SERN Large Hadron Collider#
| Operator | SERN |
| Location | Beneath the Franco-Swiss border, near SERN headquarters |
| Circumference | 26.7 km |
| Beam energy | 6.8 TeV per beam (nominal) |
| Public purpose | High-energy particle physics |
| Actual additional purpose | Kerr black hole micro-generation ("Z Program") |
| Key byproduct | Sustained micro black holes for temporal experiments |
| Archive encoding | Legacy IBN interchange format |
| Decodable by | IBN 5100 only |
| First jellification report | Filed 1973 (retro-archived) |
| Relevance to the lab | D-Mail interception; Z Program discovery |
The SERN Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest particle accelerator and, according to archives no one was supposed to read, the engine of a decades-long covert research program into time travel. Its public output is respectable physics. Its private output — filed under the internal designation Z Program — is a body of experimental reports on using collider-generated micro black holes to send matter, and eventually people, into the past.
The Future Gadget Laboratory learned all of this the hard way: SERN noticed the lab's D-Mails first, and Daru's retaliatory dig through their network is what surfaced the Z Program at all. See Episode 04 through Episode 07.
The physics is disarmingly straightforward on paper. A collision at sufficient energy density can, in principle, produce a microscopic black hole. An electrically charged, rotating micro black hole — a Kerr–Newman singularity — drags spacetime around itself, and a signal threaded past its ring singularity on the right trajectory exits the loop before it entered. SERN's contribution was not the theory but the engineering: keeping such an object stable for longer than $10^{-27}$ seconds, which the archives claim was first achieved in the early 2000s using what the reports call an "exotic matter lining" whose composition is redacted even in the decoded text. Hawking radiation should make this impossible; the reports acknowledge as much, then continue anyway.
The mass-energy bookkeeping is brutal. Compressing even one gram into its Schwarzschild radius demands energies of order
$$E = mc^2 = (10^{-3},\text{kg})(3\times10^8,\text{m/s})^2 = 9\times10^{13}\ \text{J}$$
which is why SERN needed the LHC — and why the lab's 40-joule PhoneWave achieving comparable results made SERN, in the words of one intercepted memo, "极度不安" (the archives switch languages when agitated). #lore
Z Program milestones (decoded)
- 1973 — "jellification" reports begin
- 1990s — human trials referenced obliquely
- 2000s — stable micro singularity claimed
- 2010 — lab's D-Mails detected
- Future dates — see Alpha convergence
The decoded reports include a series titled Human Is Dead, Mismatch — autopsy summaries of test subjects sent through the collider's temporal aperture. Every subject arrived at their target time spatially compressed, the archives' word for which translates as "jellified." Every date of death precedes the date of transmission. The lab stopped reading these aloud after the second one.
The failure mode is a mismatch between the transmitted mass-energy and the aperture's capacity: the LHC could send an object back in time, but not intact. It is precisely this wall that made SERN so interested in the lab's accidental success with information-only transmission — a D-Mail has no mass to jellify.
| Report series | Years | Subjects | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Z-062 "displacement" | 1973–1981 | Inorganic | Position drift, partial arrival |
| Z-143 "organic trials" | 1982–1994 | Biological samples | Total cellular collapse |
| Z-201 "HID/M" | 1995–2004 | Human (14 known) | 100% fatal, retro-dated |
| Z-288 "aperture II" | 2005– | Ongoing | Redacted |
SERN operates a worldwide monitoring net — nicknamed ECHELON's weirder sibling by Daru — that flags electromagnetic events consistent with temporal displacement. The lab's first D-Mails lit it up like a flare. The network triangulated the source to Akihabara within three transmissions, which is roughly when unfamiliar vans began parking outside the Braun Tube Workshop.
Phase-inverted microwave bursts with negative group delay — the signature of information arriving before it left. A time leap is much quieter than a D-Mail, one reason the lab survived long enough to matter.
Anything not travelling by electromagnetic carrier. The archives betray real anxiety about this blind spot, with one memo speculating about "memory-carrier transfer" a full decade before the lab stumbled into exactly that.
Z Program security is enforced by deniable field teams known as Rounders. Their standing orders regarding the lab escalated from surveillance to retrieval over the course of a single summer — the details belong to Episode 11 and the alpha-worldline page, not here.
The real collider that lends this one its silhouette is documented at Large Hadron Collider. Related pages: IBN 5100 (the only key to the archive), D-Mail, SERN headquarters, and the unwritten analysis page Z Program decoded index.1
Footnotes#
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The index exists as a text file on Daru's air-gapped laptop. He has opinions about putting it on a wiki, and the opinions are "no." ↩