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Something about Zoé#

Do you know what an Alcubierre drive is? A theoretical marvel of physics and mathematics, it’s a concept for a warp drive, science fiction anchored in hard calculations. The idea involves creating a bubble of spacetime around a spacecraft, contracting spacetime in front and expanding it behind, enabling faster-than-light travel without violating relativity. The catch? It requires inconceivably vast amounts of energy, stellar quantities, to bend spacetime itself.

Also, it does not exist.

What does exist, however, is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, a stunning achievement of engineering. Beneath the Earth, hundreds of meters down, lies a circular tunnel stretching 27 kilometers in circumference. Inside it, a vacuum-sealed pipe forms the battleground for subatomic particles. Within this pipe, matter is accelerated close to the speed of light in opposing directions, clockwise and counterclockwise.

These particles are orchestrated to collide at meticulously planned locations where massive detectors lie in wait. One such detector, weighing an extraordinary 6,500 tons, is stationed near Geneva International Airport in Meyrin. This machine is tasked with decoding the mysteries of the universe, exploring phenomena like the Big Bang and probing the elusive nature of gravity, the last unmastered cosmic force, with the aim of uniting physics under a Grand Theory of Everything.

But there is another truth.

See, there is LHC Point 4, perfectly opposite the LHC experiment in the 27 km ring, somewhere nondescript in the french countryside. Officially just one of several minor accelerator stations supporting the larger experiments. Unofficially, very unofficially and completely off the books, it is home to the Exotic Matter Synchrotron (EMS), a facility so clandestine it doesn’t appear on any diagram or funding disclosure.

Officially, the LHC’s two particle injector sources, the Proton Synchrotron (PS) and the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), perform essential tasks. These injectors accelerate particles to a fraction beneath light speed before funneling them into the main ring, setting the stage for high-energy collisions.

But the EMS? It exists outside official boundaries, built to perform experiments on phenomena even physics textbooks dare not speculate about. It is here that the real warping of reality begins.

With the EMS, we forge something far beyond the grasp of traditional particle physics: packetized beams of exotic matter, the same hypothetical substance envisioned in theories like the Alcubierre drive. These beams are injected into the LHC’s ring, pushed to unimaginable velocities. As the energy density increases, compressing more and more energy into infinitesimally smaller volumes, we approach a frontier where conventional physics breaks down. Then, we force these packets to collide.

At Point 4.

One hundred and fifty-two meters beneath the surface lies the P4 collision point, an installation so secret it might as well be a ghost. Officially, it does not exist. Unofficially, it is a gateway to the impossible.

Colliding packets of exotic matter does not result in mere warp bubbles or sci-fi propulsion systems. That would be pedestrian. Instead, the fabric of spacetime itself tears and frays, breaching the thin veil separating our reality from others. These rifts, transdimensional doors, open pathways to alternate versions of Earth. Variants where history diverged, took twisted turns, and created realities both horrifying and surreal.

Using the EMS to manipulate quantum resonance, we fine-tune the collision frequencies, dictating the specific exit point of the Exotic Transdimensional Gateway (ETG). This precision allows us to open doors to specific alternate Earths.

Some are subtle nightmares: a world where a constructed virus didn’t just ravage populations but enslaved them, twisting humanity into mind-controlled drones, the world of the Changed. Others are bizarre reflections of our cultural evolution: a version of Earth where the drafting of women into World War II permanently altered gender dynamics, creating a society where uniformed, collectivist female enclaves coexist with an individualistic, fractured male culture.

Then there are the catastrophic horrors: an America that re-elected a fascist capitalist dictator, fully aware of the atrocities the Nazis committed, and reshaped itself into something worse.

And Earths far stranger still, places so alien that even the term “Earth” seems inadequate, where biology, physics, and even consciousness itself are distorted beyond recognition.

These gateways unveil endless possibilities, but also dangerous temptations. What happens when we peer too long into the abyss? Or worse, when something peers back?

