News of a highly peculiar would-be saboteur who targeted Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider project - aka the Black Hole Generator - has been burning up the Interwebs today.
Eloi Cole, a bizarrely dressed and (undoubtedly) intense young man, claims to be from the not-so-distant future. He's travelled back to our time to prevent the controversial LHC from discovering the elusive Higgs boson particle, tearing up the time-space continuum and destroying the Universe as we know it.
Luckily for Science, the professionally neutral Swiss police force arrested Mr. Cole before he could enact his daring plan. Said plan centered on a nefarious plot to to disrupt the project by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the center's vending machines.
Cole - who was apparently decked out in a bow-tie and entirely too much tweed - was captured while rooting around some trash cans in search of fuel for his 'time machine power unit'. Reports suggest that, to the untrained eye, this fantastical piece of future-tech strongly resembles a kitchen blender.
The mysterious wannabe Time Cop had this to say regarding his motives:
"The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it from ever happening."
Sounds like a time-traveling Conservative to me. Literally the last thing our troubled planet needs.
Mr Cole was transported to a secure mental health facility in Geneva, but soon escaped from his cell - in circumstances exactly as mystifying as his arrival in our time, if not more so. According to staff at the facility, Cole simply vanished into thin air. My guess is that he was busted out by notorious anarchist Ford Prefect, citizen of the Betelgeuse system and fun-loving friend to dour tea-swilling Brits everywhere.
Now my readers may be card-carrying paranoids, for the most part, but that doesn't mean y'all are stupid. Of course this is all a joke - and a particularly transparent one, at that. What's interesting, though, is that this story - despite being touted by several supposedly reputable 'news' sources earlier this morning as a 'current event' - has been doing the rounds since 2010.
Since last year's April Fools Day, in fact.
Nice one, Internet.
Any way you cut it, the longevity of this callous prank has to be admired. Just how this story started circulating again is anybody's guess.
I have a theory...
As any Time Lord worth his salt knows all too well, time is inherently cyclical. What will be will be, and will most likely be again... again and again and again.
So rest assured, CERN fans. I'm sure we'll be hearing from Mr. Eloi Cole again... one of these days.
There are now only 385 days until the End of the World.
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