“Apparitions don’t exist!” Roger Favre growled defiantly. He refused tenaciously to accept the impossible when quite obviously something strange was going on. Something was no longer quite right. Was his mind playing games with him? His eyes? The first signs of Alzheimer’s? Were the usual complaints beginning to affect his 70-year-old body? Roger no longer felt quite sure of himself, but was unwilling to discuss it with anybody. Perhaps a bit less alcohol? Stop smoking? Or should he do what all the know-it-alls were recommending: more exercise? And give himself a heart attack?
Roger Favre sat in the same armchair in which he had been watching television for years. It was heavy, made of dark leather, with a slight bulge to support his neck and wide armrests on both sides. Roger smoked, skimmed through the daily paper, and waited for Madelaine to call him when dinner was ready. This is what had happened every evening since his retirement and nothing seemed capable of shaking this routine until, well, until something was no longer quite right. Until these strange lights started appearing.
Among his acquaintances, Roger was seen as an even-tempered kind of person. Some called him boring, others humorless, but all valued his knowledge of his subject. Roger had worked for decades as a geometry teacher in the town’s high school. In French-speaking areas, high school teachers were called “professor.” Monsieur le Professeur. If there were questions about measurements or volume, and that happened frequently in the city of Geneva, his former students were happy to consult him. Roger had a 46-year-old son who worked for the last 14 years as a physicist at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléair (CERN). This son had the same first name as his father. That is why Roger’s wife called him “mon petit Roger.” My little Roger. Roger senior had become a triple grandfather through Roger junior. The family had done well, and he should have been able to enjoy his existence as a pensioner without any worries. If only there hadn’t been the fluttering and intrusive lights that materialized at irregular intervals at foot-level by his television armchair. Roger’s wife’s name was Madelaine, but he called her “Didi,” his term of endearment, because Madelaine, so he thought, made her sound like a maid and a servant. And every few years, Roger fell prey to some whim. Madelaine called it “his obsessions.” They came and went like the seasons or the sudden urges of pregnant woman for a particular food. On one occasion, he had planted 30 palm shoots in his garden in a fit of enthusiasm so that it would make him feel as if he were in the South Pacific. The unexpectedly freezing winter turned his South Pacific into Alaska. Another time, he held forth that every responsible paterfamilias had to ensure that he had a power generator in the house. He acquired a diesel engine and dug an illegal pit in the cellar, which he sealed with asphalt. When the power failed in the whole district, the police moved in. His tank was against the law, they yelled, and was polluting the ground water. It had to be pumped out immediately. The whole house stank of diesel for weeks. Another episode worth mentioning was the one with the tunnel. He needed an escape tunnel to save himself and his loved ones below ground in the event of a disaster, Roger asserted with a deadly serious face. He dug valiantly with crowbars, pickaxes, and shovels for 12 weeks and even employed helpers whom he remunerated generously for their silence. Then the groundwater came flooding into the cellar. Not all of a sudden, but rising day after day. Ever since then, Didi had dismissively called the cellar “Loch Ness.”
People thought of Roger as kind and helpful, just a bit eccentric. Sometimes. And now the business with the odd lights on the floor. Was he beginning totally to lose the plot?
For two weeks, there had been these strange goings-on. Roger had bought the daily paper at the kiosk, drank a couple of beers in the Bar du Léman, and when he got home, greeted Didi in the kitchen. Like every evening, he had thrown himself into his ancient leather armchair and waited for Didi’s call to dinner. As he was leafing through the paper, he was suddenly irritated by a flickering light by his left foot. It was probably some reflection from outside, and then it disappeared as quickly as it had come.
Then it reappeared. Twice. Three times. Where did the light come from? Roger went to the window, his eyes searched the street up and down for a car headlight, a reflective piece of material, children playing with flashlights, anything that had not been there on previous evenings. He registered no changes; furthermore, it was the middle of March and the sun had sunk below the horizon.
