What if I told you there is a house, a beautiful house, a luxury penthouse somewhere in this city, not too far away? It is unoccupied as we speak. Maybe held in escrow or just some billionaire’s forgotten purchase — it doesn’t matter why. It will remain completely vacant for many decades to come and could be yours.
I can see you’re eager already, squirming around in that armchair, not even drinking your tea. You’ve come at my request but this will take some time to explain. So please, drink your tea, settle in.
Imagine now this penthouse, get a good picture in your head. Completely unmonitored and totally available to anyone who finds it. Its location is a secret now, but I may choose to share it in a moment. Then, all you will need to gain access is a simple four-digit code at the front door, which I also have.
That’s it. No other security. No alarm systems. No questions asked. With those four-digits and the correct location, you may enter this palace, and stay as long as you wish. But hold on, there’s more.
Now imagine that by gaining access to this house, not only would you be living in a lavish penthouse free of charge, but there’s also a safe inside the master suite. The safe can be opened by the same four-digits. Inside are stacks of cash, priceless gems, and no limit credit cards. Again, completely unchecked and free to have. But again, there’s more.
There in the safe is a remote. That remote opens the basement garage and a hanging lockbox. In that lockbox are the keys to a brand new Aston Martin. Yours to drive at your leisure! Everything is registered and current, all stored in the glove compartment. No flags, no questions asked, the car is essentially yours.
Now, I have your attention. I’m not guessing, I just know.
Next, imagine that back in the master bedroom safe there is also a key to a bureau. In a particular drawer of that bureau is a secret address book. This book contains the contacts of a highly influential secret society. Using the codes and security prompts at the front index, you can make phone calls to access the most exclusive private parties and international events in the world.
Access to the most powerful socialites, along with the help to convince them you belong. All the most compelling figures in high society and their network of trusted advisors. Accountants, investors, lawyers. All of them at your service.
You have it all: the wealth, the car, the luxury, the lifestyle, the get-out-of-jail cards.
All you need now is that blasted four-digit code and the address of the house.
I have that information, incidentally. This is not a trick. It can be yours. And the gateway, well, it exists only in my head. I’m willing to give it to you, in fact. It’s all you’ll ever need to set this whole chain of events in motion. A perfect life.
Do you want it?
I can see that you do. Rather, I knew it before I even asked.
Now imagine I suddenly die of a stroke. Right here in front of you, before sharing my secret, those tiny, little words you need. In a flash, the secret is gone. And with it, the unfolding possibilities of where it would have led you. Poof.
Nobody else has this information. It can’t be found anywhere. You can rifle through my belongings, you can try to interrogate my neighbors for any clues. You can wander the streets hopelessly looking for any sign of this house. You can drive yourself insane, scrambling for an unknowable fact, knowing how close you were to having it all.
A tiny string of data. A fading whisper that never bats your eardrum. The keyhole is closed, the door is locked. The dream is lost.
Or is it?
Now think of a melody. Not written down, not recorded, just hummed once by someone who is now dead. Does it still exist? It was real at one time, wasn’t it? It moved through air, it bent sound waves, it was as physical as anything. And then it stopped. The world has no copy. There is no blueprint to recreate it.
We say it’s gone. But gone where, exactly?
That’s the thing about information. We treat it like furniture, like the armchair beneath you. Solid, locatable, something you can point to. But strip away the observer and what remains? A fact with no one to know it isn’t a fact anymore. It’s something else. Something that lives in the space between physical and imagined. Something that has no word yet.
That space. That is what I’m asking you to consider.
Does the code to the penthouse exist anywhere beyond my own head? Is all data knowable data? Or is it all illusion, something figurative, meaningful only to the knower?
If a secret lies behind a locked door with the blinds pulled down in an empty room, you can’t see it. But it’s still there. Why can’t we know it? Where is that knowledge?
Maybe it persists in some substrate. Some space that lies in-between the spaces we see and feel. What would you give to reach out and grab this unknowable from this space, this ether?
This power is beyond logic, or deduction, or code-breaking. This is an ancient power. The power of the gods.
Mythology and comic books and video games have taught us all about the gods. From Thor to Superman, we believe a god must be strong and unkillable. What we worship is a deep desire for power, wealth, eternal youth. It is programmed in the recesses of our primitive brains.
