Angelons and de-mons

Midnight in a subterranean laboratory straddling the Swiss-French border. Father Vaux Vectra is alone at his desk, transfixed by the image on his display screen. He gazes with growing fear and wonder at the lambent pattern of particle tracks, and struggles to absorb the full implications.

Father Vectra had known for years that his colleagues at CERN were not looking in the right direction, were not searching for the right things in the morass of data generated by the Large Hadron Collider. They might have found the Higgs boson, but Father Vectra knew that there was much more at stake here, that there was something of truly metaphysical significance hidden in the data, waiting to be found.

A knock at the door!

Father Vectra's heart spasms with alarm against his ribcage. No-one else should be here! Vectra worked alone, and had studied the work roster with great care to ensure that he would be totally free from interruption.

"Who's there?"

Silence.

Vectra scowls, levers himself out of his chair, and walks with a mixture of irritation and trepidation to the door. "I say, who is that? Are you security? Work control have cleared me to work the late shift, you know..."

More silence.

Vectra pulls his keys out of his pocket, unlocks the door, and turns the handle. It is the last action that he performs alive.

***********************************************************************************

Robert Wheldon's sense of unease was suddenly transformed into outright alarm. "Surely the Dawkinati cannot still exist?" he muttered aloud. "This is worse than I thought!"

"What does it all mean?" asked Danica.

"It looks like Vectra was murdered by an acolyte of a secret cadre, thought to have dissolved decades ago, devoted to the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church."

"That's terrible!" exclaimed Danica. "But why would they kill a physicist like Vectra?"

"Well, according to Vectra's theories and calculations," said Weldon, holding a sheaf of Vectra's hand-written notes, "the material universe we see around us, with its 4 space-time dimensions, its photons and electrons, its carbon and silicon atoms, its nucleic acids and proteins, its oceans, forests and mountains, its red giants and neutron stars, its galaxies, stellar nurseries, and supermassive black holes: all of that is merely appearance and illusion, a transient, local phenomenon. Beneath it all is a 10-dimensional world, described by a unification of string theory and Manichaeic cosmology, in which the forces of good and evil fight an eternal war. Vectra believed that God has compactified 6 of the dimensions into a Calabi-Yau manifold, forcing the exponential inflationary expansion of the other 4, and the creation of the world we see around us.

"Vectra went looking for evidence of God's signature in the moduli fields which keep the 6 dungeon dimensions compactified, and it looks like he found it just before he was killed. With knowledge of these moduli fields, and their quanta of excitation, the angelons and de-mons, it will be possible for the Dawkinati to open up the 6 hidden dimensions temporarily, allowing the Christ to collide with the AntiChrist!"

"We've got to get to the Vatican before it happens," cried Danica. "I've got a helicopter..."