A small placard on the wall reads, "Rm. 108, Phys/Chem Lab, Dr. Loskin".  The door next to it stands slightly ajar, wide enough for someone to eavesdrop but not enter.  There is, however, no sound.

Through the clear window in the door, a peculiar assemblage of parts can be seen resting on a lab bench.  Coils of thick wire decorate a small metal chamber, squat and cylindrical, with the narrow black boxes of laser emitters protruding from its sides at irregular angles.  A small view-port of thick crystal reveals a tiny spot of black in the center, a pinprick against the scintillating blue beams which converge upon it.

A desk sits near the door, scattered papers across it.  The top edge of one page, beneath a CERN letterhead, reads, "...amazing potential.  The committee therefore accepts your request for a two-year sabbatical, and...", the rest obscured by other pages.  Beside the papers rests a magazine - Popular Science.  The cover shows a photograph of the room in which the magazine now sits.  The assemblage in the image is less elaborate, the beams are red, and there is no spot of black.  Standing before the lab bench are two women, both smiling brightly, one in her teens, the other perhaps in her late twenties.  Below the magazine title, smaller bright blue text teases, "The Next Einstein...attending High School?"

Behind the desk, lines and lines of equations decorate the whiteboard.  One set in blue, each number and symbol carefully formed, another in red, characters slashed urgently onto the smooth surface.  They alternate, snippets of an argument held entirely in the language of mathematical physics, the dialects of particle interactions and quantum gravity dominating.

The older woman from the magazine cover stands nearby, one hand jabbing at a particular set of terms behind her, while her other arm reaches forward, fingers splayed out in a universal plea.  Her eyes are wide, her mouth open.  The red dry-erase marker hangs in the air at the mid-point of what might have been, otherwise, an inevitable journey to the floor.

The young woman is not looking at her teacher, but deep into the heart of the apparatus.  Her face is determined, mouth slightly open.  Yet a slight flush to her cheeks and a dilation of her pupils betrays imperfect confidence.  Her finger rests on a large red switch in the "on" position.

One particular knot of red symbols on the whiteboard, skewered by the teacher's insistent finger, describes a mathematical oddity...a space-time singularity, formed not of a point, but a twisted loop.  The term is complex, and not entirely supported by the previous equations.  Perhaps five people in the world could have grasped it fully, two of whom stood in this room.

Alas, none save its author would have credited what the unit conversions suggested...despite the relatively paltry energies involved, an effective radius not limited to barely-detectable atomic distances.

They suggested one measured in kilometers.