Hi, I’m Zoë. A former data scientist at CERN, now a prisoner and unwilling test subject at the ETG in Point 4, the facility that officially doesn’t exist.

I was born in 1998 in Grenoble to parents steeped in high-energy physics. My dad is a theoretician, working on quantum field theory, while my mom specializes in quantum chromodynamics. Dinner at my house wasn’t about the weather; it was about particle collisions, wave functions, and the mysteries of the universe. My childhood was spent in the literal shadow of accelerators, their hum a backdrop to my life.

It was no surprise when I pursued theoretical physics and math at Grenoble, my hometown university. My interests, however, gradually expanded. I dove into computational models, statistical mechanics, and data science, eventually branching out into machine learning. I earned a modest living doing systems administration on the side, but it was CERN that beckoned. By the time I was 20, I had landed a coveted summer internship, analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider.

Most people glaze over when I try to explain what I do, so here’s the short version: Hi, I’m Zoë, I do computers and big data. :-)

At CERN, I was part of a team working on a cutting-edge large language model. The goal? To turn it into a revolutionary search engine using retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. This approach feeds the AI every scrap of data in your possession, enabling it to retrieve precise information, or just fabricate a convincing answer. RAG was a dream for research efficiency but a security nightmare. Once the AI ingests your data, you hope it obeys commands like, “Don’t reveal this to unauthorized users.” But hope is a fragile safeguard.

In my case, it failed spectacularly.

During the COVID pandemic, at barely 22, I started noticing something strange. My AI endpoint began sharing bizarre, detailed stories about the EMS and ETG, terms I had never heard of. At first, I dismissed them as hallucinations; LLMs are infamous for inventing plausible nonsense. But then it began dropping URLs. These URLs led to restricted resources I couldn’t access, yet I managed to trace them back to our training corpus, the supposedly curated and sanitized source data for the model.

What I found was astonishing.

Blueprints, schematics, programming code, detailed calculations, and even personnel records. Everything about the EMS and ETG was laid bare, despite the fact that the facility didn’t officially exist. The AI was mapping out a world that CERN vehemently denied. Point 4, which I knew as an unremarkable accelerator station, was suddenly transformed into a gateway to the unthinkable. The facility detailed by the documents didn’t even begin until 120 meters below the surface, deep beneath the mundane infrastructure we were told about.

The deeper I dug, the more I realized the magnitude of what I’d uncovered. And, eventually, so did they.

I made it too easy for them. In hindsight, I practically gift-wrapped myself. My official reason for visiting Point 4 was to perform a routine systems installation, just another tech job in a string of tech jobs. But I had other plans. With my access codes, I bypassed the mundane levels and made my way to the ground floor of Point 4. There, I found it: a heavy door, unassuming but clearly not meant for my eyes.

It wasn’t locked.

I opened it, revealing a staircase spiraling down into the depths. Every step I took felt like a descent into something irreversible. At the bottom, another door. I pushed it open, and they were there. Of course, they were already waiting for me. They probably had been the moment my access codes flagged their systems.

I didn’t fight. What would have been the point?

That was two years ago. The world thinks I’m dead, killed in a gruesome traffic accident involving a fuel tanker. An “empty cask,” they said. It’s a convenient story, tied up with the kind of grim believability that no one questions. But I didn’t die. I’m still here, 152 meters beneath the earth, at Point 4.

Sometimes they send me through the ETG, shoving me headlong into alien versions of Earth. My job is to scout: assess the terrain, report anomalies, gauge potential risks. I’m their expendable explorer. Other times, I’m left to rot in my cell, a metal collar locked around my neck, the tracker ensuring I can never go too far.

When the boredom gnaws at me, I hack the entertainment system they installed in my room. It’s laughable, Windows-based, riddled with exploitable holes. Breaking into its guts is easy. But the proxy server that connects me to the outside world? Heavily restricted. I can’t access much.

But I can access this site.

So here I am.