Chapter 189: Getting to Work

After making his final decision, Jason immediately called several senior physicists to express his absolute support for the mega-project.

Science is humanity’s primary mission. You will have all the necessary equipment, he told them.

Hearing this, Professor Hao Yu, Felix, and the others breathed massive sighs of relief. They rubbed their hands together excitedly as they hung up the phone; it felt as if they were finally about to conquer the Everest of the physics world.

A project of this magnitude couldn’t be completed by a single laboratory; it required Jason, acting as the supreme executive, to bridge the entire industrial system and mobilize the entire civilization.

Following the initial calls, he began contacting the heads of the major engineering departments such as the Wolfpack Design Bureau, the Tesla Institute, and the Aegis Industrial Complex to hammer out the specific logistical details.

The behemoth named the “Super Hadron Collider” was an absolute nightmare in terms of sheer engineering scale. Furthermore, it required an astronomical amount of the new Superalloy Series and room-temperature superconductors, necessitating meticulous, ground-up planning and tight coordination.

Half a day later, a massive draft list of required engineers, designers, and scientists was finalized. The core team alone was estimated at six thousand people.

These 6,000 highly specialized staff members would be fully dedicated to designing the intricate components of the Super Hadron Collider over the next two years, while the automated Aegis Industrial Complex would handle the brute-force manufacturing of the massive machinery. When factoring in the core staff, the heavy construction teams, logistics crews, and various contract workers, the project would monopolize the labor of fifteen thousand people!

This Super Hadron Collider was officially the largest super-project ever undertaken by humanity since the initial retrofit of the Noah.

This was the absolute advantage of the Federation’s current resource-based economic system. For a civilization attempting to make massive leaps in science and technology, a centralized economy was incredibly efficient. It allowed the government to instantly concentrate the majority of its resources to accomplish a single, monumental goal.

Back on Earth, employing fifteen thousand highly skilled, top-tier professionals of this caliber would have cost over two billion dollars a year in salaries alone, a truly astronomical expense. Factoring in the massive quantities of advanced new materials, the complex manufacturing processes, and the bespoke machinery, the entire project would have been completely impossible to complete without a budget exceeding a trillion dollars.

The original Large Hadron Collider on Earth had cost tens of billions of dollars, funded by the joint donations of dozens of nations. Including decades of maintenance and operational costs, the total price tag had hovered around nine hundred billion dollars.

But the Federation’s Super Hadron Collider was designed to be ten thousand times more powerful. Based on the scale of the old global economy, it would undoubtedly have cost trillions of dollars to build.

Consider the physics of it: a 270-kilometer-long circular particle track covers a staggering area of 5,804 square kilometers, roughly the size of a large Earth city. Back on Earth, a project that size would have involved a nightmare of government negotiations, endless paperwork, bureaucratic red tape, and the forced relocation of entire towns.

Land on Earth had been incredibly precious! Even if the massive track was buried deep underground, the sheer excavation engineering required would have been economically catastrophic. Add to that the massive amounts of highly expensive new materials, the complex sensory arrays, and the precision machinery… a trillion dollars was probably a conservative estimate.

A trillion-dollar infrastructure project, dedicated purely to theoretical scientific research? It was laughable.

Even for the old global superpowers, a trillion dollars was an untouchable sum. Dedicating that much capital to a single, highly experimental research project was completely beyond the means of any sane government.

If a nation had actually attempted something like this, there would have been massive, violent protests and public demonstrations. People would scream that the government was wasting taxpayer money. Others would argue that developing high-energy physics had zero practical use for their daily lives, so why fund it at all?

Of course, there would always be the self-righteous pundits claiming the money would be better spent improving impoverished regions, and the doomsday conspiracy theorists insisting the Hadron Collider would literally destroy the world…

The political difficulties were endless!

A trillion dollars was a sum that no political congress would ever approve, and no single government actually possessed that much liquid capital anyway. If an administration tried to force it through, the president would likely be impeached!

This stagnation was determined by the fundamental paradigm and economic mindset of the old world. Even decades later, those pre-collapse societies would never have been able to build a machine of this magnitude.

But in the current context of the Federation, the planning meeting lasted less than a single day. The moment Jason made the executive decision, the department heads acted swiftly, immediately compiling their detailed staffing rosters.

Tomorrow, we start work! The entire approval process took exactly twenty-four hours!

As for the economy? Money? Was it even useful anymore? To hell with it!

This was the sheer cohesive power of humanity’s new civilization; in just one day, it could mobilize its entire population to focus entirely on a single, monumental task.

Most importantly, the thousands of people drafted into the project were all smiling and vibrating with excitement, acting as if they’d been injected with pure adrenaline. Their eyes were bloodshot, their hearts were pounding, and they absolutely couldn’t wait to get to work!