Irritated, Roger returned to his armchair. Was he seeing things that did not exist? Was it his brain? Were his eyes playing tricks on him? He stared at his shoes. At that moment, it happened again. A knot of colors formed above the tip of his left foot and arranged itself into a rectangle. Roger pulled his shoe away; the colors remained, floating about 30 centimeters above the floor. Roger pushed his shoe back into them. The rectangle of light remained unchanged. Roger went to the wall and turned up all the light switches. The lights in the living room shone brightly. Roger knelt down and felt the carpet, pushing with both hands. The funny light had meanwhile collapsed, just like when a screen is switched off.
Roger went to the kitchen and asked Didi for a flashlight. Didi always knew where everything was. “Are you looking for something in Loch Ness?” she asked mischievously. “Nonsense,” he lied, “I dropped a tablet on the floor.” Roger examined the walls with a flashlight centimeter by centimeter. Somewhere there had to be something reflective. A microscopic piece of glass? A small glass marble? A picture frame? The metal wrist strap of a watch? A key? A shiny case of some kind? A coin? A disk? Was he going mad? “Keep calm,” he said to reassure himself. “I’ll solve this problem with scientific rigor.”
After dinner, he was back in his ancient leather armchair. Roger was actually hoping that the apparition would return. Someone on television was just explaining that the “world wide web” owed its origins to CERN. A certain Monsieur Tim Berners-Lee had developed the “www” in 1989 as a by-product so that scientists could quickly share their research results. Roger thought about phoning Roger junior to tell him about the ghosts in his house. But Roger needed evidence if he was to impress his physicist son. Something concrete. But there wasn’t anything. The advertising had come up on the television. Some company was presenting its latest camera. Camera? Roger went to see Didi. She was sitting in the next room laughing about some daft comedy series.
“Didi,” Roger interrupted her, “do you know where my old photographic equipment is? You know, the black Nikon bags?”
Didi turned down the volume. “What do you want in the middle of the night with your cameras? Everything is digital today. You can’t even find the films for them anymore.”
“Does that mean you got rid of them?”
“I wanted to some years ago. But then I hung the little case in the closet at the top of the stairs. The stairs to Loch Ness.”
“Thank you,” Roger exclaimed. “Perhaps we might be able to sell this old equipment.”
Two camera bodies with several lenses were lying in the bag. Exceptional quality. Trigger, settings, self-timer, everything was working as well as ever. The only thing that was missing was film.
The next day Roger went to the camera shop in the Rue du Mont-Blanc.
“Tell me, Jean-Claude, do these old types of film still exist? They were called Kodak?”
“We have them here. This is Geneva—you won’t believe the ancient cameras that some UN delegates still like to use.”
The two of them sat down over a coffee in the back room. They had known one another since school. Roger wanted to know how a motion-activated camera works. How does a camera only take a picture when something moves?
“You know these plugs, don’t you? They send out a weak beam and as soon as something moves in the room the beam is broken and the signal is triggered. The light goes on.
“Can such a system also be rigged up with a camera? I point the lens at a certain spot and set the self-timer. When the light in the room changes, is the picture taken?”
The next day Roger fixed his Nikon to a stool. It had been loaded with a highly sensitive 400 ASA film and connected up to the motion-sensitive plug. Puzzled, Didi enquired, “What obsession is this? We have neither cockroaches nor bugs in our living room.”
“I want to find something out,” Roger spluttered, and that was indeed true. “My camera is connected to a motion detector which measures the light in the room.”
“To what end?” Didi narrowed her eyes.
“I sometimes have problems. Things appear too bright or too dark. Perhaps I need to go and see an optician. This setup here measures brightness.”
Didi shook her head. Leave him be, she thought; this obsession will pass like all the others.
