Sarah Mackay, a brilliant and curious first-year undergraduate, arrives in Geneva with a suitcase full of physics books and a hunger to understand the smallest particles in the universe. At CERN—the world's leading particle physics laboratory—she joins an elite group of students for a nine-day immersion into the strange and beautiful world of quarks, gluons, and the theories that govern reality.

But as lectures unfold and collisions deepen, so too do strange and personal entanglements. Sarah finds herself drawn into a whirlwind of intellectual intensity, budding romance, and an increasingly surreal atmosphere where the boundaries between observation and reality begin to blur. When a mysterious package appears—containing a lifeless tabby cat, eerily intact—Sarah's journey takes a sharp turn into mystery and metaphor.

Nine Days Immersed in Particle Physics is a rich fusion of literary fiction, speculative mystery, and coming-of-age tale. It explores the interplay of attraction and symmetry, the emotional resonance of scientific metaphor, and the philosophical consequences of quantum uncertainty. With a keen eye for detail and a narrative voice both poetic and precise, author Rikki J Prince crafts a story where the rules of particle physics mirror the complexities of the human heart.

By the end of her time at CERN, Sarah will have learned more than she ever expected—not just about quarks and the Higgs field, but about herself, her past, and the strange, ever-shifting fabric of reality.

This is the origin point.