Rare! Unique! Limited Offer! Hurry Now!

To set up, maintain, and upgrade the computer system necessary to study the solar system and all its inhabitants requires a giganthumongenormous power grid. The LHC is a battery-powered picoflashlight in comparison.

Of course, operating such gear in any locality attracts the attention of authorities interested in seeing if there's something worth investigating.

I'm not interested in attracting attention.

My goal is to connect this moment to a moment generations from now.

Thus, necessity is the itch I scratch to solve the problem inherent in invention.

How to hire a bunch of hardware and software design types to build a system so complex that it dwarfs itself in its replication phase? How to make this system transparent? How to keep the hamster cages running so that those who run the factory don't know they're in a factory? How to hide all this in plain sight?

Douglas Adams was on the right track. Will Rogers wrote 10,000 entries to tell the story but nobody was listening to what he meant. Martin Luther King, Jr., thought that Gandhi had put Confucius' words in a straight line.

And then a stranger handed me this book. The only one of its kind, she told me. The book that has all the questions that will ever be asked. And by listing all the questions, the answers are found in the wording.

Thing is, I can't read this book. In fact, it's not a book, not the way I see a book, anyway. It's more like a geode. A volcanic burp frozen in time.

Do you read rock? I don't mean rock-and-roll chord progressions or rock lyrics. I mean actual rock, the stuff of paved roads and mountains.

So far, I've figured out only one question: "What if you could power the world on invisibility?" From that question, I worked with my engineers and scientists to capture the unlimited radon gas under my house and created a radon power reactor. So now the authorities have no interest in a modest home in a random housing estate in a generic suburban neighbourhood.

Of course, I've got this nagging cough and I'm on my third set of replacement lungs, the first two sets eaten up by cancer (allegedly caused by radiation) but at least I'm getting the data I need to put the wisdom together to solve the rest of the questions this book poses.

Here I sit, a crystal ball, the Book of the Future, an organic self-replicating computing system, and the geode of infinite questions beside me. I know what you're going to do, how and when you're going to do it. I have no worries, mate. I have all the time in the world. I know what you think you know about what you haven't thought about yet.

And the beauty I see each and every moment? I have all the power and no need to use it for personal gain. I already know what's going to happen so I don't have to try to overcome what the next moment brings. We will do what we will do. There is order in our chaos as seen in what the Book of the Future tells me about the past. The growing computing system tells me more and more about the details between now and then. The crystal ball reveals random events that give me points to verify along the imaginary timeline of life. The new book, the geode, tells me what I should ask myself next.

I'm just this guy, living next-door to other people who are living next-door to me. Points on a line. Nodes in a web. Ghostlike apparitions formed of temporary energy levels in the guise of what we believe are species.

Do you know how to hold a neutrino in your hand or look down the path of a cosmic ray? Do you know what is there that we haven't yet seen? Can you imagine yourself not existing while you live your whole life in a society of the rest of us who don't exist? At the same time treating this life as the only thing you've got in the moment, enjoying your interaction with others and going confidently about your daily tasks regardless of your current situation?

Of course you do. You know you can. You're the number one bestselling book about you, full of words and free of words at the same time. Speeding up, slowing down, unexpected plot twists and subplots filling the moment. A page turner you don't want to put down. Worth reading again and again. Ready to option the sequels and the spinoffs. A masterpiece on the head of a pin.