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The subterranean hum at CERN is not background; it is a voice that Doc has learned to read. Fifteen miles of superconductors sing in a narrow register, an electromagnetic chord so low you feel it more under your teeth than in your ears. Doc liked to say the lab made the planet feel like a great instrument and he had the front-row ticket. He walked the low-lit corridor toward the bubble-chamber control like a man who had learned to kneel before patterns.
 

On the screens the collisions were unreadable to anyone who did not know how to listen. Particles exploded and braided and died and birthed again, spooling filigree of motion that the old language of physics called tracks. Doc watched the lattice and felt the sentence he loved—objects are events—translate across the glass. An electron is not a thing; it is an argument enacted. A proton is a verb. To look at the aftermath of a collision was to read grammar. 

He smiled despite the early hour. “Annihilation and creation are married,” he told himself, and the machines agreed by blinking like eyes. He loved the smugness of this life where collapse always prefaced invention. He stepped outside into a cold that braided his thoughts tighter, lit a cigarette though he knew better, and felt the nicotine work like a temporary calibration for his nerves. It steadied his hands enough to be honest with the world.
His phone was a throwaway—flip, cheap, forgettable—and that was why it was steady in the pocket of a man who had spent half his life learning which lines might be monitored and which were safe. It rang and the name on the screen was a white-knuckled rope he could trust: Michael Braxton, Black Tie Ops.
“Doc,” Braxton said without preface, breath like leather. “We have something. It may be nothing. It may be the thing that makes nations bribe saints. I’m sending you a picture. Keep your mouth zipped until you hear my voice again.”
Doc held the phone near his ear and did the thing the old men do; he accepted danger like an old debt. “I’ll look. Quiet, right?”
“A church hush,” Braxton answered. “And Doc—if it isn’t a hoax, don’t bring it into the usual channels. You know what happens when the NSA gets a nose. It becomes a demonstration and we lose the artifact to someone who wants to show it dead.”
The message arrived: a single image pushed in the ether to a number that had been a friend for three decades. Doc’s thumb opened it. The trapezoid sat on a towel against a hotel lamp’s washed pool of light. At first it was glass and craft and the small lie of design. But the caption—two thousand years old; transparent aluminum—was what unclenched the last of his good humor.
Transparent aluminum was an engineering chimera; someone made the joke decades ago and he’d written a paper about it in the younger years when physics had the innocence of possibility. But the caption was a bone placed in the mouth of a hungry dog. For a second his eyes tracked the object like the screens that showed particle tracks—looking for clue-lines. The edges were too
clean. The etching along the base was not typical artisan scratch; it looked machine-cut in a way no ancient hand would make.
“Send me the raw,” he said. Braxton obliged: a dozen frames, a close-up in a different light.