The blond girl in the lab coat seemed way too enthusiastic in Sean’s opinion, as she droned through the scheduled part of their tour. Rachel - or was it Rebecca? - was their guide for the day at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island.

“...achieve temperatures in the excess of three hundred million electron volts… quark-gluon plasma…”

Sean zoned out, craning his neck to take in the cavernous concrete chamber or what little he could see of it, squeezed between his peers from the junior class of Cardiff High at Portsmouth, Connecticut. They stood on a narrow catwalk overlooking the monstrous particle detector as big as a house that massed over a thousand tons. Sean fidgeted, not having much to see or do. He knew that the bulk of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider was buried underground, too large to be clearly seen even if it wasn’t buried.

He winced as Mei-Ling’s voice shrilly pounded his right ear like a pile driver, as she excitedly fired questions at their tour guide. Something about how closely the quark-gluon fluid mimicked the conditions at the Big Bang. Mei-Ling’s elbow dug uncomfortably into Sean’s ribs as he moved his ear away from her as far as he could. Mei-Ling was the quintessential nerd, well on her way to acing perfect scores in every AP test. She was Sean’s best friend, his only friend actually. The girl had grown on him ever since she had defended him from random bullies in sixth grade. It had amused him to watch the confused expressions on his would-be tormentors, as a girl half their size threw rocks at them while calling them “odiferous misanthropes”.

Screw this, decided Sean. He wasn’t going to stand here and go deaf listening to Mei-Ling. They spent enough time hanging out together anyway, which tended to attract odd looks and gossip. Not that Sean cared about what others thought, especially since their speculation was dead wrong. Mei-Ling had confided in him, not long ago, that it wasn’t boys who caught her fancy.

“Watch it, dunce,” an immovable object hissed, as Sean pushed his way through the crowd, “you’re stepping on my loafers.”

Sean looked up scowling. Jason Fuller was among his least favorite classmates. The tall muscular jock was not only the obscenely rich heir of the Fuller family, but also had the nerve to be handsome. To add insult to injury, Jason was a better student than Sean. Not that Jason’s grades really mattered. Jason’s tycoon dad contributed generously to Harvard’s endowment and two admission spots were waiting there for Jason and his sister. Sean had diligently nurtured his resentment over the years, even if the Fuller scion usually left Sean alone as being unworthy of notice, which enraged Sean even more.

“Up yours, preppy,” retorted Sean, elbowing his way through the squad of cheerleaders who always seemed to hang around Jason. Tiffany glared at Sean, while Carmen gave Sean a disdainful sniff that clearly conveyed her opinion of him. Sean had the good grace to blush. Tiffany was generically pretty like a barbie-doll, while Carmen was more classically beautiful. Carmen and Sean were sometimes mistaken for siblings during field trips, on account of their shared ethnicity, which annoyed Sean to no end. He was sure the feeling was mutual.

“Going somewhere, Sean?” a sardonic voice whispered, “Why not hang around? You actually might learn something, you know. The least you can do, seeing that I took the trouble to plan this trip.”

There were snickers from Jason and his coterie of cheerleaders. Sean sighed. Mr. Turner, their physics teacher, had an almost fanatical zeal to impart the joy of physics to every high schooler whether they wanted it or not. The man practically radiated enthusiasm, looking like an excited robin jumping from foot to foot. A lanky frame and owlish glasses above a sharp beak-like nose completed the avian impression.

And Turner seemed to delight in singling out Sean’s academic shortcomings, apparently convinced that Sean had potential that could be unlocked with sufficient goading. Sean grimaced. It wasn’t that science was uninteresting. If anything, it was too interesting. So much so that Sean found himself jumping from topic to topic in distraction until he ended up forgetting whatever assignment he had set out to do. He had never been able to summon the focus to finish any particular chapter in his text books. Attention deficit, the counsellor had called it. Though Turner was a good teacher, even Sean had to admit.

“...succeeded in stabilizing the Planck scale wormhole…” Rachel’s commentary drifted over the crowd, rising in volume, “...link to entirely another universe… unprecedented potential for cosmological research… if you will please form a queue into the next room...”

What. Did she say wormhole? Sean perked up. It was the first he had heard of anyone creating a wormhole outside sci-fi novels devoured in middle school. The herd of high schoolers squeezed into a single file through a metal door at the end of the catwalk. This control room was smaller than the others they had passed before, with a cylindrical glass cage dominating the center. A tiny blue dot glowed with actinic intensity within the cage, apparently suspended in mid-air. There was a young man in identical lab coat standing by. Probably one of Rachel’s fellow postdocs. Or fellow lab-slaves, as Sean thought of them.

“Wait…” Sean frowned, “that’s it? That tiny dot?”

