Time Crystal Chapter 1: ATLAS Control Room

[Phil Brown]

"Excuse me. Would you mind please? I'm trying to...Thank you."
Danny Kissov turned to see Seline Soubise push through the dozen visitors crowding around the Run Co-ordinator's wide curving desk. She threw her coat over the back of a chair and flopped down beside him. "God, do we have to work with an audience?"

"Some of them have been here all night," he said.
"What? You mean you've let them stand up all night? Even the old ones? They'll be getting thrombosis and dying on us! No wonder they look worn out, poor things. How's ATLAS coming along?"
"It's not my job to get chairs for visitors. It was hard enough getting all the sub-systems up and running. We had trouble with the pixel detector and the transition radiation tracker. The details are in the log but I haven't--"
"What kind of trouble?"
"The pixel software version was out of date and two of the TRT control parameters were set wrong. Nothing serious but it took a while to figure out what the problems were so I haven't quite finished bringing up the muon spectrometer. I was just about to check that data was flowing across the Grid. Do you want to--"
"Sure, I'll take over now. You go and have breakfast," she said opening a Trigger and Data Acquisition System monitor window. "How did Maria get on at the clinic?"
With a stab of guilt Danny realised he had forgotten about the clinic. He glanced at his watch. 9:37. But it was Maria's fault, he told himself. She was supposed to phone him when she came out of the clinic at nine. "I'm just going to phone her," he said as if he had been planning it all along. "Back in a moment." He pushed his way through the crowd to the window, flipped open his mobile phone, pressed a button and waited for the connection.

"Beep. Beep. Click. Hello, this is Maria Kissov. Sorry I can't take your call--"
Danny snapped the phone closed and held it for a moment, moist in his sticky palm, staring through the opaque window at the huge round bulge of the Globe looming dark against the pale spring sky. She should be in there by now. Was there something wrong? He instantly felt guilty that he hadn't gone with her to the clinic and he began to list the reasons he had to work last night. The first run of the season was always the most difficult shift of the year. Many scientists had used the winter shut-down to repair and upgrade their sub-systems. This always created some problems and Danny was the best one to solve these. Danny was the most experienced Run Co-ordinator, Jose Rodriguez was off with the flu and Seline had never led a start-up. Maria had told him the baby was fine and there was no reason for him to go. But even after he had reassured himself he had been right to lead the start-up shift, still he felt guilty. Where was Maria now? She had been due to open the Globe at 9:30. He went back to speak to Seline. "I'm going over to the Globe to see if Maria's come back from the clinic. Call me if you need me."
"Okay, Danny, but I'm sure I'll cope. You've done all the hard work. But thanks."
He was half way to the door when a computer generated voice echoed around the Control Room:
"Level One Alarm. Data Storage System Overflow."
Danny slowed his pace as the computerized voice repeated the warning in French. Level one alarms were minor faults but he had never had one of these data storage system overflows before. He wasn't even sure exactly what might have caused it. When he reached the door he paused and looked back. The visitors were leaning over Seline's desk and she was frowning at her screens obviously unsure of what to do. When she saw Danny watching her she shook her head and raised both hands, palms upwards. Danny walked quickly back to her desk.
"Just tell me where the procedure is for handling this type of error," Seline said as he sat beside her. "Then you can go and see Maria."
"Well you could start by acknowledging the error. That voice is driving me mad."
She clicked on the Acknowledge button on the Detector Control System Alarm Screen and the computer's voice fell silent.
"I've never seen one of these alarms before," Danny said. "Just do a search in the DCS Operations Layer of the ATLAS TWiki."
Seline brought up a web browser, navigated to the Twiki and clicked on 'Search' while Danny read the top line of the list of alarms filling the screen.