Everyone understood the profound significance of this machine. If Supersymmetry Theory was physically verified… it would be unbelievable! The entire foundational edifice of physics would be rewritten! Humanity would transition from a state of total cosmic ignorance to possessing a fundamental understanding of the universe, it would be an evolutionary leap forward!

These scientists, designers, and engineers all desperately wanted to witness history, to become a vital part of it.

If anyone dared to stand up and oppose the project now, they would be drowned in the collective spit of the scientific community!

When Jason finally returned to his quarters, exhausted from the project’s opening ceremonies, he noticed an urgent document sent by Austin blinking on his computer terminal.

The document contained a highly detailed criminal incident report regarding the newly minted “Great Scientist,” Peter.

“What the hell is going on?” Jason muttered.

He blinked hard, convinced his tired eyes were playing tricks on him. He had been riding the high of the Collider’s launch, only to suddenly read that the genius who invented the room-temperature superconductor had been arrested and detained. It felt completely surreal.

He reread the report several times to confirm that the name was indeed Peter, the very same scientist.

What? He violently kicked over potted plants, destroyed public property, and… sexually harassed a woman in broad daylight?!

The report included detailed surveillance footage, providing irrefutable evidence of the bizarre behavior!

“He even used a salon drone to shave his head bald in the middle?” Jason read aloud, completely at a loss for words.

Could a perfectly normal, if slightly lazy person really just suddenly snap and go insane? Jason instinctively assumed it was a severe psychological break.

If it was treatable, then the Federation needed to treat him. After all, the man had single-handedly invented the groundbreaking superconducting material; he clearly possessed immense, raw talent.

In fact, the entire construction of the Super Hadron Collider relied heavily on Peter’s invention. Without the new superconductors, the cost and workload of the collider would have been exponentially higher. Relying on massive quantities of liquid nitrogen for cooling left virtually zero margin for error; it was incredibly expensive and technically complex, likely beyond humanity’s current engineering capabilities.

Jason patiently continued reading the medical addendum.

After being evaluated by a team of leading psychiatric experts, Peter had been diagnosed with severe dissociative identity disorder, more commonly known as multiple personality disorder. According to the psychiatrists, a highly aggressive, deeply delusional ’alien’ personality had fractured from Peter’s psyche and was actively attempting to seize control of his motor functions. All of the absurd, destructive actions were reportedly committed by this ’alien’ persona.

Regardless of the specifics… his tone, his behavior, and his wild claims made him completely indistinguishable from a raving lunatic.

Jason frowned deeply. Perhaps Peter had suffered some kind of severe, hidden trauma during the Earth’s destruction that had finally triggered a delayed mental breakdown. According to the file, he was currently confined to the psychiatric ward which was essentially a highly secure, medically converted wing of the detention center and was receiving intensive expert treatment.

After finishing the report, Jason took a deep breath. He finally understood why Austin had forwarded it directly to him instead of handling it quietly.

The main issue was Peter’s newly elevated social status.

The Federation government didn’t officially bestow honorary titles like “Great Scientist.” Those titles were organically given by the public based on a scientist’s visible contributions and intellect. Austin was deeply worried that this rising trend of idolizing scientists would accidentally create a privileged elite class that believed it could operate entirely outside the law.

If Peter had been anyone else, Austin wouldn’t have bothered Jason with the details at all; he would have just locked the man in the psychiatric ward and closed the case. After all, Jason was the leader of the entire civilization; it was impossible for him to micromanage the daily drama and legal disputes of nearly 60,000 citizens.

Will scientists eventually become a privileged class? Especially the ones the public labels ’Great’? Jason thought about it carefully but ultimately didn’t take the fear to heart. He considered the public’s current, widespread fascination with science to be a net positive. After all, registered scientists and engineers now made up more than half of the Noah’s total population.

Besides, Peter, this so-called “Great Scientist” was worlds apart from the actual great minds Jason interacted with daily, both in terms of personal charisma, professional dignity, and raw intellect.

Isolated anomalies like this always existed in any society. If Peter spent the rest of his life unable to invent anything beyond the superconductor, the public would eventually just write him off as a one-hit wonder who got incredibly lucky. His honorary title would naturally fade away into obscurity.

“An alien personality?” Jason muttered, shaking his head.

Thinking about that specific detail gave Jason a strange, almost eerie feeling in the back of his mind, but it was incredibly faint. Then, reality crashed back down on him; he realized just how insanely busy he was. His schedule was completely packed with critical Collider logistics for the next two weeks. Compared to the monumental scale of the Super Hadron Collider, Peter’s psychotic break was a minor, irrelevant footnote.

I’ll go check on him in the psych ward when I have some free time in a couple of days... Jason promised himself.

He sighed heavily, pushing the bizarre incident from his mind. After washing up, he stripped off his uniform and collapsed into bed. Within minutes, his breathing evened out, and he fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.

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