A Felony of Birds by Harris Tobias	The Greer Agency by Harris Tobias	Assisted by Harris Tobias	Hold The Anchovies by Harris Tobias
Alien Fruit by Harris Tobias	Peaceful Intent--Stories of human/Alien Interaction by Harris Tobias	CHRONON--Time Travel by Harris Tobias	The Stang by Harris Tobias

The Collider

by Harris Tobias

                    THE COLLIDER


    When Zumak, the creator, wanted to make a universe for his children to play in, like any good parent he knew he had to first make it safe for the little ones.
    The first thing he did was lock away the Lokii, the evil demons who would eat his children and wreck his world. Zumak could see far into the future and knew that his children would grow intelligent and that someday they would develop technology. He saw too that that technology would tinker with the very fabric of reality, so he locked the Lokii up in a place where humans could never reach. A tiny place so small that it couldn’t even be measured. No matter how much humans played around with physics, the Lokii were safely out of reach in another dimension, a mathematical concept so bizarre it didn’t even figure in anyone’s calculations. The Lokii could bang all they wanted on the walls of our world but they could never break in. Zumak gestured and it was so. Unfortunately he miscalculated.
    
    In the collider control room Professor Handmaiden waited for the magnets to cool down and come on line. there were two thousand of them at even intervals around the thirty mile diameter ring. It was the biggest, most powerful collider ever built and promised to extend man’s knowledge into the nature of reality itself. Professor Handmaiden’s specialty was multi dimensional space, the possibility of dimensions beyond the four we know. It would take an immense amount of energy to pierce the very fabric but not since the big bang itself has a proton carried so much energy. When the two streams of particles collided, the resulting explosion should be enlightening. It was.
    
    At first the Lokii were stunned and blinded by the light streaming through the crack in their prison wall. When they realized that the door to their prison had been opened they did not hesitate, they shook off their ancient slumber and poured into the space between the worlds.The Lokii streamed through the tiny tear like all the demons of Hell which indeed was what they were.
    
     A first Professor Handmaiden felt a burning on his hands and an itch behind his eyes, there was a whiff of sulphur in the air. He expected great things from his experiment. He never expected the slobbering great thing that swallowed him in one crunching bite. His scream was lost in the screams of every living human in the lab, the city, and eventually the world. Then the Lokii went to work dismantling the physical apparatus of reality itself, and they didn’t stop at our tiny speck of a world, but went right on to ingest all of the limitless universe and the countless worlds it held.
    
    It was what Zumak feared. Damn Lokii. He heaved a weary sigh of cosmic proportions and turned out the light.
 

Read more stories by this author

A Felony of Birds by Harris Tobias	The Greer Agency by Harris Tobias	Assisted by Harris Tobias	Hold The Anchovies by Harris Tobias
Alien Fruit by Harris Tobias	Peaceful Intent--Stories of human/Alien Interaction by Harris Tobias	CHRONON--Time Travel by Harris Tobias	The Stang by Harris Tobias

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