Status: Warning
Description: ATLDAQSFO
Alarm text: Disc Storage Overflow
Direction: CAME
Ack: Yes
Time: 2012/04/08 09:38:41.50.902
Trend -

"We must be getting a lot of events," he said. "The Sub-Farm Output computers are swamped."
"I can see that, Danny. Okay, I've found the procedure. I can handle it now."
He sat watching her. This was the first time Seline had ever led a shift. She had to prove she could handle this on her own but it wouldn't harm to hang around and give her a hint or two if she needed it. Danny wanted her to be a success in the job. She had only been promoted to Run Co-ordinator during the winter as a result of his recommendation. "How many events are we getting?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said. "Wait a minute." She typed an Athena command into a console window.

MyTTree->Draw("All", EventsSince(Today(090000)));

A histogram flashed up and she peered at it. "We're getting over two thousand events per second," she said.
"Good God!" Danny said. "Two thousand? That's ten times more than normal. They can't be real events. What kind are they supposed to be?" His heart began to thump with excitement. He had been working on ATLAS for five years but had never come across anything like this.
Seline clicked on a menu above the histogram and it changed into a single bar. "They're all missing energy events," she said.
Danny looked at her incredulously. "ALL of them?" he said. "That's not possible. There's obviously a fault with one of the sub-detectors. No way could there be that many real events, let alone all the same type. And missing energy events too, well..." This name always annoyed him. Energy wasn't really missing from these events, it was just that there were some particles that ATLAS couldn't detect, neutrinos for example. He wiped his hands on his trouser legs as he watched her trying to analyse which sub-detector was giving rise to these events, excitement and worry about ATLAS now mixing with his guilt about Maria. There was no way he could leave now.
"Dr. Riley," Seline called. A little balding man in the bottom corner of the ATLAS Control Room looked round. "Would you mind coming over here for a moment, please?"
"Is it the muon spectrometer?" Danny asked as they waited for Michael Riley to walk round to her desk. Michael wasn't a visitor. He was one of the scientists based in CERN, responsible for his sub-detector, the muon spectrometer.
"You still here?" she said. "I thought you were going to see Maria?"
"I'll stay for a minute or two. I'm curious. I've never seen anything quite like this before. It's probably an error but if these events are real it would mean ATLAS had found another new particle. Imagine how I would have felt tomorrow if I'd gone and missed all the fun!"
The crowd parted and the little Irish scientist walked through. "We're getting thousands of missing energy events from the muon spectrometer," Seline said, "and they're all in sector four."

"I know," Michael said slowly.
"It could be some new sort of particle," Danny said.
Michael looked at him. "I think, it is a little early, to jump to that, type of conclusion," he said in his usual hesitant, careful way. The way he spoke, as if he weighed and measured every word before he permitted himself to utter it, was just one of the odd things about Michael Riley. "You have to remember, that all the drift tubes, in sector four, were replaced, during the winter shut-down. I was just going, down to the, electronics room, to check, whether it was, a network fault."
That made sense. Michael was odd but he wasn't stupid. It was easy to do something trivial such as leaving a network cable disconnected after a major piece of work.
"It could be a trigger fault too," Seline said. "You'll need someone to help." She picked up the phone.
"I'll go," Danny said. There was something about Michael Riley he didn't trust. He needed watching and this was too important to get wrong.
"Are you sure?" Seline asked.
"No problem," Danny said.
"I thought you wanted to see Maria?"
"I'll call her on the way down."
Seline's eyes met his and she smiled then stood up. "Ladies and Gentlemen," she said. The ten scientists stopped work and turned towards her. Some of them stood so they could see her over the tops of their monitors. "You heard the alarm a minute ago. We're getting two thousand missing energy events per second in sector four of the muon spectrometer. It's probably a fault so we're going to check it out, but I'll have to stop beam intersection while we do the investigation."
There were cries of disappointment from the visitors. They had come from all over the world to watch the various parts of the detector they had built coming on-line. Back home there were hundreds of other scientists huddled over their computers in laboratories and universities examining the data flowing to them across the Grid.
"I'm sorry. We don't have any choice," she said calmly. "All the data we're taking could be totally erroneous. There's no point wasting beam particles or storing worthless data. We need to check the hardware first."
They began to telephone and email their colleagues to let them know what was going on.
"Excuse me," the little Irish scientist said. "Do you think, I could have, a word with you, about this?"
Seline blinked at Michael. "What's the problem?"
"I would like, you to leave, the beams, intersecting."
"Why?" Danny asked. The two beams were still circulating in the huge LHC accelerator, but there was no point in making them collide inside ATLAS until this problem--
"As you know, the muon spectrometer, is notoriously difficult, to calibrate. I have to collect, a hundred million, events a day, just to calibrate, the tubes."
Danny and Seline both nodded.
"I ran, a calibration, yesterday, but only using, cosmic rays," Michael said. "That was not, very accurate, of course, since it did not provide, enough data. I have not yet, completed the calibration, this morning. This problem might be, a calibration fault."
The two Run Co-ordinators looked at each other.
"I suppose we need to eliminate calibration faults as well as hardware or trigger faults," Seline said.
Danny nodded. "Better leave the beams intersecting then," he said.
"I'll just shut down, my systems," Michael said with a smile and walked back to his desk.

