"...5...4...3...2...1...impact!"
The screens went white for a second, and then lines began spreading out from the center. A general cheer went up throughout the room.
"Well, my friends, it is official: after all the bad magnets, alignment problems, and other Bullshit, we have collision," Dr. Legard said in French. "Here's to us, my fellow physicists and engineers," he added, raising his glass high.
There was a collective here here, and a quaffing of champagne. Several people left, with a few high fives, to go meet significant others for celebrations, and gradually crowd dropped to six. Dr. Jules Legard looked around the room at the others who were staying on standby. Joining him on the magnetic system was Dr. Mike Richter, a German engineer and the project's token old, fat biddy, selected not so much for her skill at designing magnetic systems as to show a lack of age or sexual discrimination. Over at the computer stations, John Birmingham, a scrawny, pale kid from England, and Hans Gubler, a tall, skinny kid from Sweden, were making sure that both the data recording systems and the transmission to physics departments around the world were going okay. On the sensor monitor was Joseph Wishard, the short balding French-American Physicist who had insisted on staying to make sure his detector was working. Last, but certainly least, on the emergency panel was Antigua Schristave, the black-haired, large boobed undergrad from somewhere in the Balkans who clearly was only along because she was sleeping with her professor.
"A great accomplishment for mankind, but not for my Friday night," he muttered, and the he a Dr. Richter set about placing the guideway magnets on standby for the weekend.
Out in the collider, the intense energies released by the collision bent the fabric of reality, and, just for a second, something snapped. The rent space and energy fell back together as the collision ended, merging with a sliver of energy that had seeped into the universe from somewhere else, and an energy field unlike anything ever seen before coalesced. Caught in the collider runway's containment field, it traveled along the track until, their job done for the day, the magnetic coils were lowered to their standby energy, allowing the field to bleed through the radiation shielding and into the control room.