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When Sergei woke up, the Earth had vanished. He'd expected it - they'd all expected it - but to open his eyes and actually see nothing beneath them... That tore through his guts like a swallowed shot of liquid nitrogen. Jonathan and Eloise floated at the Space Station porthole, mute, haggard, as he pulled free of the cocoon.

"Five hours twenty-two minutes, Greenwich," she said, "April 2nd, 2019. Requiescat in pace."

"We turned off the radio a few hours before. It's stored in the computer," Jonathan said, facing the window.

Sergei floated to the wall, still numb from his drugged sleep. He had been awake for nearly two days before mission control medics insisted he get some rest. He hung upside down above the other astronauts.

The three looked out in silence as the stars spun past outside, a panoramic, pinwheeling show of the universe rotating around a pinpricked centre.

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Brian Wilcox sat behind a keyboard in the main observation bay at the LHC-ALICE, ten stories beneath the Franco-Swiss border.

Thought about the upcoming weekend, planned to spend it with a brace of pellet guns and a few six-packs of Budweiser - real Budweiser - out by the substation, keeping watch for the birds of the 19th Baguette Bomber Wing.

Three uncomprehending seconds after the warning lights screamed into his eyes, harsh red amping up the aggression to let him know the alarm meant catastrophe, he leapt to scram the beam.

Automated safety systems shunted magnets and triggered plasma-window force fields around the explosions, but he had the job of putting fist to red plastic button. Not an April Fool's Day joke, surely, nobody would be so terminally stupid.

It sounded like a freight train running into a church bell.

Rainbow-coloured detector traces and warning messages crashed across computer monitors beneath CERN. The clanging roar switched off, replaced by the ululating wail of fire alarms.

Three of the other experiment monitors stood up shouting behind him as news of the malfunction spread around the globe to tied-in universities and he puzzled over error messages.

"What happened?"

"Kill the magnet power!"

"Get atmosphere numbers on the tunnels!" Gretzky shouted. Brian blinked - perceptive. If the magnets had gone normal, the thermal energy dumped into the liquid helium coolant would have vaporised it.

The inert gas would have displaced the oxygen around the beam line. Two steps and a breath and you'd fall over unconscious and choking.