"He's an odd case," Seline whispered so the visitors wouldn't hear. "Which planet do you think he comes from?"
"I'm not sure," Danny said, "but I hope those aliens are friendly."

 

[Erin99]

Well, I don't know what type of critique you're looking for, so I'll just point out a couple of things I noticed.

Michael's speech (the multiple commas) seemed a little too distracting for my taste. I don't read SF books, however, so I'm not sure if you've seen others do it. Just a thought, but perhaps you could use elipsis instead? If not, you could always show his hesitency by writing something like "He paused for a moment before speaking", that way we can see he's thought about his answer before saying it.

Also -- and, as said, I'm not a SF reader -- a lot of this chapter seemed very technical to me ("DCS Operations Layer of the ATLAS", for example). I know these terms are most likely made-up, but do you need to use so many technical terms in the beginning? Then again, for all I know that could be normal for SF books!

A final point I noticed: This line, "Beep. Beep. Click. Hello, this is Maria Kissov. Sorry I can't take your call--", could you put the actions in italics and seperate them from the speech? It just seems very strange to include the onomatopoea in with the rest of the text.

Example:

Beep! Beep! Click. "Hello, this is Maria Kissov. Sorry I can't take your call--"



Sorry I can't give you a better crit re the story. Perhaps someone who's better qualified might help you there. But, since you had no replies, I thought I'd write something.

 

[Phil Brown]

Hi Leisha,
Thanks for your time and interest, even if it was a 'sympathy vote'.

Well, I don't know what type of critique you're looking for, so I'll just point out a couple of things I noticed.

Michael's speech (the multiple commas) seemed a little too distracting for my taste. I don't read SF books, however, so I'm not sure if you've seen others do it. Just a thought, but perhaps you could use elipsis instead? If not, you could always show his hesitency by writing something like "He paused for a moment before speaking", that way we can see he's thought about his answer before saying it.

Michael's speech is intentionally odd. He's a difficult character to understand.

Also -- and, as said, I'm not a SF reader -- a lot of this chapter seemed very technical to me ("DCS Operations Layer of the ATLAS", for example). I know these terms are most likely made-up, but do you need to use so many technical terms in the beginning? Then again, for all I know that could be normal for SF books!

Almost none of this stuff is made up. I've spent months carefully researching it to make it as accurate as possible. The reader needs to feel that she's there, watching them work, even if she doesn't understand it all. How could she, when she's not been trained? But somehow I've got to get her to believe and suspend her disbelief.

A final point I noticed: This line, "Beep. Beep. Click. Hello, this is Maria Kissov. Sorry I can't take your call--", could you put the actions in italics and seperate them from the speech? It just seems very strange to include the onomatopoea in with the rest of the text.

Example:

Beep! Beep! Click. "Hello, this is Maria Kissov. Sorry I can't take your call--"

That's an interesting point. I've changed it. Thanks very much.