“The wormhole is atomic scale,” Rachel nodded brightly, “and has a fairly strong magnetic field, allowing us to extract it from the collider. The wormhole itself is too small to see of course, but there are enough exotic particles passing through to give off Cherenkov radiation.”

“Radiation?” someone asked in alarm, “is it safe here?”

“Quite safe,” Rachel smiled approvingly, “since there is almost no ionising radiation being emitted. The geiger counter will warn us of any danger. And the dosimeter badges you were given at the start of the tour will record the level you are exposed to. And we have the ability to dissipate the wormhole in any dangerous eventuality.”

Rachel turned to type in a series of commands at a console, and the glass cage retracted into the ceiling with a pneumatic hiss.

“Peter,” Rachel gestured at her lab partner, “the extractor, if you will.”

Peter held a shiny metallic pole that held a horseshoe magnet at one end. The postdoc had an henpecked expression that Sean found strangely familiar. The guy’s sulk reminded Sean of his dad. Sean’s dad wore the same harassed look whenever Sean’s mom yelled at her husband, which was quite often.

The prongs at the tip of the pole were carefully positioned to flank the glowing dot. Then Peter pulled back the pole and the wormhole came with it, snuggled suspended between the poles of the horseshoe. It was all very underwhelming to Sean.

“How do you know that the wormhole connects to another universe?” asked Mei-Ling suddenly, “Might it not be connecting to another part of our own universe?”

“An excellent question, Mei-Ling,” nodded Mr. Turner approvingly. Sean rolled his eyes. Of course Turner adored Mei-Ling. All the teachers did.

“We can use the particles passing through to estimate cosmological constants on the other side,“ Rachel answered looking pleased, “and they are subtly but measurably different. It’s either another cosmos or a very different space-time within our own cosmos.”

Peter clamped the glowing end of the pole just inside the protective railing that surrounded the romm’s center, so each student could get a good look as they filed past. When his turn came, Sean paused to squint at the intense glow of the wormhole point.

“Is it supposed to be doing that?” Sean frowned.

“Doing what?” Rachel raised an eyebrow.

“Getting brighter,” Sean pointed.

“I don’t think…” began Rachel, and then paused as the wormhole flared with the brightness of the noonday sun. A few students screamed.

Sean tried to blink in confusion. Fat red stars glowed balefully in the darkness of space, packed so tight that the night sky was awash with their light. Sean didn’t seem to be standing on anything, just floating in space. He was looking out through the other end of the wormhole, Sean guessed with sudden insight. The reddish firmament drifted slowly across his vision from the wormhole’s spin. Something vast and nebulous drifted into view, blocking the sky. Sean had seen enough Hubble photos to recognize the spiral galaxy below him. But this galaxy was dark and dim, lit only by red ambient light, all its stars burned to cinders. He was looking at a cosmos far past its prime, well beyond its Stelliferous Era....

Wait… If he was looking out from intergalactic space, then all the reddish stars weren’t individual stars at all… they were galaxies. But why would they still be glowing bright, when this galaxy was dead? Hadn’t the light bearing news of their passing reached his point of view, yet? They were probably billions of light years away. But why would they all be a uniform red? A second spike of insight skewered Sean’s mind. All those galaxies were indeed dead, but their dying heat had been blueshifted into visible light as this cosmos reversed its expansion, collapsing on itself. He was looking at a cosmos trillions of times older than his own, with even protons starting to decay into positronic noise. Sean shivered.

Motion in his field of vision. Swirls of glowing filaments arrayed in a lattice structure, that he hadn’t noticed due to the background light, extending forever out into the space between galaxies… more like crystalline faults engineered into space-time. They were twisting and coalescing into a whorl… there was no sense of scale out here in the desolation of intergalactic space, but Sean knew he was looking at a distortion larger than worlds within a structure that tiled the entire cosmos. The whorl was an eye as vast as a solar system and it was staring straight at him. Sean quailed, feeling like a microbe under a microscope. And despite the inhumanly alien scale of the intelligence he was looking at - for that was what it unmistakably was - Sean perceived a familiar emotion. Cold fury tinged with inhuman patience filtering into his mind. Well... Sean would be pissed too if he was trapped in a dead cosmos. The center of the Eye grew brighter as Sean’s mind was flayed apart under alien curiosity.

Rachel’s voice screamed far away as if from another universe, “...SHUT IT DOWN… SHUT IT DOWN…”

“...I DID… I switched off the magnetic field…”

“..use the proton injector… YOU FOOL…”

Sean experienced white-out again as his awareness faded…

END OF CHAPTER

Edits: 1. Fixed paragrapgh spacing & font size. 2.Corrected redshifted to blueshifted