For two days, nothing happened. No apparition in the house. Whenever Roger sat in his armchair, he unplugged the motion detector and disarmed the camera. He placed them on the chair next to him. It was maddening. No lights taunted him. Then, finally, on the evening of March 28, the flickering started again. Roger grabbed the Nikon, put it to his eye, and pressed the shutter release 36 times. It was not possible to use the flash because it would have drowned out the light on the floor. Three days later he held the color photos in his hands and rejoiced. Incredible! Unbelievable! The pictures clearly and unambiguously showed a spot, which grew into a ball of lights. Then a cube formed and finally a colorful rectangle with stripes. While he was taking the photos, Roger had been quick-thinking enough to push his shoe into the picture. It too was recognizable in three pictures in which the rectangle of light was positioned over the tip of the shoe.
“Roger,” Roger asked his son on the phone, “can you spare a minute to see your old dad?”
“A bit difficult at the moment. We have more than 60 colleagues from all over the world here. You can’t imagine the shop talk. And then there are swarms of intrusive journalists.”
“The papers are full of stuff about some elementary particle. What are you looking for?”
“The Higgs boson. Oh Dad! The story is too long to tell over the phone. But you’re quick on the uptake. In 1964, the British physicist Peter Higgs developed a theory according to which initially massless particles suddenly acquire mass against the background of the so-called ‘Higgs field.’ These strange particles explain a whole lot, if we can find them.”
“How far have you got?”
“We first started up our particle accelerator last December, then again in February of this year, and currently we are starting the third phase. It all looks very promising. But don’t ask about the quantities of energy we need! Almost impossible for the man in the street to comprehend....”
Roger senior knew that. The Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) had been brought on stream at CERN as long ago as 1989. When fully operational, this monster gobbled up 100 GeV (gigaelectron volts), the energy used by 10 cities. Now the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was running, the largest particle accelerator in the world. Roger knew about it from the papers. The accelerator ring had a circumference of about 27 kilometers. It was located directly under the French and Swiss border areas near Geneva, which was about 60 meters underground only a few kilometers away from Roger’s house. In this ring—actually a circular tube—9,300 gigantic magnets ensured that the elementary particles, which were accelerated to near the speed of light, did not crash into the wall, but kept to the middle of the tube at incredible speeds. CERN was financed by 21 states and each participant sent their best physicists to Geneva. The public rarely found out what was actually happening at CERN. Not for any reasons of secrecy, CERN was happy to communicate, but because of the complexity of the subject. Particle physics was not popular and not something that could be explained in a few words.
“And when do you expect a breakthrough?” Roger senior enquired of Roger junior.
“That’s not so easy to predict. Actually, we are hoping for something in the next few weeks, but anything is possible: a revolution in particle physics or a disaster. You’ll hear about it on all channels if we have a successful breakthrough.”
“Just one more quick question, son, before you go,” Roger said. “I’ve heard some stupid rumors. Is what you do actually dangerous? I read recently that some physicists had warned that you could produce a mini black hole that could swallow up the whole world. After all, the popular media often refer to this Higgs thing as the ‘God particle.’”
“Dad, you really don’t need to worry about anything. I and many other of my colleagues know the calculations. Nowhere can a black hole come about. That would require a million times the energy we have now. When all the fuss here is over, I look forward to coming home for a meal. Bye! Love to Mum! I’ll be in touch!”
Roger put his cell phone aside and looked thoughtfully at his 36 color photos. He picked up one photo after the other. And his suspicion kept growing. Was the rectangle of light in his living room connected with the experiments conducted with the Large Hadron Collider? Was something uncanny manifesting in his house that might be of burning interest to the physicists at CERN? Troubled, Roger wanted to phone his son again but thought better of it. He needed more evidence, better photos. Pictures from another angle.
So Roger obtained a batch of very fast Kodak film, everything Jean-Claude had in stock. The living room turned into a hunting ground. Roger no longer sat in his ancient leather armchair, but propelled himself across the carpet on a small chair with wheels he had acquired from a home for the elderly. He had his camera round his neck as if he were out stalking. Both cameras were loaded, and he had four different lenses available.
Didi became concerned. “Can you really not explain to me what all this is about? You’re behaving like normal, but I know your eyes and your impulses.”
Roger took her to one side and attempted to explain to her something about the Higgs particle. He showed her the 36 pictures.
