The team started to focus intensely on their side project, bringing in more precise sensors. After months of work, they were ready to run it again. Their speculations were confirmed. The Higgs boson didn't prove that mass was obtained from the Higgs field, it proved that it came from the 5th dimension. Mass came from particles in space-time interacting with the 5th dimension, tethering the dimensions together.
Then they started to see something truly unexpected. At first they started to understand how particles in the real world had a tethered gravitational end point in the 5th dimension that attracted 5th dimensional particles. This tether explained what gave objects mass in space-time; they were ‘weighed down' by the 5th dimensional particles they were tethered to, coming from the strong gravitational force in the 5th dimension. But there was something more. These 5th dimensional particles also combined into complex composites. The complex composites were only attached to living beings in space-time.