The Collider has started.

CERN Zoo Incorporated is excited.

Follow it as it happens: http://twitter.com/cern

From 2004, I've been building the Weirdmonger Wheel as a zoo for all my stories (published and unpublished), including Secret Wheels - from base camp here:

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2007/03/secret-wheels.html

Someone later drew an image of it here:

http://www.ligotti.net/album.php?albumid=34&pictureid=259

Now I know what it really looks like - below!

It's been staring me in the face all this time.

To celebrate and reflect the Large Hadron Collider's momentous re-start this weekend - its fears and hopes, its retrocausal, infinitely retropausal implications - I reprint below my short story 'When I Was An Old Man', first written in the early Nineties and first published appropriately in ZEST magazine in 1998.  You can also hear me read it aloud here: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80559/n/VN650086_WMA

I am not obsessed with the LHC, but the LHC has become obsessed with me - following the publication, last June, of CERN ZOO. This is not solipsism on my part, but possible diversionary tactics to avoid the world's visit to Switzerland for assisted peace-making with itself before final closure.  Or maybe it's to make that visit more likely, more necessary, more as if it-has-happened-already.

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WHEN I WAS AN OLD MAN 

I recalled a time when ordinary people were able to build their own inventions from scratch, like that wondrous Great Drill.  Whilst the ramp had looked like a giant youthful Meccano model, it did bear the weight of the Drill, a mighty monster of metal which glinted in the setting and rising suns.  This was to be home—for me, my family and friends together with a single stranger—lasting at least an optimum length of time. 

          The bodywork of the Drill sloped towards the ground upon the ramp and creaked like a regular clock, each tick representing a separate strain on its rivets.  It could be measured in hundreds of metres, and even thousands, widening out towards the top, tapering down to the deeply spiralled Bit which was poised half a centimetre above the desert floor.  The Bit spun gently as the powerful engine above in the main body took light revving exercises and clambering labourers leaned from the gantries to squirt huge gouts of black sludge into the moving parts.  As the sun rose—blinding off the shiny areas of the mighty contraption—the Bit spun harder; then I, being the project leader, pressed a button which I knew was the real starter-switch, all the other switches built into the pilot's console being just for show.

          Years of arranging—poring over incomprehensible charts of futuristic engineering—debating the ways and whyfores of the avenues towards which it might lead me—vicariously enjoying the false start romances which alternated like misfiring currents between members of the crew—carefully monitoring my own sanity—yes, after all these things, surely the day had arrived.  I got to get there.  Really got to. 

          A futuristic Noah's Ark, yes, but one with no need to take to the open skies, as had been predicted.  It was to be home for humanity's hope not as the Lark Ascending but, in darker moments of delving doubt, more a Lurk Descending.   

          The lady was younger than myself, although we both dreamed independently that we had once been the same age—separate dreams that neither could admit to the other.  She had peach-blossom cheeks and a name she kept hidden, making me call her by all manner of endearments.  She played on my good nature and my deep desire for a sex partner (even at my advanced years).  She stood beside me as I pressed the starter switch.

          The ignition turned the mighty engines, one sparking off another, until the Bit spun so fast it was just one among many scintillating shafts of the dawning sun.  The tip met the hard redness of the Surrey desert, throwing up a wormcast fit to outshadow an Ancient Egyptian pyramid.  It eased into the undersoil, to where centuries of misbegotten seasons had sunk.  Then it ground into the first layer of bedrock, setting off a rain of white-hot splinters which cascaded past the windows of the Drill's cabins.

          My family and friends merely sat and stared, amid the juddering, as the darkness of Earth enveloped them.  No need for concern, I told them: the lights on board would not even flicker, since the relentless power of the Drill's torque would feedback and regenerate the cells.  I showed them where the fuse membranes were stored, so these could be replaced with just one turn of a screw and a snap-on-snap-off cassette.  The chosen stranger in the crew was less confident, for I did read fear in his eyes, behind the hope.  He was suspicious of why I had chosen him to ride at all.  Suspicious, indeed, of himself for having agreed to come on such a wayward mission.

          "On to the core!" I announced over the ship's tannoy.  "That's where we shall pitch our tents!" 

          She laughed.  She knew at the bottom of her heart that it was far too hot at the core for anything to exist, especially for our bodies of human parchment and the spontaneously combustible brains that our skulls freighted. 

          I had always felt that I possessed two brains: two lumps of grey matter with hot-rod lightning Z-tracking between.  I was not schizophrenic, but merely overburdened with thoughts and ideas which, by turns, conflicted and merged.  It was like being married to myself.  And as the mammoth Drill delved downwards between rocks which shifted amid the sluggish marrow of Earth's inner sky, I had to calm the nerves of everybody on board, needing to contain their fears concurrently while not allowing my own sanity to slip.  I boasted that we were the ultimate pioneers, ones that history had foretold would boldly bodily go to the outer reaches of the Universe, finding a new home to flee a terrible world.  But this great escape, I told them, was not up, but down.  The dire diseases, you see, were wilder, deeper, stronger in the places where the stars flowed. 

