8/24/22 — D E S T A B I L I Z E

The collapse didn’t happen as quickly as the math predicted it would. In fact, Scott had enough time to register the shock and absolute horror on all his coworkers’ faces before the chain reaction could really get going.

Yes he was new in this lab, but not new new. He’d written papers that had dozens of citations. He knew his way around a supercollider. Hell, he was on the team that discovered the goddamn Higgs in the first place.

Which is why nobody could believe it when he (absentmindedly, on auto-pilot after a long night of joyless binge-watching some commodity Netflix show because he had foolishly missed his sleep window and was now stuck in that liminal state of awakeness familiar to so many insomniacs, the sleepless state that had plagued him through high school, through undergrad at Stanford, through a PhD at MIT and into some of the world’s most prestigious research positions) introduced the wrong particle into the accelerator and destabilized the Higgs field.

His brain sent the impulse down his neural pathways to shake his head and flush his cheek in embarrassment, but before a single synapse was crossed the world as we know it blinked out of existence, all matter converted to energy in an instant, and the electrical impulse that would have carried his shame instead become part of the wave of nothingness that cascaded across the universe.