Didi looked nervous. Uncertain, she said, “And there is nothing that will explode? You don’t have any chemicals in the house?”
“No, my darling. Not even a Bengal Match.”
Didi stared at the floor, then back to the 36 pictures lying spread all over the small table.
“We have to inform our son,” she said defiantly.
“Already done!” Roger affirmed. “The physicists at CERN are all busy with this extraordinary experiment. They are looking for the non-existent elementary particle. As soon as the flurry of activity is over, your little Roger will come for dinner.”
In the next two weeks, the rectangular light appeared at various times of the day. Roger took photos from all angles: from the front, both sides, the back, and from on top with and without the lights on in the room. What on Earth...? It couldn’t be a Higgs particle. As far as he knew, the particle disappeared as fast as it appeared. It decayed into other elementary particles—transformed itself. Roger had read up on it. As a result, he had learned that this Higgs boson corresponds to a quantum excitation of the Higgs field—whatever that was—at any rate, not something that remained stationary in the air and allowed itself to be photographed from all sides. But still: the light field existed. Roger could prove it as clear as day with 234 pictures. Roger junior would be in for a surprise. Full of excitement, Roger waited for the call from his son.
May had come. Mild weather on Lake Geneva. The icy tips of the French Alps sparkled in the distance. On the southern slope of a hill 800 meters distant from the runway of Geneva airport sat two generations of the Favre family under a wide sun shade. Roger had cracked open the first bottle of champagne.
“We’ve done it,” Roger junior reported proudly and nodded with a laugh. “Dad, none of this must get out. We’ve discovered the Higgs particle. Definitively and for all eternity. It’s incredible. Old Peter Higgs was also there. He cried with happiness; we all held hands and danced around in a circle. A unique moment! Twenty-six particle physicists behaving like children. But we decided only to go public with it in a few weeks. Our results have to be documented squeaky clean. So that journalist can also communicate them.”
“Congratulations! You’re wonderful!” Didi raised her glass to her son. “Are we about to become the parents of a Nobel Prize winner?”
“Mum, you’re letting your imagination run away with you. We are a large international team. The honor is due to Peter Higgs. He calculated the particle in advance.”
The three of them fell silent. Roger turned to his son.
“Do you have time to listen to an unusual story?”
“From you, yes!” Roger junior laughed and raised his glass again.
An hour later, he knew everything. He had looked through the photos again and again. He had trekked with his Dad into the living room, had sat down in the ancient leather armchair precisely at the moment that the apparition reappeared. Now Roger junior had become an eye-witness—an experience that embedded itself in his brain cells in precisely the same way as the discovery of the Higgs boson. The men debated how to proceed. The physicist Roger said to the geometry professor Roger, “This is too crazy for me to get anywhere officially in CERN. I know two really good guys, both particle physicists like myself and both up for a joke. With your permission, Mum, Dad, I’ll invite them here. Saturday perhaps?”
The one physicist was a man called Zwicky from the Swiss canton of Glarus, and the other, who looked like a gym teacher, was from Clermont-Ferrand in France and called Durand. They had a good sense of humor and started by telling jokes from the academic world.
After the jokes, things turned serious. Roger told his colleagues about the events in his Dad’s house. He showed them the pictures and, champagne glasses in hand, they all went into the living room where, as if by command, the colored field lit up. It had rarely been gone in the last few days and had, indeed, grown a little, rather like someone zooming in on an image. Mr. Zwicky and Monsieur Durand admired the colorful patterns from all sides. They wanted to be sure that they were not seeing a reflection of some kind. They placed newspaper around the light patterns so that any reflection, no matter from which angle, was impossible. Then the deliberations started. Theories, speculation, and mad ideas were discussed and discarded again. Mr. Zwicky said that he had particularly noticed the irregular colors. The thing was displaying a different pattern from the front than the back. The back part was not a copy, not the front side shining through. “Perhaps the whole thing is a hologram. Three-dimensions, and we’re only seeing two sides. Like the first and last page of a book. But the part in between is missing.”
