“You mean a galaxy?” the Defense Secretary asked.

“No, Mr. Secretary, a universe. All the physics that make up a universe, which won’t be the same as this one, all the math, all the galaxies if they form. Theoretically.”

“That’s…” the Homeland Security director stopped and chuckled. “It isn’t insane, it’s the physics, right?”

“Yes, sir,” Weaver said, nodding. “The thing is they take really high levels of energy to form. CERN in Switzerland’s been working on them for forever and couldn’t get one. But the other thing is, there’s another theory that when it formed it might just… supercede this universe.”

“Supercede?” the president said. “As in replace?”

“More or less, Mr. President,” the physicist said. “That’s why I said: Not as bad as it might have been. We might not have even known anything happened, just all been gone. Moonshots to the Mona Lisa, gone as if we never existed. And anything or anyone else in the universe. Biggest argument against that happening is that it hasn’t and something, somewhere in this big wide universe must have made a Higgs boson before.”

“I see,” the President said.

“Or even, and I think we might be onto something here, open a hole into another universe. You see, they don’t last for long, even if you make one. Now, within the universe, it’s all the time of the universe which might be, well, the whole thing. In the couple of nanoseconds they exist in this universe, in that universe they’d have the Big Bang, us making the universe so to speak, universal cooling, star formation, planet formation, the formation of life, contraction and then erasure. Billions and billions of years in that universe compressed to less time than it takes a computer to calculate two plus two in this universe. I know you’re a God fearing man, Mr. President, but with Higgs boson theory, God might have been Ray Chen pushing a button as he said: ‘Let’s see what happens.’ ”