          They listened open-mouthed, but I soon saw that none of them had ever believed me.  No wonder they couldn't even trust themselves.

          How could I have even hoped that any of them possessed the nous for such concepts, when times were so backward?  There were other questions, too.  Indeed, I set them pub quizzes to pass the time along its rightful channel, tested them on knowledge and on historical perspective.  Until the stranger pointed out that we had forgotten to stow the books.  How were we meant to preserve the spirit of the world, the very posterity we hoped to further?  Old people were meant to have wisdom, weren't they.  Otherwise, they'd be young again. 

          I unconsciously bit my lip and indicated towards the carved slabs of map-crazed rocks which slid past the windows, but if I were meant to speak, to smooth away the puzzles on our brows, I could only find two words: "Trust me".

          Suddenly, we all heard an edge-toothed rasping and outlandish crunching noise, like the strongest tide upon loose shingle, when trying to claw a way back from drowning.  The Drill ground to a ricocheting halt, sending the passengers in all tilting directions, my lady collapsing on top of me with a screech which the Bit itself must have felt as it met an impermeable Hard Core.  Sparks in a molten silver river flowed past the portholes, as my family clambered across the steepening floor towards me, yearning for comfort and words of unalloyed wisdom.  But she, my lady, spoke first:  "The air is escaping, we can't breathe."

          Two brains merged—at this optimum point of time.  We gathered that the hull of the Drill had been stove in by the force of the jolt, and the carefully preserved life support systems were seeping out—not rapidly as they would have done in outer space, but gradually enough to warrant immediate donning of Q-shaped masks.  My mask was in the image of Ancient Pan, and my lady's in that of a birdlike creature with oversize beak.  The stranger’s mask was designed along the lines of my own face whilst the rest of the crew presented a motley array of fictitious heroes and villains, spinning on their rumps like dying bluebottles, all doped to the white-clogged gills. 

          Only two masks possessed the secret air supply instead of the snorts of dope.  But such supply was to last for a mere one minute—suitable for my lady and I to reach orgasm on this delving Love-Ark of the Covenant.  But, instead, we took the opportunity to speak a gratuitous message——

          "The Core will split asunder like a lanced boil and give forth Great Old Ones which will use their tentacles to crawl up the vertical chimney, a chimney we've gouged for them." 

          Seeing what these creatures used as faces slide past the Drill's cockpit, my two brains alternated endlessly between Death and Life.  Until, finally, even endlessness eventually ended and, after much debate, Death itself can write. 

          "Trust me," the stranger said with his last words—but he knew, in his heart, if not his two brains, that these words were trapped between the hard covers of a book, the ink-trod paper crumbling to choking dope-dust in his throat.  The lady tugged a washing-line of pure white oblong flags from under her skirt.  She smiled and held it out for him to help pull them free from endlessness.  They were the virgin pages for a book which became banknotes for invisible money, most blank but some bearing the head of Charles Dickens in the corner.  A few even were denominated.

          One eye, I somehow know, weeps an old man's tears; the other sparkles like a child's.  Got to get there.  Really got to.  Right to the core of dreams. 

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MORE RECENT FANBLADE FABLES HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-fanblade-fables.html

IMMORTALITY TAKES ON A NEW ACHIEVABILITY: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2009/11/immortality-takes-on-new-achievability.html

WEIRDMONGER WHEEL COLLIDER: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/weirdmonger_wheel_collider.htm

Enid Blyton was *the* major force in my reading life in the Fifties. And apparently she still sells 8 million books a year. She wrote 750 books.
The excellent TV drama last night on BBC4 with Helena Bonham-Carter was very provocative about her life. A case study in the Intentional Fallacy and Nemonymity, I feel.

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“'Secret Way!' said Anne, her eyes shining. ‘Oh, I hope it’s that! Secret Way! How exciting. What sort of secret way would it be, Julian?’
‘How do I know, Anne, silly?’ said Julian. ‘I don’t even know that the words are meant to mean “Secret Way.” It’s really a guess on my part.’”
-- Enid Blyton (Five Go Adventuring Again).

QUOTED in the famous "NEMONYMOUS FIVE"

In today’s TIMES newspaper (17 Nov 09) there is an article about the Cerne Abbas chalk giant (liberally featured in the ‘Cern Zoo’ book) and its oft mis-orthographised ‘hadron’.  ‘Hadron’ is Greek for ‘stout or thick’.

The article debates the identity of the original creator of the giant and Lord Holles is proposed: “One resident who may have been responsible ... Denzil Holles, a characterful MP who fought for the Parliamentarians but was a Royalist at heart and who occupied the house from 1642-66.”