Sorry I can't give you a better crit re the story. Perhaps someone who's better qualified might help you there. But, since you had no replies, I thought I'd write something.

I'm aiming at the general reader so your feeling that the stuff is too technical is worrying. I wonder what else I can do to convey credibility?

Thanks once again. Wonder what you thought of the pics?

 

[Phil Brown]

Maybe there should be a preface describing ATLAS and the LHC (this is currently described to the characters in chapter 5) and emphasising that the details described of the story are true?

 

[Erin99]

Michael's speech is intentionally odd. He's a difficult character to understand.

He's like me then.

Almost none of this stuff is made up. I've spent months carefully researching it to make it as accurate as possible.

Very good on the research then! It did sound realistic, but science was never my strong point.

In answer to your "conveying credibility" question -- the answer is simple (I hope) . Perhaps you could lessen the scientific terms a little, so they're not so daunting to a general reader. How would you feel about that?

Then again, saying this, Chrispen will come along and probably tell you everything's fine (he understands science better than I do).



As to the pics, they're good. I wondered what program you used to create them, actually. I've used rendering software before -- house-designing programs, world-building ones, and a couple of others. Do you include them so the reader can visualise the setting? Because if that's the case, you don't necessarily need them. If it's just cos they're pretty, I'd keep them.

 

[Erin99]

Maybe there should be a preface describing ATLAS and the LHC (this is currently described to the characters in chapter 5) and emphasising that the details described of the story are true?

That's a good way -- but you'd have to watch that you don't wander into omni POV, then suddenly switch to third person POV for the main part of the story.

 

[Phil Brown]

He's like me then.

Very good on the research then! It did sound realistic, but science was never my strong point.

In answer to your "conveying credibility" question -- the answer is simple (I hope) . Perhaps you could lessen the scientific terms a little, so they're not so daunting to a general reader. How would you feel about that?

I could, although none of this stuff is actually science. It's just engineering.
All this human stuff with Danny and Maria and Michael's personality are intended in part to carry the reader along, to engage her attention, the sugar that makes the techology slip down more easily.
I'll wait to see what others think about simplifying it. Maybe I should add a poll (if I can figure out how)?

Then again, saying this, Chrispen will come along and probably tell you everything's fine (he understands science better than I do).



As to the pics, they're good. I wondered what program you used to create them, actually. I've used rendering software before -- house-designing programs, world-building ones, and a couple of others. Do you include them so the reader can visualise the setting? Because if that's the case, you don't necessarily need them. If it's just cos they're pretty, I'd keep them.

The pics were made with Frameforge and I added them because I like them. I've actually done a lot of work producing a graphic version of the story, mainly because it helped me to visualise what was happening in the early days when I was learning how to plot. (I'm still learning but I'm not quite so hopeless as I was (I hope...)). Now I've got them I want to use them. For a graphic version of an earlier edition of the story see Episode 1: The Tunnel

Originally Posted by Phil Brown
Maybe there should be a preface describing ATLAS and the LHC (this is currently described to the characters in chapter 5) and emphasising that the details described of the story are true?

That's a good way -- but you'd have to watch that you don't wander into omni POV, then suddenly switch to third person POV for the main part of the story.

The preface would stand outside the story. I've always been opposed to them so far but if it helps the reader to know this stuff is mostly true it might help and I don't see any other way to tell her.

 

[Mandorin Anamor]

Hi there, of what I read its actually pretty good, (the graphics do the visualisation in my head justice btw). I notice that youve both been discussing the use of such technical engineering and software terms, and how they might put off a general reader. I just thought i might console you a little, I am an avid sci-fi reader, and that sort of thing generally encourages me to keep reading and attracts my attention. I find that the science and complexity of such thigns are part of what draw sci-fi fans to such literature. So yeah, sorry i didnt have time to do a proper critique, ill try and get back to it during the week.
Tim.

Great work from what little i read so far.