The men decided to conducts some experiments. They would bring some highly sensitive detectors to try and detect the source, the origin of the light.
Two days later, the living room was turning into a laboratory. Small boxes were attached to metal racks bought in a DIY store. Lasers shone in a variety of colors from one rack to another. They touched the mysterious rectangle of light 30 centimeters above the ground. The set-up of the experiment was changed several times. Four hours later, Monsieur Durand was exasperated and close to giving up. “That thing is not shining from anywhere. It does not have a source—somewhere behind the wall, on the ceiling or from outside. The color image is being created directly at the site where it is flickering right now.”
The clearly brilliant Mr. Zwicky from Glarus thought they should try and find the “message.” There was a message there, wherever it might come from, and the key was to make it visible. The three physicists connected a laptop to several of the devices. An invisible laser beam—this, too, was something Roger had not come across before—scanned the very thin lines at the side of the square. The lateral side of a piece of paper, as it were.
Suddenly complete silence fell. Breathlessly, they all stared at the screen. Binary code began to form in five blocks:
00110001 00110010 00110001 00110110 00110010 00110001 00110001 00111000
00110001 00110010 00110010 00110010 00110010 00110001 00110001 00111000
00110000 00110001 00110000 00111000 00110010 00110001 00110001 00111001
00110000 00110001 00110001 00110100 00110010 00110001 00110001 00111001
00110000 00110101 00110000 00110101 00110010 00110001 00110001 00111001
“Where have these numbers come from?” Roger junior whispered in astonishment. “Or is someone winding us up? Are we in something like the TV program ‘Hidden Camera’?”
“Shush!” Mr. Zwicky said, annoyed. “I’m just trying to make the code readable! Here—look!”
12162118
12222118
01082119
01142119
05052119
All of them stared at the small laptop screen. Thoughtfully Mr. Zwicky explained, “It makes sense: The first two lines of numbers end with “2118,” the next three with “2119.” So they’re calendar dates written in the American style. That is, first the month, then the day, and finally the year. Here in Europe we’d write it like this:
16 December 2118 (l2.l6.2118)
22 December 2118
8 January 2119
5 May 2119”
“Yes and...? Who...?”
“No idea.” Zwicky and Durand looked at one another perplexed. Then they all gathered around the table. The dates pointed to the future. Today’s date was May 5, 2012. The first date on the screen was December 16, 2118, seven months and 100 years in the future. What was going on here? Again and again the group of men checked whether they were not falling for an outright prank. Maybe their colleagues from CERN thought something up to hoax them.
The next idea came from Roger junior: “Is there any possibility of responding on the same frequency? When someone sends me a message, I can send a response....”
“In theory, yes,” said Durand pensively. “What should we tell the sender?”
Mr. Zwicky had already started. He typed the date, “May 5, 2012,” on the keyboard and followed it up with “Who are you?” He wrote all of this in English and in binary code because the group of physicists assumed that this was the language everyone would understand.
With these keystrokes darkness descended. Not just the screen on the laptop, but the strange light box 30 centimeters above the floor as well. It seemed as if their message had arrived somewhere. Nothing further happened for the rest of the evening. Peter Zwicky—by now they were all on first-name terms—tried to send a further two messages. But the link had gone. Were they all caught in a common dream? Victims of unknown mind control? Reality seemed to have gone out the window. Objectively, Peter noted that everything was real and could turn out to be important. It appeared that their unknown partners somewhere out there had possibilities at their disposal, which they were lacking.
“And that means that there is no explanation other than that the strangers are coming from the future. They’ll be back in contact—if they want to.”
The group continued their discussions into the early hours of the morning. Roger, the geometry professor, insisted that nothing could come out of the future. Nothing whatsoever. And that included messages. Period. Jacques Durand referred to the Swedish physicist Max Tegmark. In scientific journals, he had postulated parallel worlds, universes existing alongside ours without us noticing. “Little Roger” referred to the work of the mathematician Kurt Goedel, who had said decades ago that Einstein’s general theory of relativity allowed for tears in space and time. And messages? How was that supposed to work?
