monitoring room. A vast array of monitors and displays glowed and beeped throughout the room, temperature readings, speedometers, and other measuring devices displaying their readings. Ignoring the monitors Jeffrey walked briskly to his desk and sat down with a sigh.

“Ready for the big event Holmes?” said a voice behind Jeffrey. He startled and whipped around to find his coworker Millard standing behind him.

“Yeesh, don’t startle me like that Millard” Jeffery complained “But yeah, I’m pretty excited, we’ve been running diagnostics on the tube for months. I’m ready to turn it on.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, I can’t wait,” Millard remarked. Just as Millard opened his mouth to say something else, the loudspeaker chimed to announce an incoming message

“Attention all staff, the SMÜ collider will be starting up in 10 minutes, please get to your station.” then with a click the Intercom cut off and everyone else jolted into motion.

“Alright well, I got to get to my desk, see you in a bit Holmes,” Millard said

“Yeah, let’s just hope everything goes well” Jeffrey responded

“Don’t jinx it.” came the retort

Jeffrey turned back to his desk and set everything in order, logged into his computer, and started monitoring the readings. Jeffery was the one who was monitoring the energy output on the collider. Jeffrey worked at the Super Massive Über Collider; the biggest particle accelerator in the world, and today was the first day it was turning on. The accelerator was more than 4 times the length of the Large Hadron Collider(LHC). The SMÜ was 80 miles long and nearly half a mile below the surface.

The monitoring room was shaped like a theater, and so when the lead physicist Dr. Fritz Slarn walked onto the front podium and cleared his throat into a microphone everyone instantly turned to look at him.

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“Ahem, alright everyone I'll keep this brief so we can stay on schedule, but first I have some words to say: In this day and age where information is key, you are the locksmiths, the creators and dispensers, the innovators who will lead this world into a new age of prosperity. Let us be the first to unlock a new era of peace and science!” Dr. Fritz practically shouted that last bit of his speech in a fervor, before clearing his throat and visibly calming, and then continuing. “Thank you for your time, we have around three minutes until the collider activates, be ready everyone.”

Quickly double-checking he had all the correct programs running and displayed, Jeffrey sat back in his seat and waited. Finally, the intercom clicked back on and announced “The SMÜis starting everyone please make sure you are ready.”

A staff member walked up to the microphone up front and began to speak. “Now that we are ready, let's start the countdown, start the collider up in 3… 2… 1… NOW!”

As the last word left his mouth, a low hum began to resonate throughout the building and the monitor in front of Jeffrey started to run charts and graphs, as the particles in the collider reached maximum speed the graphs evened out. The microphone crackled on “We will now be introducing the collision particle, prepare yourselves.”

The graphs on the screen jumped suddenly, and massively. A spike in the amount of energy being produced, caused by a particle moving at near relativistic speeds suddenly colliding with another particle, however, there should have only been one spike; but that wasn’t the case, there were multiple spikes. In the end, there were 15 spikes in the graph, all of them perfectly identical and produced in the span of less than a second.

Jeffrey was surprised, but quickly brushed it off as a technical glitch, after all at these energy levels it wasn’t a surprise that the sensors would glitch, and they were all identical, the computer must have accidentally sent the energy levels fifteen times instead of one.

Unfortunately for the scientists in the SMU, the spikes were not a glitch at all, but instead a reality. You really couldn’t fault them though, how do you know to measure something that hasn’t even existed on this plane of existence until just now? It is rather hard to figure out that sending the particles at this speed would put them back in time, let alone realize the implications of poking holes in a membrane they had no idea was there.

,,’\_/’,,

Cathleen Finnigen put out her cigarette on the railing of her apartment balcony, sighing in disgust at her actions, she walked back to her chair, struggling to sit down with her abdomen distended in a visible bump. She looked out into the dirty streets, and then down at the baby bump, and finally the still-warm cigarette in her hand before throwing the cigarette over the railing and heading back inside, ignoring the ever-growing warmth within her.