World War Zed

18. Facility tour with: Dr Anders Haraldsson

CERN, Switzerland

Facility tour with: Dr Anders Haraldsson

The following text is transcribed from a recorded commentary given by Dr. Haraldsson during a tour around the newly refurbished CERN facility, buried deep under the mountains of the Swiss-French border.

A group of dignitaries from the UN was invited along, together with senior members of the armed forces from the combined UNZ (United Nations Zombie Task Force). The tour took several hours, and the full transcription has been edited for the purposes of this book, the content of which has been kindly scrutinised and agreed upon by Anders prior to inclusion here.

We join the tour as Anders takes over the commentary from the normal tour guide...

"Welcome to CERN ladies and gentlemen, or rather what was CERN. We're putting the equipment to somewhat different use these days as you can see.

"Prior to the War, The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, was an international organization whose purpose was to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory. You are currently located approximately 100m below the Northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border. The original complex was established in 1954. Up until the start of the war, the organization had twenty European member states, sadly that has dwindled, in some cases because those member states simply no longer exist, but the Swiss, French and British are still the major financiers of what remains of the project.

"At its height, the laboratory itself employed approximately 2,600 full-time employees, as well as some 8000 scientists and engineers representing 580 universities and research facilities, and 80 nationalities. As with many organisations, we are a shadow of our former selves, but we still attract the brightest minds from all over the planet and although our research has changed direction in some areas, we still continue to push the boundaries of science.

"As a little aside, this place, as you can see from the little plaque on the wall there is the birthplace of the World Wide Web, and, due to our location, our computers survived largely unscathed during the War. Thankfully, the small group of survivors who lived here during the war were predominantly scientists, who felt no need to plunder the computers for parts, being proved correct in their assumption that if the human race survived it would need a centre of learning to provide for the future.

"As a group of scientists, we have been here since 1954. Since our formation, we have studied beyond the atomic nucleus into higher-energy physics; utilising various scientific principles and developing technology along the way. This eventually lead us to construct the various particle colliders, and more recently in the history of the facility, the large Hadron Collider.

"Oddly enough in 1983, we discovered a particle which was called the Z boson, the 1984 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer for that one, more recently though we are looking into other, larger Zeds. 

"And that ladies and gentlemen leads me neatly into the next chambers. Now, while you are all aware that our scientific work in the world of Physics continues, albeit in much-reduced scope, we are also developing ways to combat the continuing presence of the Infected. Prior to the war, this sort of science, which is essentially weapons development, would have been unthinkable, but recent UN resolutions, and agreement with all the remaining world powers have made this possible. What you are about to see is not pleasant, but it is necessary. Certainly in my opinion at any rate, although as always with these things there is a certain amount of controversy.

"Before we go any further, I must warn you that we test on Animated subjects. They were once human; they were once living breathing creatures. They are no longer either of those, and most are volunteers from recently infected victims, often from the armed forces. Only some of the older test subjects are not volunteers, but we have made efforts to trace living relatives prior to testing and so far, where we have had positive identifications, we have had no refusals.