“Imagine a very finely meshed net on a tennis racquet,” Zwicky explained. “When the tennis ball hits the racquet it makes an indentation. The space becomes curved. Now imagine a tiny but extremely heavy ball in place of the tennis ball. It will curve the net to such an extent that it closes into a sphere which completely surrounds the tiny ball. The microscopic but very heavy ball would be the time machine. It could leave the sphere in any place. That, by the way, results from Einstein’s general theory of relativity—but you know that. The incomprehensible part is that the time machine lands in a different dimension when it leaves the sphere because there are an infinite number of dimensions around the space. Pictorially, there are a trillion other spaces next to the space in which we happen to be at this moment only a fraction of a nanomillimeter away from us.... Quantum physics makes the most impossible things possible.”
“Mumbo jumbo as well?” someone asked.
“Quantum physics is like mumbo jumbo,” Mr. Zwicky remarked calmly. “According to the tachyon theory of our revered colleague Gerald Feinberg, cause and effect can even be reversed....”
As morning arrived, the men took a taxi home. The apparition did not return until the day after.
Peter had connected the laptop to the printer. A very clear 3D image glinted on the screen. Everyone could recognize the slightly bent banana shape of Lake Geneva from above. And around it was the city of Geneva, only much bigger than in 2012. An expanse of houses intersected by wide roads surrounded both sides of the lake. On the left, it extended as far as today’s Swiss city of Lausanne, on the right side opposite, as far as the spa town of Evian in France. And above the picture there fluttered the unmistakable blue flag of the UN.
“I don’t believe it!” Jacques remarked derisively. “Simply impossible! If that image comes from the future there would still have to be a UN in 106 years’ time and its flag would also have remained the same as today. That can’t be!”
“What could we ask them?” Peter Zwicky interjected thoughtfully. They agreed on the sentence “Please identify yourselves.”
The response came by return: “We are the descendants. We are experimenting with bridging. According to the old Christian calendar, today is May 7, 2119.”
“Ha! Insane!” Peter scoffed ironically. They say they’re in 2119—just like that!”
“Slowly I’m beginning to believe in the impossible,” Roger remarked. “Just think of the benefit we can obtain from knowledge out of the future. They’re more than a hundred years ahead of us! Their knowledge will reduce the time needed for our research....”
“...and our research budgets...”
Until then, the only proper smoker among the four physicists has been Roger senior. Now everyone was puffing nervously on their cigarettes. It was clear to all of them: They had to inform their colleagues and bosses. The discovery of the “Higgs bosons” was small beer in comparison to a dialogue with the future. The consequences were unthinkable!
Together they agreed to ask their partners in the future a question: “Albert Einstein calculated gravitational waves and postulated that these waves would cause the curvature of space. Has this theory been proven?”
There was no response. The connection was broken off from the other side. The screen remained dark. That is why neither Roger junior nor senior, neither Peter Zwicky nor Jacques Durand, informed their colleagues. Peter said what all of them were thinking. No knowledge was allowed to reach the past from the future. It would change the future.
The men agreed to give up the research laboratory in Roger’s living room and dismantle the devices, lasers, and racks in the living room. But then the screen lit up again. Eight people with faces of almost supernatural beauty revealed themselves. Each one had the same large eyes, the same regular slightly smiling lips. Each one was wearing a kind of dark blue overall and each one waved with slow, graceful movements. On the lower edge of the screen the words appeared with a mercurial luminescence: THE FUTURE HAPPENS REGARDLESS. Thinking quickly, Peter started the printer. The pictures appeared in color and with razor sharpness. After two minutes the connection terminated.
The photocopies made by Roger Favre went through several hands. And the world no longer made sense to the small number of initiates of 2012. Those were our descendants? All of them very beautiful? Graceful, gentle, no distinction between the sexes? Furthermore, they emitted something alien. Our descendants, extraterrestrials?