The tour group consisted of himself, two German families, and a French elementary school class. While the guide talked, they were looking through a glass wall at a room full of scientists looking at computers. The computers were recording the results of those non-black-hole-producing collisions—protons accelerated in opposite directions through a buried twenty-seven-kilometer loop that bridged the border between Switzerland and France (like he did!) until they crashed together at a smidgen less than the speed of light. “Only two and a half meters per second slower,” said their guide. Which was pretty astounding. What was 186,000 miles a second minus two and a half meters?

Watching the results of those collisions on computer screens looked pretty boring, though. And watching people watch the results on computer screens was even more so. He thought it would be more interesting to see the collider itself up close, but it was accessible only to staff, who entered via air locks after passing retinal recognition scans (the guide said), and the radiation down there could be fatal if you didn’t know what you were doing.

When he returned to CERN after that, it was always to “The Universe of Particles,” an exhibit in another building that tried to get tourists interested in the big questions of physics in a world where science was losing favor. Images of the Big Bang (as if anyone could know what that looked like) were projected on the curved walls of a large darkened room, while a disembodied voice on speakers pronounced: “Our universe, what is it made of? Where did it start? What is its destiny?” He thought those were certainly valid questions. They were among the issues he had pondered when he read his favorite popular science websites before his own smaller universe collapsed. But now, by necessity, he was more interested in the darkness of “The Universe of Particles” than its potted science. On his very first visit, he had spotted some likely prospects in the waiting area outside—a group of Korean tourists busy with not only the usual cameras and selfie sticks but also a small selfie drone that followed them, its propellers keeping it hovering just over their heads, snapping photos of their adventures in Geneva. How did that work? he wondered. Did it hone in on a signal broadcast by a device one of the Koreans carried? Did it recognize their voices? Their faces? Their smell?

Whichever, the drone came to heel and was inserted into a custom carrying case as the group entered the exhibit.

He followed them inside and paused near the entrance. Now was when he needed his courage. The courage he had not had when the ISIS men came for his brother, or when he was smuggled across borders, when he cried, crouching helplessly, in a small boat pitching across the Aegean. But that was before. Now, he thought, he could do this. Because of the cat.