Chapter 185: The Super Hadron Collider
Peter was stunned for a moment before realizing he was still sitting in an interrogation room at the precinct, having accidentally cursed out loud.
He quickly apologized. Then, sitting in front of a group of doctors and security officers, he spilled the entire story. He babbled about aliens, a parasitic entity named ’Black,’ and his body being forcibly hijacked.
He had truly had enough. He didn’t care about sounding crazy anymore and just let everything out. He had absolutely no intention of covering up for Black. They weren’t exactly best buddies!
The thing in his head was a literal alien parasite!
Fueled by his anger, Peter rambled on and on. By the end of his frantic confession, he actually felt a massive weight lift off his shoulders. An issue this massive should be handled by the Federation government, not shouldered by an unqualified nobody like him. Even if they ended up dissecting him for research, he had to speak up. He couldn’t care about the consequences anymore.
However, Peter was still clever enough to keep the truth about the room-temperature superconductor a complete secret. As far as he was concerned, *he* was the one who had invented it, not the alien. If that secret got out, his newfound reputation and status would be completely ruined!
The psychological experts who had been called in to observe were utterly stunned. Their immediate, unanimous thought was that this young man had completely lost his mind.
"Schizophrenia?"
"Severe dissociative identity disorder?!"
The victim, Mei, had already given her statement in the next room. When she heard what Peter was frantically claiming, she was speechless. How could Peter, who had always seemed like a perfectly normal, if somewhat lazy guy, suddenly go completely insane?
But thinking back on the incident, his mental state had indeed seemed incredibly disturbed. After all, a sane person wouldn’t shave a massive rectangular bald patch into their head and drop their pants in the middle of a public salon in broad daylight.
"Ms. Mei, under these circumstances, this doesn’t qualify as a criminal sexual assault. At most, it’s considered severe public sexual harassment," a uniformed officer explained to her. "According to the Federation’s public order regulations, it carries a penalty of 15 to 30 days in the detention center."
Mei was taken aback. She hadn’t actually intended to press formal charges and see Peter locked up in a cell.
Furthermore, Peter’s mental breakdown didn’t seem faked... he genuinely appeared to be suffering from a severe psychological crisis. She ultimately decided to drop the charges. She had only suffered a brief scare and hadn’t been physically harmed. She figured it wasn’t worth ruining the life of someone who was clearly mentally ill.
Assuming Peter was genuinely unwell, the psychiatric experts took over and began conducting an extensive battery of psychological evaluations on him.
"Should we inform the captain about this?" Marcus whispered to Austin outside the interrogation room.
Austin frowned, his mind racing with the political implications. Peter’s status was incredibly delicate; he was the celebrated genius who had just invented the room-temperature superconductor!
The whole situation was bizarre. This brilliant mind was actually suffering from a severe psychiatric disorder? Had he experienced some hidden trauma? Were all geniuses just naturally crazy? Or... was there actually a shred of truth to his wild story?!
Possessed by an alien parasite? That’s impossible, this isn’t some cheap sci-fi movie, Austin thought, shaking his head in confusion.
If Peter wasn’t actually mentally ill, then the situation was highly serious. His status as a prominent scientist couldn’t absolve him of criminal acts; he would still need to be detained and punished according to the law. Damaging public property combined with sexual harassment warranted a mandatory month in the detention center. No one was above the law.
Society required strict order. This wasn’t the dark ages; everyone was supposed to be equal, and the Federation strictly forbade the creation of a privileged elite class. From a legal standpoint, good deeds did not erase crimes. Even scientists who made massive contributions to humanity had to face the consequences of breaking the law. Otherwise, doctors who saved lives every day would theoretically be legally permitted to commit murder.
The legal system had to maintain absolute fairness and justice. Without it, how could they build a stable society on the ship? How could they keep the population united?
The absolute last thing the Federation leadership wanted was social unrest. Especially now, during this crucial period of technological advancement, chaos was unacceptable! If social order collapsed, humanity would never survive the stars. Trust was easy to destroy but incredibly difficult to rebuild.
Therefore, the government, the military, and the civilian sectors all worked tirelessly to prevent a ruling elite from forming. Not even top-tier scientists were exempt.
However, if Peter was diagnosed with a legitimate psychological disorder, and the victim, Mei, refused to press charges, the matter could easily be resolved quietly without a public scandal. After all, patients suffering from severe mental breaks couldn’t be held to the same standard of legal accountability; they couldn’t control their own actions.
The Federation’s central administrative complex was located at the bustling intersection between the residential and industrial sectors. On this particular day, the staff were working diligently as usual.
Jason sat in Lily’s office with a deeply serious expression, discussing a highly critical issue.
Displayed on the computer monitor was a massive research proposal: "Blueprint for the Construction of a Super Hadron Collider." It was co-signed by Dr. Felix, Professor Hao Yu, and a long list of the Federation’s top physicists!
This proposal was no joke. Its sheer scale and significance meant Lily couldn’t simply reject it in her capacity as an administrator; only Jason had the authority to make a call of this magnitude.
Building this colossal machine would require an astronomical amount of the new superconducting material, along with staggering amounts of manpower and raw resources.
When Jason first glanced at the projected scale and the material requirements, he was completely stunned. He wanted to throw the datapad across the room and yell at the scientists, but considering the heavy weight of the signatures and the absolute necessity of a particle collider for their future survival, he forced himself to remain calm.
A Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is a massive high-energy physics facility used to accelerate and smash protons and electrons together. It was humanity’s ultimate tool for studying particle physics!
Back on Earth, the largest particle collider had been built deep underground near Geneva. It was famous not only as the largest particle collider, but as the largest machine ever built by man, the fastest track in the world, and the most perfectly evacuated vacuum space in the solar system.
Its greatest scientific triumph occurred in 2012 when it proved the existence of the Higgs boson, often referred to as the "God particle"—confirming the Standard Model of physics. It placed the final brick on the roof of humanity’s physics framework, widely considered a scientific achievement on par with the original moon landing.
Now, fueled by the rapid advancements in room-temperature superconductors and electromagnetism, the scientists were ambitiously proposing to build a super-collider that was ten thousand times more powerful than the original LHC!
According to the blueprints, this Super Hadron Collider would be constructed in the zero-gravity zone above the Noah’s main sectors. It would feature a 270-kilometer circular tunnel and have a total mass of three million metric tons. It was designed to smash electrons and positrons together with an energy output of at least 500 gigaelectron volts!
Its power output would completely dwarf anything ever built on Earth.