Dèjà Vous

A sudden attack of vertigo surged through her as she pushed open the huge glass doors which lead into to the reception area. The facility itself was far underground, up here all was business-like and serene. This was Jan’s first visit to the L.H.C. facility in Sweden, and though the vertigo was by now subsiding an awful sense “Déjà vu,” was with her. Like an ill-fated omen of the future. Everything she looked at seemed oddly familiar,
           ‘of course it is,’ She told herself ‘you’ve been looking at pictures of this place for years.’
           ‘Ah, if it isn’t doctor Janice Sowdon’ said a loud voice from behind. Jan jumped. It wasn’t the voice that made her jump, but the fact that on some deep level of her mind, she knew it was going to happen, the tone, volume, pitch and word order of the sentence was all filed away in her memory. She had never before met the owner of the voice; all of their communications had been via email. She didn’t even know what he looked like…
           ‘Oh god’ she thought as her subconscious again sent her a message ‘yes I do.’

           Eyes closed she turned towards the voice. In her mind, she could see him clearly, his hair slightly shaggy, his beard, once close cropped and neat, now showing a few days of un-kept growth. She opened her eyes and was disappointed to discover that she was absolutely and completely right, even down to the grease stain on his otherwise smart and neat lab coat.
           ‘We’ve been having difficulty fitting your device to the main ring’ he continued. ‘Hopefully you can help us finish the fitting before noon tomorrow, or we will lose our slot, but would you like to freshen up first?’ 

           He led her to the residential area handing her some keys as they reached, what was to be her home for the next few weeks
‘I’m due for lunch soon... would you like me to wait for you?’ He added as she opened the door.
She already knew before she had thought of her reply, that she would be quite surprised by the look of hurt which crossed his face, when she turned him down. Part of her wished to say things differently, to break this sudden onslaught of precognition. She was still thinking these things when she heard her own voice as if from afar replying.
‘no thank you doctor Cottis,’ She said ‘I’ll meet you in the lobby in one hour if that is acceptable’.
The expected brief look of pain and disappointment spread over his face, he quickly recovered and nodded
‘Of course.’ He said with a false cheeriness, turned and walked back the way they had come. 
           Jan walked into the small apartment and sat on the bed, flopping back onto it. Two subjects seemed to be struggling for dominance in her mind. In one train of thought she struggled with her state of perception.
           ‘I’m badly jet lagged,’ she thought ‘causing the left temporal lobe to be out of sync with the right. As a result, it feels like I’m seeing things I have already seen. Yes, that must be it.’ 
           In the other she considered Doctor Cottis. She was average looking, and so was he. But then to her so was everyone. To say she was A-Sexual wouldn’t be quite right. Though relationships were far down on her list of priorities, and not something she was good at. Everything about her put others at their dis-ease. Her body language and social skills were, well, shockingly bad. However, as a scientist she was well respected and tomorrow would be her crowning glory and culmination of twenty years study.
           Her thoughts returned to Doctor Cottis… Sam… he was brilliant, no match for Jan in her particular field; but easily her match in raw intelligence. He had a ‘jack of all trades’ attitude to physics. His joy was to look at the latest research and to do what he called ‘point out the bleeding obvious.’ That’s how they had been introduced. An early paper of Jan’s in which the foundations for the following day’s experiment were laid; had overlooked something so mind-numbingly obvious that nobody else had considered it. His note to her had surprised her in a way she didn’t think possible. Over the years, though they had only communicated via email, on some level Jan considered him one of the people she was closest to, and there were precious few of those.
           ‘Yes,’ she thought ‘he would be an excellent candidate for a relationship’. Briefly she wondered if she could catch up with him for lunch; before filing the thought away in a folder titled ‘silly’. Raising from the bed the busied herself with the shower.

           One hour and fifteen minutes later she stood, much refreshed, with Dr Cottis in the lift to the Large Hadron collider.
           ‘I... I hope I didn’t offend you earlier Doctor... err… Sam’ she said nervously ‘I would love to have lunch. Or… um… dinner? With you… sometime…’.
 
           Her Déjà vu was still with her and she knew he would smile and simply say ‘thank you’ and yet still she discovered a knot of fear in her stomach followed be a relief when he replied. The lift opened on the collider. Jan was well aware of its size and dimensions, but still the sight of this gigantic monument to scientific achievement caught her breath.
           ‘I envy you,’ said Sam whispered. ‘I remember when I first saw it, I would love to feel that wonder again.’
           The lift had deposited them near the titan detectors which measured and plotted the sub atomic debris caused by two streams of protons smashing into each other at; oh, so very close to the speed of light.
Now, between these awesome instruments lay a new one: Jan’s project. It was designed to split each proton stream into 16 smaller slightly faster streams which would collide at diverse angles to each other. This would, Jan hoped, create the mysterious and elusive particles called tachyons, some of which could theoretically travel faster than light, and even some postulated, backwards in time. Jan’s device had no detectors built into it. These were far underground, one in Italy and on the other side of the world in china.
           A younger technician explained that on the simulated runs, the magnetic coils in the device were affected by the huge coils around the main collider, causing almost all of the 32 combined streams to miss. Jan set to work, adjusting all of the electron magnets to do their job. Simulation after simulation was run. After each Jan made her adjustments until she was sure every stream would hit its target... Which was the space she now occupied. 
           ‘Go.’ she called out. She had of course meant for a final simulation. The technician in the control booth would swear blind that he had pressed the right button. But there would be no record and so he avoided prosecution. The whole thing was put down to stress and working 20 hours straight.
           By a billion to one chance, at an infinitesimal moment before he pressed whatever button he pressed. Every safeguard simultaneously failed. The door sensors showed shut due to an overcharge of static. The same burst seemed to affect the computers, the CCTV. It overloaded the control panels; and in the blink of an eye… Jan was gone.
           Nobody was ever able to satisfactorily explain where she went.
           The cause for the burst of energy was the matter of debate for some years. One popular theory had come from an almost unknown but well-respected scientist; he had speculated that as certain tachyons were believed to travel backwards in time, and as Jan’s experiment had been designed to create them, maybe she had succeeded.
           The theory was popular with the public, though most of the scientific community dismissed it out of hand. They were happy to discuss paradoxes as intellectual curiosities, but the idea that the surge which was responsible for the accident was caused by the accident that it caused. Well… it was clearly preposterous. But as for Jan?
           A sudden attack of vertigo surged through her as she pushed open the huge glass doors, which led into to the reception area…