Crystal Day was 5 April 2012. The fact that you are reading this after that date tells you that, despite the catastrophe which overtook the Earth (and indeed the whole Universe) at 11:23 on that day, we all survived to read the tale as described in Time Crystal, the epic novel by Wyken Seagrave.

You might think that this proves the whole story is fiction; but it is one of the objectives of the series of books to explain how and why the Universe survived, what the consequences were and what lessons we should learn from the terrible struggles and triumphs of those involved.

If we do not learn from this then their efforts will have been in vain.

On that terrible day, Danny Schneider was working at the leader of the team of engineers who were starting the first run of ATLAS after the winter shut-down. At 09:34:23.58 an extraordinary event occurred: a cosmic monopole was captured by the strong magnetic fields inside ATLAS and became trapped inside the beam pipe.

Here it absorbed particles from the beam and became transformed into a black hole. This burned its way out of the beam pipe and through the detector, causing a helium leak and an explosion which led the the collapse of the emergency stairs leading up from the nearby USA15 cavern. This led to several people being trapped in that cavern.

The black hole finally emerged from ATLAS as the trapped people were trying to escape through the ATLAS cavern. They tried to prevent it from hitting the Earth, with potentially catastrophic consequences, but during this effort two men were absorbed by the hole.

Moments later, at 11:23, there was an unprecedented event, fragments of blue crystal emerged from the black hole and time stopped everywhere in the Universe.