Dateline

La Flèche, T plus 21 hours, 10 minutes

On the Rhumb Line, 149 degrees West

His head was hurting. He pressed his thumbs into his eyes and massaged them, hands together like he was praying. Perhaps he was. For the last hour, Kelly had subjected him to an intense and detailed discourse in quantum mechanics that pushed his knowledge of physics beyond its limit.

"Let me see if I've got this straight. The detectors at CERN got a good look at the phenomenon as it passed, and you got all the data. And in that data, you've discovered that whatever it is, it has purpose, and is talking back to whoever's sending it. Right so far?"

Kelly nodded once. "Yes. ATLAS and beauty went ape-shit at midnight. More exotic particles were recorded in a hundred nanoseconds than would be seen if they ran the collider for a hundred years, twenty-four hours a day."

"But ... you've only had the raw data feed. Nothing's been analysed, yet you say we can communicate with whoever is sending it? How?"

"That part was obvious. The ATLAS experiment, for example. One of it's aims was to find the existence of microscopic black holes; things that lead in theory, to other dimensions. There's no analysis needed to spot them, they simply appear as tracks on the instruments traces with particular characteristics. When the phenomenon went over, there were millions of them. I can't begin to imagine the amount of energy being used to create them across half the circumference of the globe, onto the through the earth's crust."

"Okay. What else?"

The light; the golden hue. Large numbers of quarks were seen by beauty, This is really my best assessment, but given the huge numbers of sub-atomic particles thrown about by the phenomenon, I'll bet some of them were new to science. Perhaps a a lot of them were dark matter. But I think the light given out by the phenomenon relates to photons, and there's something coherent about it. I'll swear its information. Literally, trillions trillions of terabytes of information being transmitted somewhere by this thing. Probably through the wormholes and maybe combined with some form of quantum entanglement to send the data over long distances instantaneously."

Able didn't argue, though he thought this a stretch of imagination beyond even what he was capable of. A realisation of what Kelly was saying made him feel slightly ill. "And the information it's sending is..."

"People. It deconstructs people, and sends their information, their map, if you like, somewhere else."

"Why the hell would they do that?"

"That's the wrong question. The one you should be asking is, 'where are they taking everyone.'"

It took several moments for that to sink in, too. "Jesus. It's a teleporter?"

"If you like. At least, I think so."

"Where too? And more to the point, why?" 

"Invasion, maybe. Rid the world of the dominant species and walk in unopposed. But that doesn't make sense."

"It doesn't?"

"Why save all the information? Why not just kill and destroy all human life? I think everything is being recorded, right down to the minutest detail, so that it can be reconstructed later on."

La Flèche bumped through some turbulence, causing the empty bottles on the small table between them to clink together. "Reconstruct? Put back together, like in Star Trek?"

"Yes, like Star Trek."

"So," said Able. "Put that to one side. You said we can communicate, but someone's got to die to do it? Explain."

"Simple really. One of us can take a message to them, just by allowing ourselves to be swept into the beam. We can ask them why, argue the case for the human race if you like. Tell them there are survivors who can start a dialogue."

"This is crazy, Kelly. Why would they listen to us? They didn't bother to contact us before doing this. It certainly looks like a prelude to invasion to me!"

"Who knows how they think? To them, this could be a perfectly sensible, benign thing to do. If you have technology this powerful, you really think they play games of conquest? No-one else on the planet knows this information, Able. Everyone went into the phenomenon thinking they were going to die. Their last thoughts of their loved ones, or bitter regrets, or hate and anger. No-one went in thinking of saying 'hello, who are you and what do you want?' It's worth a try."

Able looked at his chief science officer, unconvinced. But deep down, he recognised the truth of her words. And the chances of survival were slim anyway. 

"There's another thing, Able. The person going needs to understand all this, in outline at least. We can't send just anyone in with a note. It has to be up here." Kelly tapped her forehead to emphasise the point. "And that means it's either got to be me, or you.