Peter Ters (Ters rhymes with scare, as he was fond of pointing out) was drafted from his job as a test pilot in Seattle into the 13th Airborne Division in 1941. He flew 89 sorties and was prominent in many more legendary tales during his time in France, and later Russia and Germany. He quickly earned the nom de guerre "Stukkabane" for his skillful and gleeful extermination of the German planes that hounded their bombers. He had an immense belly laugh that was equal parts infectious and offensive for its outright volume (it wanted, needed you to hear it, intruded willfully on your privacy to say "I'm here! We're laughing! This shit is funny!"). All that wrapped into a dense package five and a half feet tall, with wiry black hair, now gone mostly white and thin. Of course, he had been born no less than twelve decades previously, so the fact that he could stand was something of a miracle, let alone the fact that he still had some hair. But that's jumping ahead.
After the war he had picked back up as a test-pilot. Exciting and dangerous work, but with little true glory. When he couldn't stand the lack of notoriety any longer, he looked up the Senator son of a war buddy, and in very short order landed a position at NASA. He flew a total of 19 missions. His crew was the first to note in their official report that they had experienced a "collective anomaly" in which the four crew on board, under the apparent effects of a cabin air gas mixture failure, had seen what they could only describe as a foreign spacecraft. They described it as being of remarkable design. At the time it was taken as an extremely alarming indication of progress by the Soviet Union.
It was not long after the Challenger disaster, when it became clear that ships were going to fly less often, and he was only going to get older, Peter turned to theoretical physics. In a way, he perceived this as an ultimate extension of the test pilot... you sit in a room and think until you have an idea... then you work that idea into something you can build or test... and then one day you give it a shot. You take an airframe and a motor and a prop, or some solid fuel boosters and a launch/return vehicle, or a theory and a missing particle and an untested accelerator, and you see if they fly. Peter was unique in that respect. Most of his buddies from WWII had not gone on to NASA, and none of his buddies from NASA had gone on to work at CERN.
His contributions to the body of theoretical work being done at the lab were not great. Still, he played an important role, and no-one on the team begrudged him his salary as the Primary Hadron Collider. The title was not precise, but it was close enough that everyone on staff, every visiting PHD, knew exactly what Peter's _real_ job was. He was the test pilot of the high-energy theoretical physics experiments. If the world was going to turn inside out while we verified the existence of the Higgs Boson, well then Peter would be there turning the wheels and firing the collider and writing down whether we got one.
It is in this context that no one who truly knew Peter was truly surprised what eventually became of him. Surprised at the exact details, of course. Who wouldn't be surprised by that? But if you have a friend in an incredibly dangerous field, you know this feeling: the assumption that they will eventually die doing something dangerous. Every time you get a call from their wife, or a close mutual friend, there is some small percentage of your mind that is expecting the bad news. That feeling turns inside out the day that it comes true. There is a part of you, which has been girding for "real life" and slowly coalescing some "adult feelings" and "adult assumptions", and has has prepared a space in your psyche for this. But then, your friend dies one weekend. On Friday you're skiing with him and then on Monday he's gone, killed in a car race or on an oil derek or in a drug deal gone bad, or in our case: frozen in time-space in a 20-foot-wide sphere of impossibleness.
It was a Tuesday. An extremely big Tuesday if you happened to be a theoretical physicist. And in the gigantic cave where Peter stood frowning over a trans-vector alignment guisemometer, pretty much every person within sight was a theoretical physicist. Not that Peter was looking at any of them. He was in pre-flight checklist mode. It's a curious feature of the test-pilot: by the job description (person who flies things that may or may not in fact fly) you would imagine a crazy Scotch-guzzling ne'er-do-well who stumbles from a hotel room with a stewardess ten minutes late for the flight and then miraculously lands the new craft after the left wing comes off. That would all be accurate except that he actually shows up two hours before the flight and obsessively (if hung-overly) inspects the aircraft. And that is what Peter was doing now, except that instead of fuel lines and landing gear he was checking inveiglement tolerances, precisely measuring the Lessinger gaps, and over and over again reviewing the collision plan.
So Peter Ters is right there when the experiment is finally conducted. He is quite literally flipping switches and calling "we are GO!" into his radio. And he is there at the collision point. They discussed this at length during the original planning meetings: how close should we be? Is there any chance it will go Seriously Wrong?
Peter intones: "we are 10 until go." Moments later he snaps "we are 5 until go" and from that point on everything becomes "a blur". There is no blur, in fact. Just a space that isn't there and photos in between.
As Peter hits zero on his countdown, he enters into what is now known as a (the) Tersian Anamoly. Peter is utterly parked in time at this point.
At some point., 40 years later, the Tersian Anamoly is disrupted and Peter rejoins the surrounding time/space
He sneaks out, despite Steve's objections, and gets loose.
After taking on a ridiculous pseudonym, he makes it onto a NASA crew. From there...
(this guy is eventually one of two backup guys)
