A wink, a wrinkling, then a flash of geometry.

The trees twirl like mad brown bellows pumping out inert green clouds, their drastic capillary motion undergoing gigantic magnification distortion as the tensorlens of space-time spasmed.

At Ground Zero where the effect was total, the scientists and equipment were twisted into fantastic configurations, the very topology and their inability to navigate complex knots and surfaces trapping them in the collider’s cool halls. Their cries became sonic explosions, or were distant, far off, as if creeping through a labyrinth. They starved to death before they found their way out. “They didn’t have a ball of thread,”later historians would remark sadly, after expeditions were sent into—to use a term coined by a television personality—the LSD atomizer and found old bones in postures of desperate futility.

Seasoned explorers of psychedelics weathered the reality storm with relative ease of difficulty, and they were the grassroots heroes who ushered in a new golden age.