Crossed Shadows

"When death lurks in your own shadow, where will you hide?"

It was 3:03 a.m. In the darkness of his bedroom Jason Hague was deeply asleep, unaware of the improbable truth that the planet he shared with around seven billion fellow human beings would, in little over a week from now, no longer exist. He was also oblivious of the even less believable fact that he was the only one who could stop this.

Had you woken Jason and told him any of this, he would not have believed you. Who would? Forces did exist in the Universe that were capable of destroying whole planets - perhaps a rogue black hole or an asteroid as big as the moon - but how could one man, one ordinary thirty-year-old computer programmer, with no remarkable skill that he was aware of, hope to stand against such apocalyptic power? It was absurd. And yet it remained fact. Jason could no more avoid his fate now than trains on a collision course can jump tracks. Some deeper part of his mind must already have sensed this truth; for his heart rate and breathing were even now quickening, his skin was squeezing out sweat, and his muscles were tightening, as his body prepared itself for the approaching threat.

Dr Daniella Esposti, a scientist at the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland, performs an unauthorised experiment while searching for the so-called 'God Particle'. Her experiment exceeds her most optimistic calculations, the resulting energy shredding the very fabric of reality. Even time itself ceases to follow the rules. True chaos. And for Jason Hague - a man whose need for order borders on the obsessive - an unbearable nightmare, especially since he is the only human being alive with the power to face the agent of chaos threatening every species on Earth with annihilation.