The Mandela Defect

It was a Thursday night, and Dr. Evelyn Saunders, a renowned research physicist specializing in quantum mechanics, was deep into her nightly routine of reviewing data from the latest particle collider experiments. The lab, bathed in the soft glow of overhead incandescent lights and computer monitors, resonated with the gentle hum of machines at work. Evelyn, by nature an introvert, found solace in this subterranean sanctuary, deep in the bowels of CERN and far removed from the chaos of the day shift with its noise and bustling people. Here, amidst equations and data streams, she could retreat from the outside world. In the quiet, isolated environment illuminated by the warm incandescent light, Evelyn thrived, preferring this solitude to the company of others.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC for short, was a 17-mile tracked loop built deep under the borders of France and Switzerland. Here, they smashed particles together at the speed of light as they sought to discover the fabric of reality. Her job, as a chief researcher and engineer, was both to assist in the varied experiments, as well as ensuring that the maintenance system ran without issue.

The LHC utilized redundant and overlapping maintenance systems. The outer core (which was accessible by a larger group of engineers and researchers) was called SpectraNet. It was web based, that provided an impressive dashboard that connected to the closed loop intranet system accessible to everyone involved with the LHC, both above and below ground, as well as certain governments, namely the European Union and the United States.

The inner core was called Chronocore, which handled tracking all of the critical and sensitive operations of the LHC such as the critical control systems (i.e., the superconducting magnet calibrations, particle beam alignments, and power grid management). It also provided the only access to the Quantum system ‘Mobius’, which was used exclusively for running complex simulations so as to be fine tuned for the actual tests in the collider.

Two hours into her night’s review, she rubbed her eyes and then looked back at the present data set on the screen. Something wasn’t right. Puzzled and intrigued, Evelyn dug deeper, her fingers flying over the keyboard with precision typing in a command she hoped might provide an answer to her growing discomfort. A few moments later, she traced the irregularities to a concealed set of experiment logs that seemed to indicate a series of unauthorized tests being conducted in Chronocore under the guise of maintenance exercise. The data logs had some kind of encryption on them, so there was no way to indicate as to how many there were at first glance, or who did it. But it was a clear indication that someone wanted to keep these tests hidden.

She looked at the data and could see why everyone else would have missed it. Whoever did this was very good at concealing it in the thousands of lines of code. Whoever did this probably weren’t factoring this one variable into their very complicated equation; she had a photographic memory and as the lead data quality control engineer for CERN, she was exceptional at her job.

Evelyn's heart raced as she easily bypassed the encryption, her mind racing with possibilities. Was this some new groundbreaking experiment the top brass wanted to keep secret, or was it something more malevolent? The anomalies suggested more than mere maintenance to which she was intimately familiar with; they indicated intentional manipulation of very particular data sets. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was the largest man-made machine on earth, and conducting experiments weren’t something that anyone could just do on a whim. The tests were scheduled years in advance, and they would have included hundreds of scientists and technicians from a variety of specialties all involved in ensuring everything went accordingly. Finding out who did this may be like looking for a needle in a stack of needles. Nevertheless, this appeared to be a system test using the same powerful computing network that managed the inner workings of the LHC. It appears, at least as far as she could tell now, that it wasn’t actually activated during one of the collider events. So, somebody is piggy backing off the system to run calculations, and then taking those configurations to another program to execute it?

She was confused as to the intent.

Several hours later, her mind was swimming with numbers and equations that would have turned the ordinary mind into a bowl of warm pudding. At last, she thought she figured out what was happening. If her assumption were correct, and they usually were, someone was attempting to tamper with the very fabric of time and space in the upcoming LHC test. It looked like it was an experiment set up to silently piggyback off the real experiment but releasing the results into a standalone system somewhere else. In other words, this would be a secondary test quietly running in the background, tapping into the vast amounts of energy being used, unbeknownst to those running the primary collider experiment. Judging by the data she has mined thus far; the implications were staggering. This wasn’t mere theoretical physics; it appeared to be an active adjustment of the human timeline, altering both past and future as if to artificially induce changes to our present reality.

Time manipulation was, at the present, of course, impossible. But leaning back in her chair, a thought dawned on her. Over the years, she’d recalled with perfect precision all the varied conversations she’d had on the subject with her peers. The one thing that stood out to her now was that the word impossible seemed to be used less and less each subsequent year. Now, these were mostly off-hand conversations at office parties and other non-official events, so people, even scientists, tended to be a little more open about their own hypotheses on time manipulation. But no scientist in his or her right mind would ever go on the record and say it publicly for fear of losing all credibility.

But scientists used to reject the possibility of other dimensions. And yet as time wore on and technology continued to advance at an exponential rate, one of the core missions for the LHC was changing to do just that, discover other dimensions. So if other dimensions or realities were a possibility, so too was the manipulation of time.

Perhaps time manipulation was possible, she thought, and someone has either figured out how to do it or is very close to that breakthrough. Could it be she thought, could someone has actually cracked the code on how to do this? Returning her gaze back to the test sets, the data was filled with heavy, complex equations that even ten years ago, wouldn’t have even been possible. But with the advancements in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, who knows. Maybe someone finally figured it out. She looked back at the computer screen and reviewed this latest batch. It read:

# Constants and parameters 

c = 3e8 # Speed of light in m/s 

G = 6.67430e-11 # Gravitational constant in m^3/kg/s^2 

h_bar = 1.0545718e-34 # Reduced Planck's constant in J*

# Lorentz factor for velocity time dilation M.E.

lorentz_factor = 1 / np.sqrt(1 - (velocity**2 / c**2))

# Gravitational time dilation factor M.E.

gravitational_factor = np.sqrt(1 - (2 G gravity / c**2))

return lorentz_factor * gravitational_factor

def create_M.E. ctc(mass, radius, energy):

She read the coded calculations again, but paused at the M.E. What does that stand for, she thought. She looked back over the hundreds of lines of code and noticed that the letters “M.E.” were found together at least seven other times. M.E. What could that stand for? The initials of the individual doing this? Unlikely. If this test was unsanctioned, no one with half a brain would put their initials anywhere near this. Just then, a random thought popped into her head.

What if M.E. stood for what the conspiracy theorists called the Mandela Effect?

Continued here.