 

[Phil Brown]

Hi there, of what I read its actually pretty good, (the graphics do the visualisation in my head justice btw). I notice that youve both been discussing the use of such technical engineering and software terms, and how they might put off a general reader. I just thought i might console you a little, I am an avid sci-fi reader, and that sort of thing generally encourages me to keep reading and attracts my attention. I find that the science and complexity of such thigns are part of what draw sci-fi fans to such literature. So yeah, sorry i didnt have time to do a proper critique, ill try and get back to it during the week.
Tim.

Great work from what little i read so far.

Gee, thanks. That is very, very encouraging.

 

[chrispenycate]

staring through the opaque window at the huge round bulge of the Globe looming dark against the pale spring sky.

If the window were opaque he wouldn't be able to see the dome. And are they actually planning to put the ATLAS control room on the surface? CERN is such a subterranian place; everything interesting's at least thirty metres down.

and she was frowning at her screens obviously unsure of what to do.

comma after "screens"

"Good God!" Danny said. "Two thousand? That's ten times more than normal.

Only ten times? They've put a peak overload at a thousand percent? (not to mention that they're not going into buffer overload with that unless they're storing a lot of data about individual events, which they aren't, because they don't recognise them)(yes, I know, they earmark the bandwidth for events they do recognise, and put dozens of zeros in when ignorance is king)

"I'll call her on the way down."

if they've installed a mobile phone relay in the lift going down, that's probably your fault right there. The screening they do to get rid of all extraneous electric noise, then allow one of those overpowered harmonic spitters into the building (The guards look askance at me when I ring from the car park)

I don't have any difficulty wit the technology; Oh, I don't know what a muon spectrometer does, presumably separates mesons out by energy level, but it feels reasonable. I'm more worried about finding a web browser used as a search engine in the big data correlation region; rational, why reinvent the wheel, but does that mean they're running in Windows?
Please, if you're intending to wipe me, Geneva and the Pays de Gex off the map, don't let it be with a windows runtime error.

 

[Phil Brown]

Sorry for faulty format, can't get rid of it.

If the window were opaque he wouldn't be able to see the dome.
[\quote]
Excellent point. I used the wrong word! Thanks chrispenycate!

And are they actually planning to put the ATLAS control room on the surface? CERN is such a subterranian place; everything interesting's at least thirty metres down.

It is on the surface.

comma after "screens"

Okay boss.

Only ten times? They've put a peak overload at a thousand percent? (not to mention that they're not going into buffer overload with that unless they're storing a lot of data about individual events, which they aren't, because they don't recognise them)(yes, I know, they earmark the bandwidth for events they do recognise, and put dozens of zeros in when ignorance is king)

You could be right here, Chris. I'd ask the guys at CERN but they're getting fed up with my questions. Maybe I should say 100 times...

if they've installed a mobile phone relay in the lift going down, that's probably your fault right there. The screening they do to get rid of all extraneous electric noise, then allow one of those overpowered harmonic spitters into the building (The guards look askance at me when I ring from the car park)

There is a leaky antenna cable that means mobile phones and Fire and Rescue Service VHF radios work almost everywhere underground. This is explained later in the story.

I don't have any difficulty wit the technology; Oh, I don't know what a muon spectrometer does, presumably separates mesons out by energy level, but it feels reasonable. I'm more worried about finding a web browser used as a search engine in the big data correlation region; rational, why reinvent the wheel, but does that mean they're running in Windows?
Please, if you're intending to wipe me, Geneva and the Pays de Gex off the map, don't let it be with a windows runtime error.

They use the internet and a Twiki exactly as I describe. And Windows. And yes, you will be in severe trouble in Geneva in 2012, but then so will everyone on Earth not to mention the whole universe. This is a big disaster we're leading up to here...

Thanks for your help. Keep up the good work!

Phil

 

[Phil Brown]

That's a good way -- but you'd have to watch that you don't wander into omni POV, then suddenly switch to third person POV for the main part of the story.

My current idea is to include a set of maps showing the location of CERN, starting with a broad overview of Switzerland and zooming down to this one showing the main buildings mentioned in this volume.