His twin sister, Missy, walked by with a juice box. “Then why are you crying?”

Sheldon touched his cheek. It was wet. “I’m not crying. My lacrimal glands are reacting to the strain of processing incomplete visual data.”

Sheldon Cooper, age ten, sat cross-legged on the floor, six inches from the television. His breath fogged the glass screen. On it, a bootleg VHS copy of a documentary about quantum mechanics played, but the tape had been re-recorded so many times it looked like a mosaic of quivering ants.

“Cool. Wanna play catch?”