'Lost Souls' by Joseph Lidster

Torchwood comes to Radio 4 in a specially-commissioned drama. Martha Jones, ex-time traveller and now working as a doctor for a UN task force, has been called to CERN. Join Captain Jack and friends in a series of strange events around the activation of the world's largest particle accelerator.

"Somewhere out there in that chaos of darkness and light, of science and protons, of gods and stars and death... somewhere there's an answer."

The Torchwood Institute was founded by Queen Victoria in 1879 to protect the British Empire against the threat of alien invasion. By 2008, all that remains of the organisation is a small team based in Cardiff. And now, following the tragic deaths of two of their colleagues, the remaining three – Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones – have to protect the human race against another unknown force from the darkness.

Martha Jones, ex-time traveller and now working as a doctor for a UN task force, has been called to CERN – the world's largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva – where they're about to activate the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC is a particle accelerator which has been built deep underground in a 27km tunnel under Switzerland and France. Once activated, the collider will fire beams of protons together, re-creating conditions a billionth of a second after the Big Bang – and potentially allowing the human race a greater insight into what the universe is made of.

But so much could go wrong – it could open a gateway to a parallel dimension, or create a black hole – and now voices from the past are calling out to people and scientists have started to disappear...

Where have the missing scientists gone? What is the secret of the glowing man? What is lurking in the underground tunnel? And do the dead ever really stay dead?

John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness), Eve Myles (Gwen Cooper), Gareth David-Lloyd (Ianto Jones), Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones), Lucy Montgomery (Professor Johnson), Stephen Critchlow (Doctor Harrington), Mark Meadows (Leon Foiret)

Produced and Directed by Kate McAll
Executive Producers Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner
A BBC Wales production

TX (BBC Radio 4):
10th September 2008 @ 2.15 pm

Notes:
*Featuring Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Ianto Jones and Martha Jones

*This 45-minute radio episode was broadcast as part of the day-long coverage of CERN's (European Organization for Nuclear Research) experiment to re-create the aftermath of the Big Bang