“You sort out that anomaly yet?” asked Dr. Dickerson. Dr. Malthora looked up from the computer monitor and frowned at him.
“No.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Every time we try to subtract out the anomalous signature, we end up losing some of the good data.”
“Which correction algorithm are you using?”
“Yerkes-Hamilton.”
“Hm…that should work for a K-anomaly like that…”
“Yeah, I know that.” Malthora frowned again and took a sip of his espresso.
“You’re gonna get an ulcer drinking that stuff.”
“I’m going to get an ulcer working here no matter what happens. Ah! There! It’s done!” Malthora peered blearily at the screen, and Dickerson joined him. In a blank white window on the monitor, a skein of colored particle traces swept downwards, followed by a second, differently-colored tangle. Then, a hideous neon-magenta trace descended. Malthora, who had been preparing to take another sip of espresso, dropped his cup. Dickerson took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, put his glasses back on, and fainted.
The phone rang. Dr. Flesichmann groaned and rolled over, wrapping himself in a straitjacket of blankets. He fumbled for the receiver, picked it up, and stuck it to his ear.
“Peter Fleischmann…” he mumbled.
“It’s Raja Malthora.”
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Something really odd happened.” Fleischmann winced visibly and sat up, untangling his legs from the covers.
“What? A malfunction?”
“I don’t know. Looks more like a practical joke to me.”
“What do you mean, practical joke?”
“Well, the last collision gave us some really odd results…I think you probably ought to come in.”
“It’s three A.M.!”
“You’re the only one who knows the computer systems…well, the only one in Geneva, at least.” Fleischmann said a very unpleasant word in German and swung his feet off the edge of the bed. He stood up and ran his fingers through the bramble of hair atop his head.
“All right…just hold everything until I get there. Don’t touch anything!”
“Okay.”
Five minutes later, Fleischmann was haphazardly dressed and driving down the motorway. He spotted the sign that read “CERN: Entree B” CERN. The largest particle-physics research center on Earth, home of the world’s biggest particle accelerator. Flesichmann, despite having worked at CERN for half a decade, still found this hard to believe. After all, the CERN complex itself looked like little more than a modest campus in the middle of a big circular field. That field, however, was encircled by a ring of superconducting magnets capable of accelerating particles to nearly the speed of light and smashing them together, generating bursts of energy that they used to probe the deepest, smallest structures in all of the universe. It was an incredibly expensive facility to run, which helped to explain Fleischmann’s habitual irritation when things went wrong.
Flesichmann parked his Citroën and caught the shuttle to the main building, then took the elevator up to the third floor. He found Room 3035 and threw the door open.
“All right, what’s going on?” he grumbled, striding up to the monitor, against which Malthora and Dickerson were still pressed. Fleischmann pushed Dickerson aside and gazed at the display. There was the standard thornbush of multicolored particle traces. But, overlaying them, there was another set of particle traces, highlighted in brilliant magenta. Flesichmann screwed up this face when he saw this layer, and reached up to turn the monitor towards him, as though the cryptic image might be a result of seeing the image from an angle. His face only contorted further when he saw the image straight-on.
The source of the confusion was this: the magenta particle traces, apparently not the result of any kind of interference or malfunction, spelled a word. It was unmistakably a word.
HELLO
“Scheiße! Somebody’s screwing around!” bellowed Fleischmann. “I hope it’s not needed, but I’d like to remind everybody here that this a serious research facility, not a university campus!” Malthora and Dickerson looked up at him, seeming hurt.
“We didn’t do this,” protested Malthora, scratching the back of his neck.
“Call Dr. Mbola!”
“Mbola’s been in the hospital since Monday. Liver problem.”
“What?”
“I don’t know what to make of it,” said Dickerson.
“It’s a prank. Don’t even think of making anything else of it. There is no, and I repeat for emphasis, absolutely no way that pimesons could spell out the word ‘hello’. Understand?” The other scientists nodded, but Malthora still looked remarkably uneasy.
…
In the next week, Flesichmann re-ran the experiment. Unable to find any way to remove the prank’s traces from the data, Fleischmann angrily re-did the collision, and put all the scientists who had been manning the accelerator that night on probation.
Then, the results of the re-run came back. Flesichmann stared at the particle tracks with great dismay.
HELLO
they read. He suspended five suspect scientists — including Dickerson, Malthora, and Mbola — and ran the experiment a third time. The same result.
HELLO
written in pimesons on the computer monitor. Software engineers were called. Technicians were brought in. When Fleischmann was convinced that there was no way this was a harmless prank, he began thinking sabotage. Radical religious group, he assumed, trying to make it look like God or whatever other deity they worshiped was sending them a message.
…
“All right, we’ve got the detector out!” called the crane operator. The spidery machine swiveled away from the enormous hexagonal detector that was the heart of the HEQGP experiment. Fleischmann watched as the intricate detector panel swung out into open space and was gently lowered into a foil-lined, padded cradle. He slipped the surgical mask down over his face, tightened the hood of his white bunny suit, and, confident that he wasn’t going to shed any dust on the detector, stepped up to it.
The detector itself was a fairly bland thing. A steel-gray panel a meter and a half square, surrounded by a yellow-painted titanium frame bristling with electronics. The technicians gathered around the instrument, searching for any suspicious additions to the electronics. There had to be something that explained the anomalous message. After all, what were the chances of a bunch of pimesons happening to all fly out in the exact right directions to form the letter “H”, much less a whole word? Fleischmann decided that the probability of this was exactly zero. He craned his neck, but two of the bulkier technicians had bunched in in front of him. Someone said something in Swahili that dripped with astonishment. An excited volley of Czech and Polish followed. Someone exclaimed something Fleischmann couldn’t catch in German. Flesichmann, putting his extensive English vocabulary to work, managed to frighten away the two technicians in front of him and get a good look at the detector.
HELLO
read the detector. The word was burned right into the metal. It looked as though someone had turned an immense cutting laser on the metal plate. Fleischmann went red immediately, and went into an absolutely unprintable tirade, alternating between foul words in German and fouler words in English.
Scientists and technicians were fired in the weeks that followed. Malthora and Dickerson were among them. The HEQGP detector was dismantled, examined minutely, repaired, and reassembled.
Fleischmann suffered a heart attack in Room 3035 the month after the detector was reinstalled. He was dead by the time a graduate student stumbled across his body. His hands, already stiffened with rigor mortis, clutched a torn printout, which he’d apparently snatched from the printer as the heart attack felled him. Only the top two-thirds had printed, and part of that had been torn away as Fleischmann collapsed, but the reason for the heart attack was still utterly clear.
The printout was of the same sort of particle graph that had started the whole debacle. There was the standard thicket of particolored particle traces. Overlaid was the magenta skein of a cloud of high-velocity pimesons. Shock, it was decided, had been the cause of Fleischmann’s heart attack, for the pimesons spelled out the words
HELLO? IS ANYONE THERE?
