6:15 pm Central European Time
8th Floor, Center 42
CERN
Meyrin, Switzerland
“You people can go to hell.”
The white-haired man sat at his desk in an unkempt office piled high with papers, several stories above the black-tie opening gala that was slowly gathering force on the main floor. His name was Oleg Karolyi, and the very large handgun he normally kept in the top drawer of his desk was in his right hand. The gun was a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum Model 29 revolver. It was loaded with six bullets, though he would probably only need one.
In his left hand was a shot glass half full of vodka. The bottle sat on a pile of notebooks in front of him. In one sudden movement, he tilted his head back and poured the vodka down his throat. The delightful burn came to him like a line of fire along his throat and into his belly.
God. That was good.
Below him, he could hear the strains of background music—the organization had hired a cellist and piano player for the check-in period. He could hear the hum of people talking as the crowd accumulated.
Oh, the important people! They were pushing at the frontiers of science! They were lighting our way through the darkness. Right now, they must be sipping wine, eating cheese, and chatting together in a polyglot of languages about the wonderful progress they were making. They were very pleased with themselves.
The overall event, the Triumph of Knowledge, was an insult. If they had been trying to humiliate and further break the spirit of a broken old man, they couldn’t do a better job than they had done.
For many years, Oleg had been the lead researcher on a dismal failure of a project that once seemed to hold so much promise. Indeed, you might even say he was the only researcher left. Everyone from his generation had retired or died. Younger people had moved on to other ideas with better funding and better opportunities to step into the limelight. The romance of laboring anonymously and secretly no longer held much allure. Oleg had defected to the West from the Soviet Union decades ago, in an era when nearly everything that mattered was done in secret. He was highly esteemed in those days. It was a coup to steal him away from the communists!
Had he just thought that younger people had moved on to other ideas with better funding? It wasn’t quite true, was it? No. They had moved on to better ideas in general. The idea that Oleg had spent his entire adult life on had turned out to be a colossal waste of time, money, his own personal energies, his enthusiasm, optimism, youth, and then his middle age. All slowly drained away.
The famous American inventor Edison was said to have once remarked after one of thousands of botched attempts to perfect the incandescent light bulb, “I have not failed ten thousand times. I’ve successfully found ten thousand ways that will not work.”
This quote was almost certainly spurious, a capitalist old wives’ tale spawned to convince mediocre American minds that anyone could become a great captain of industry if they only tried hard and long enough.
But it was applicable to Oleg’s life, if only in an ironic way. For long years, he had discovered, over and over again, countless ways not to make a particle beam weapon. He supposed it was his own fault. If he searched his heart, he could see that he already knew it was impossible, given the limitations of human understanding twenty years ago. He should have moved on then. But he had already invested twenty years at that point.
He could scream. Forty years had been squandered. It was too much to accept. Even allowing himself to think about it was too much. He would slam the door of his mind shut if he could.
It wasn’t that a particle beam weapon was impossible. That wasn’t accurate. Given current technologies, particle beams as we understood them had to run along a pre-existing track. They ran particle beams in the various accelerators here at CERN night and day. That problem was solved in the 1950s.
But what good was it? A particle beam weapon implied that there was no track to guide it. If you were to fire a particle beam at a naval destroyer in the ocean, the enemy navy wasn’t going to stand idly by for years while you spent millions of dollars constructing an accelerator up to the side of their precious ship.
His life’s work was a bust. It was a disaster. He still dutifully sent encrypted reports to the American military intelligence agencies that sponsored his work here, but he knew what they thought of him. He was an embarrassment. He was a Cold War relic. His budget was a rounding error. If anyone spoke of him at all, it was probably to make a joke by the water cooler. He was a laughingstock.
They were waiting for him to die, and then they would close the book on yet another stupid episode in the history of American-Soviet relations. Remember how they were going to race each other across the solar system, claiming and colonizing the outer planets? Remember how they were going to defeat each other using remote viewing and other psychic phenomena? Remember the mobile nuclear missiles on truck beds along the line of contact? Remember how the Americans were hiding the bodies of four crashed aliens from outer space and were learning to use captured alien technologies?
Oleg’s efforts belonged to that silly and dangerous era. He was inventing a space age weapon for a space age that never arrived. It was a curiosity, an artifact of another time. He could be a man in a wax museum, except there was no reason to celebrate him in a museum because his ideas didn’t work.
Sometime in the past two years (he didn’t remember exactly when—the vodka had begun to cloud his thinking), he had taken to sending encrypted emails out into the world, hinting there had been a breakthrough in the study of particle beam weapons. It was the adolescent vandal in him coming to the fore.
He sent the emails to dummy civilian email accounts he had created himself. He received them off-campus, sometimes at his own home, masking the whereabouts of the accounts using a VPN. It was a rudimentary, off-the-shelf security setup with encryption that any intelligence agency should easily break. But no one did. That was because no one cared. No one was monitoring his activities. He was well and truly forgotten.
Below him, the sounds of the gala continued to rise up through the building. It was like a gathering storm that would blow his house down. He was thinking very seriously about ruining their party by shooting himself in the head.
The giant handgun was absurdly powerful, a leftover from his days of being enamored with everything American. One shot under the chin should blast a catastrophic hole up through his brain and out the top of his skull. A bit more vodka and he might have the courage to go through with it.
In front of him on the desk was a piece of paper with a scribbled note on it. Before today, he had thought long and hard about what such a note should entail, but today, nothing would come to him. The words on that paper were the best he could do:
Messy, isn’t it?
He giggled quietly. If nothing else, perhaps people would remember and respect him for his sense of humor.