The ‘house’ in question is the Abbey of Cernes “transformed into a country mansion in the mid-16th century after the Dissolution of the Monasteries”. 

That Dissolution was possibly history’s first Collider...

A fanblade ferris-wheel laying waste across the land.

Holles held Cromwell in contempt. A joke’s butt of the giant?

The giant was covered up during the war for fear of the Luftwaffe navigating by his bright outline.

The question is how many Holles makes a single Black Holle?

The retro-causal theme of Cern Zoo has, in many ways, been taken over by the later real history of the Large Hadron Collider as reported in the world’s various media during recent days and weeks.  The bird with the beget bread in its beak now leading us, two by two, towards Nemo's Ark. The respected scientists who seriously proposed that the Collider was sabotaging itself from the future. Just symbols, perhaps, but they have given a new dimension that could not have been foreseen when initiating the Nemonymous ‘win immortality’ competition all those months ago: HERE

This unique competition is still open until 31 December 2009. And all its implications have yet to be played out while, even as we speak, new dimensions of the Cern Zoo open up day by day in parallel with real events.

It is not beyond the realms of imagination that the prize to be won now is not simply a fabricated, semi-laughable version of immortality, not simply a gimmick of publicity to underpin a ‘guess-the-author’ competition, but soon to become an immortality that is achievable.  A fictionhead.  Dr Who’s own water-park of forever. A flashy FlashForward.

After all, Cern Zoo was originally a near anagram of the previous Cone Zero and Zencore books, but it then beget from itself a hindsight destiny when a real professor duly gave a lecture entitled ‘Visit to the Cern Zoo’ on 4 February 1995:  as indicated HERE.

By special permission of this outstanding artist:

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SIX PAINTINGS BY

DAVID WELHAM © 2009

Post-Collider version of sixth painting above: HERE

     

Cave Art is supposed to be pre-technological, yet when I entered the underground system beneath the Abbas Chalk Mines as a producer for a TV programme on popular aesthetics, I was astonished nobody had noticed a scratched image in a dark corner that only the strong camera lights (needed for such a venture) could sufficiently illuminate for me to see what I could only describe as a modern domestic cooling-fan complete with electric flex.

Of course, it only looked like one. On closer scrutiny, I could see it was just an accident of chance shadow and my imagination that made the 'whole' from the bits and pieces of expertly dated caveman art. Abstractions as well as cunning representations.

The flex was indeed a queue of what appeared to be animals – two by two – just made out with a magnifying glass. How the cavemen had had the wherewithal to create such precise down-sized figures – with just a stone implement upon a rock wall and in utter darkness – was quite beyond me. 

We were the first TV crew allowed on-site and I had yet to meet the head curator of the Abbas underground system.  His girl assistant had led us down – more concerned with her love life, no doubt, than what she was showing us.

Indeed, it appeared she, too, was surprised by what the TV lights and magnifying-glass revealed.

“They are like lemmings slowly heading towards some vast spinning-contraption,” I said.

The adverb ‘slowly’ seemed an odd choice of word in the circumstances, I guess, but I am not a scientist.  I am an entertainer and reporter, and sometimes the two became far too close even for my comfort.

Eventually the programme was made. On my instructions, we did not feature the mysterious Lilliputian zoo creatures heading towards their own collision with Fate.  It was a great success.  One does need to balance truth with secrecy.  The showing of the bizarre interesting bits in the corner would have undermined the whole Abbas project, even if those bizarre bits were just as real as anything else we showed. In fact, I later suspected that the only genuine caveman art in the Abbas system was that depicting the zoo animals and their fate while the remaining more believably ordinary images shown on our TV show had earlier been completely fabricated.

Who says crime doesn’t pay?  The crime of concealing bizarre truths in favour of boring fabrications.

I wonder how many other projects, artistic or scientific, are dogged by similar considerations.  It makes one wonder.  I only report this here for my wife to post on the internet when I am gone. It seems right somehow bearing in mind where we first met.

You see, the flex had no plug.

 From here: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=33848&styleid=35#post33848

Re: Is the Internet something one should resist or embrace?

I've been giving this much thought. It is very wise.

I tend to use the internet for expressing my fiction in a public way.... and philosophising about all manner of life's angles, original (I hope) and/or traditional.
Hadronic and/or Elizabeth-Bowenesque. Ligottian and/or Rhys-Hughesian. And/or...

This is tied up with a burning creativity (good or bad) and an ambition (but I'm not sure about the nature or goal of that ambition).

I am proud to present a 'Fanblade Fable' by Bob Lock who says he was inspired by my own Cern Zoo - Fanblade Fables, but in what I deem to be an otherwise original and hadron-provoking fashion.  Thanks to Bob.

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The 90^th Intervention Of Natural Webster

© Bob Lock (2009) - First published here today.