To: s.gerkin.local7newsroom
Shauna,
We evolved to survive, not see the world as it truly is. That's the simplest explanation i can give you at this time. You may deduce more once you have finished reading my report, but for now it will suffice.
I was an engineer at the Very Large Hadron Collider, just outside of Chicago. Almost 150 miles of vacuum and magnets under my purview that need to be reasonably well-kept in order to peer deeper and deeper into the fabric of the cosmos.
I was on shift the day concern was raised over some of the findings. The raw data was fine enough, just what sensors spit out into their memory banks after every collision. The usual stuff. But once the data scientists took that data and constructed models out of it, looking at the shape and curvatures of the detritus left behind every colliding pinprick of mass and energy, I'm told a cold fear gripped the man who first laid eyes upon it, and he smashed his computer monitor against the ground. HDMI cables and power cords flailing around the room like whips flogging cattle, he didn't stop until every last screw was dislodged and sheared and scattered across the white tile floor
Clearly shocked at seeing what was normally a calm and well-adjusted man flying into a pure rage, the rest of the team were slow to get back to work, but once a replacement monitor was sourced from a storage room and the computer awoken from sleep mode, the second physicist to take a seat at the workstation processing the countless data captured like a fly in a spider's web froze stiff and refused to even respond to the concerned queries of her colleagues.
She just couldn't dare to move, to turn away, to even give herself away to whatever beastly thing had her gripped in its attention by muttering a single syllable.
Paramedics were called and shuffled rapidly down to the underground offices that operate this massive complex that sprawls under Kane and Du Page counties.
Atmospheric readings were taken to make sure there wasn't a gas leak, psychiatric tests were administered to the other colleagues to rule out the possibility of mass hysteria.
Nothing was definitively proven. The only sureity was that this one collision of many that occur every second in this collider had released some thing that activated fight, freeze, or flight.
The administrators at Fermilab called in what experts weren't already on site working. The data was doled out in parts, just to be sure, and the individual snapshots of this three dimensional web of decaying particles scattering in every possible direction, carrying with them the energy that for a single fraction of a fraction of a second made this one spot in the universe the most like the conditions of the Big Bang, were all individually deemed safe to look at. The problem came with the combination of the information. Two voxels of space were placed together in the software, then three. Eventually they had half the data filled in, the scrutineering eyes of the several scientists grew ever more skeptical as what appeared to be one of many collisions that run through the VLHC was forming from its constituent parts.
I was in the room for this part, sweeping up the shattered plastic shell of the former monitor and checking to make sure no other wiring was pulled from its sockets in the hardware's sudden excursion. That's when I glanced the screen, just out of the corner of my eye, and i felt something deep inside me churn, and i felt the overwhelming urge to turn away. I felt my muscles move on their own, like a whole-body reflex. I only stopped when i realized i was gasping for breath, sweat suddenly apparating on my forehead.
I was terrified. The most terrified I'd ever been in my life, and I suspect one of only three people that have ever felt that level of terror in the entirety of human history. The reflexive and primal nature of the reaction has led me to believe this is an ancient feeling, one shared not by our other hominid ancestors, but only experienced in the earliest life forms that were able to feel fear, compelled to use it as a means of survival.
Some psychiatric evaluations later, I was sent home ashamed. What could have let me fly off the handle that bad? Clearly it wasn't just in my head, but it clearly originated there.
That night, in my nightmares, I saw what can only be described as the ur-predator. It was formless and sly, black as night but it blended into the sunlit forest floor it chased me through. It was unlike any other creature I'd seen in biology books or in the most twisted of fiction. It lived in the gaps between light and dark, in the gaps between things. It was small, microscopic if it needed to be, and massive, dominating the landscape when it wanted to be. Its camouflage served to hide its description, but at the same time was noticeable in the uncanny ways. It patrolled in the unknown and prowled the margins of existence in whatever setting my subconscious made up to escape.
Out of the corner of my eye, on the piercing white computer screen, i saw its tendrils choking the bosons as even they tried to flee its presence. How it escaped the notice of the three physicists humming and hawing at the screen, I don't know.
The following Tuesday, after the long weekend, I heard the beast in the hushed gossip of the other physicists, in the unsure and unbelieving table conversation in the cafeteria. I saw its fangs in the concerned glances i received, i felt its gaze in the invisible area directly behind my head.
Sitting down with my tray in that cafeteria, with multiple sets of eyes on me, I got an email from an astrophysicist in New Zealand that had heard the news. Gossip travels faster than light, it seems. They mentioned their research into the peculiarities of dark matter on the cosmic scale, to mirror the peculiarities of the substance in the atomic scale that Fermilab interrogates. I was about to forward it to the other member of staff here that shares my forename, assuming it was a mistake, before I saw the phrase, "ur-predator."
They asked if I saw this dark being in the data, choking and compressing anything it came into contact with. The anomalies discovered in the newest data from the James Webb Space Telescope mimic the behaviors of slime mold, of ant colonies, of severed cephalopod tentacles grasping blindly for an anchor. If this observation of anomalies--found concentrated in the regions of space where dark matter was predicted to be most abundant--could be correlated with subatomic behaviors, the astrophysicist believes they had discovered the solution to the question plaguing physics.
Dark matter was strangling galaxies, herding their component stars into tighter and tighter revolutions around the galactic core beyond what the conservation of momentum would allow. Dark matter was tying together entire galaxy clusters beyond the scope of gravity itself. From the strained, twisted, fleeing lines on the data i glimpsed on the monitor, it was doing the same to the very stuff of matter. It was herding. It was chasing. It was hunting.
Dark matter refused to be detected, or even refused to interact with matter, because it didn't want to.
It was remaining out of sight, intelligently and deliberately.
And it was at this thought that I took my tray of untouched food, tossed it onto the disposal rack, and walked out of the VLHC complex for the last time.
The very drive of evolution is to survive. There's no recourse. There's no points for good behavior, or being the smartest. The only way through is to avoid the threat. Fight, freeze, flee. I choose flee.
I'm now in a boring office job, handling paper files and analog systems. The only displays in the entire building are seven-segment displays on old retro watches. I choose to reply to this email now only to perhaps serve as a warning to the rest of the scientific community in the wake of this discovery.
It is a breakthrough that will change our understanding of the universe, for the worse.
I hope now you can see why.
Your fellow survivor,
Dominic
