Funny how the Large Hadron Collider is capturing our imaginations, even though few of us really understand quantum theory, or what a Higgs boson is. And even though it’s theoretically impossible for anything to go seriously wrong with it — I’ve read that the chance of it producing a black hole is roughly equivalent to the chance of me spontaneously evaporating while shaving in the morning — we can’t help imagining it.
I’m guilty of this in my fiction, constantly asking “What if?” about the worst possible outcomes of current trends. “Story is conflict” they say, and what could be a bigger conflict than The End? I suppose it’s what Freud said (as I understand him), that we’re constantly bouncing between eros, passion for the things of this world, and thanatos, the death wish.
We all have to die, yet culturally we do everything we can to put our fingers in our ears and sing “La la la”, which leaves us with this curiosity about the dark and serious matter waiting out there in our future. When an opportunity like this comes along, to imagine not just sighing our last in a home somewhere but vanishing in a glorious subatomic apocalypse, who can resist?
This morning, I dreamt about it myself:
I was on vacation somewhere up north and visited a community centre/hospital. I spoke to one of the workers, whom I knew from working together somewhere in the past; we blethered about his patients, catching up. We felt a rumble beneath our feet and turned to look out the waiting room window. A dusty beige cloud was rising from the horizon, rolling toward us, blocking off the sky. “The collider,” said my friend. The final test was today. Something was very wrong in Switzerland; in fact, we knew there was no more Switzerland, and soon we would be gone, too. There was no shelter to be had from this, no escape. We could only wait.
The cloud tumbled closer and closer; the earth shuddered violently. The window burst and the cloud engulfed us. I felt myself lifted, pulled, torn asunder…
And I woke up.
Now I’m supposed to concentrate on copywriting?
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