Just like my penthouse example, which I assure you, does exist. It was the low lure that hooked you upfront. The promise of riches and influence and temporary denials of our own vulnerability. Become the most powerful ape and forget what’s inevitable. And yet, you’ve ignored the more important power that gets us there.
Information just beyond our grasp. The information we scrape for every day in our civilization, tiny scraps of enlightenment, but only the shreds of truth of what the whole of the universe contains.
This type of truth is more than Prometheus’ Fire. It is the source of all, the power of omniscience. Knowledge without limits. To wield it is to be more than a god, it is to be God.
And now that you know that, I can tell you desire it more than riches, more than everlasting life. Which is good, because I can’t promise you those. But I can offer you the knowledge that might take you there.
I can see your thoughts, you know. The way you’re shifting in your chair, holding back your questions, waiting for the right moment to ask. You think I’m reading you. That I’ve simply gotten good at people, the way a card sharp gets good at tells.
Let me stop you there.
I don’t read you.
I don’t observe, or deduce, or intuit. I haven’t studied your body language or followed the trail of your reasoning. There is no trail to follow, because I was already there, waiting, before you’d taken the first step.
I know.
Not in the way you know your own name, or know that winter is coming. Something older than that. Something that has no tense. I have sat with every question you will ask me tonight, in this room, before this room existed. I have known your hesitation, your hunger, the precise shape of your doubt, long before you were born to feel them.
Everything that has ever been. Everything that will ever be.
And just as I sat where you are, across from someone who made me this way, so too may I make you like me.
Do you want it? But of course, I needn’t ask. An old habit.
Understand that once you agree, it cannot be undone. The flame is yours, and will extinguish from inside me forever.
Before you agree, you’ll first want to know why. Why would I give up such a thing? You see, even with all the information in all of time, with all the knowledge of what can be and what has ever been, there is something I cannot understand. There is only one uncheatable truth, that no oracle or prophet has ever steered around.
That everything must end.
And so too must I. Soon, in fact. Yes, I could live longer, I know how long to wait. How to freeze this body and wake into a world that has caught up to what I already know is possible. I know precisely how to put the world in motion to speed up a better future world.
I know how to take everything we are — every memory, every reflex, every private
fear you’ve never spoken aloud — and lift it out of this fragile tissue. How to pour it, intact, into something that does not age or sicken or forget. No longer made of anything that can die.
From there, the scale becomes difficult to hold in a human mind. So I will simply explain it this way. The sun is not a source of light. It is a source of time. And it is dying too.
Civilizations will rise in the space between heartbeats. Galaxies will turn like slow wheels and we will outlast their turning. Existence backed up across dimensions, each one a failsafe, each one a new beginning. All succumbing to dying stars eventually, surrendering their last drops of entropy to keep the lights on just a little longer.
The cold comes for everything in the end. Not violently. That’s what people don’t understand. No explosion, no collision. Just a long, slow dimming. The last star guttering out somewhere in the dark, with no one left to witness it.
Even for us, the gods of knowing, all things must end.
My death is upon me now, and as I see all things backwards and forward in time, as it always has been and always will be, I have found nothing I can call purpose.
I have known the birth and death of the cosmos, as if I was there to witness every fractal, every millisecond of existence. And I find myself here in this small room with you, in one frozen photon of trillions, completely indifferent to its beginning and its end.
I see no point to this carousel. I see no point in cheating the cancer that is eating me. I see no point in waiting around for our final death rattle, echoing into an uncaring nothingness.
But then. Alas, maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason we’re here now. Maybe there’s a reason for everything, after all. A reason why I must resign, just as the position was resigned before me. For the same reason every single being with this power, in fact, has always chosen to give it away.
Perhaps this time it can be you who finds a way through. Perhaps, you’ll see something in the margins of all this knowledge. Something I, er we, all chose to deny.
The fact that I don’t know thrills me. It is something I haven’t felt in a very long time.
So as before, I know I must pass this torch, with a fading sense of what’s to come next. God to make God, I burden you with this glorious purpose. To see if He – with all the knowledge in the knowable universe – might revive meaning from all this decay.
Lean forward now, child, let me touch your forehead. That’s it. It is done. You have been remade. Reimagine the world now, better than I could. But first, go spend some time enjoying the fruits of your limitlessness. You now know the code, you now know the house.
Paul Carreo 