Flashforward

The control building for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider was new: it had been authorized in A.D. 2004 and completed in 2006. The building enclosed a central courtyard, inevitably named “the nucleus.” Every office had a window either facing in toward the nucleus or out toward the rest of CERN’s sprawling campus. The quadrangle surrounding the nucleus was two stories tall, but the main elevators had four stops: the two above-ground levels; the basement, which housed boiler rooms and storage; and the minus-one-hundred-meter level, which exited onto a staging area for the monorail used to travel along the twenty-seven-kilometer circumference of the collider tunnel. The tunnel itself ran under farmers’ fields, the outskirts of the Geneva, airport, and the foothills of the Jura mountains.