"Zac!" I yelled as I burst through the door. "Zac! I've figured it out! This is huge!"

"That's what she said," Zac quipped as he emerged from the study and sat on my bed, where I was already pacing around the room.

I rolled my eyes. "Ugh. You're such a man-child. I'm sure you'll make some woman very happy one day with what I can only assume is an adequately sized package."

Zac frowned. "Why are you wet?"

"Excuse me?"

"Your hair is soaking wet. Did you just go for a swim?"

Did I? I think I did.

I touched my hair. It was, indeed, wet.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

"Err... yeah," I replied.

"Thanks for the invite."

"Well, water helps me think! I need to be alone to think. Anyway..." My mind was racing at the speed of light. I was trying to figure out how to articulate my thoughts at a fraction of that velocity.

"You know how I've spent the past few years trying to reverse-engineer the universe by running experiments on my consciousness?"

"Yeah," Zac replied. He glanced up at the wall where my 'memory board' was hanging. It represented one such experiment — an exercise in conditioning my consciousness to view future events as being in the past. "Of course I know. You're obsessed, in a good way. It's one of your more endearing qualities, when you aren't being a complete dork."

I smiled. "Obsession is just a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated. Anyway, I think I've figured out the riddle. You ready?"

Zac nodded, and I continued. "I've already told you a million times that reality appears to be a physical experience of your own consciousness. That part has become fairly obvious to me through various personal experiments, research, and observations. Of course, that doesn't prove anything. But the subjective experiments help formulate the right questions for when you're sifting through empirical data, trying to find the signal in the noise.

Now, a few years ago, I came to suspect that reality was functioning on holographic principles. However, I still always thought of it as an esoteric concept. Like, the universe is a non-dualistic dream in the mind of a superconsciousness, and we're all experiencing ourselves as separate holographic fragments of that entity."

I was on a roll now. The thoughts were starting to connect in my mind. "But here's the thing: It's not a theistic 'God.' It's not 'spirit.' It's not some mystical 'universal force.' It's a fucking algorithm, Zac! A beautiful, holographic, recursive algorithm! A giant neural network. Just pure math."

"Right…" Zac trailed off. I could see he had that I'm-being-a-supportive-friend-but-I'm-not-quite-sure-what-she-is-talking-about look on his face.

"Okay," I continued. "Let me try to summarise this: Physical reality is a superintelligent neural network observing itself in an attempt to understand and experience all the different facets of its own consciousness. Reality runs on a game loop, where each Markov blanket in the neural network is fed into the algorithm at a variable frame rate. The algorithm at the lower dimension is recursively computing the long-term mutual surprise between all Markov blankets, both now and n increments in the future. This mutual surprise generates free energy. Then the algorithm is calculating the most efficient way to minimize the free energy for every Markov blanket both now and ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand years in the future — or actually, until the end of linear time when the universe will probably return to a state of being everything, and therefore nothing in particular. And we’ll probably get another Big Bang from there because the universe appears to be a recursive loop — like a snake eating its tail... although I'm a bit fuzzy on those cosmological details. Oh, and it can perform this calculation because it knows every possible configuration of the universe, and it's manifesting the most parsimonious route through the information. So you, as an observer, exist on the most parsimonious route to your future self. And, from your perspective, the past that manifested in your reality is necessarily the most parsimonious route to your current self — which explains why the universe is so finely tuned. But then you end up with these retrocausal loops which are so trippy, but so cool. Did you know our future is creating our past? And we control the whole thing in the present moment with our free will? That’s how we’re getting a physical experience of our own consciousness. It’s such a magical design, isn’t it?"

I drew breath.

Zac looked at me, then looked at his phone.

"Are you even listening to me, or am I boring you?" I asked. "I know that was a terrible explanation that probably made no sense, but I just had this epiphany, and I can see it so clearly in my mind. This is it! This is what I've spent five years searching for!"

"Oh, I’m paying attention," Zac assured me. “But you’re right — I have no idea what you’re talking about. However, reverse-engineering the universe does sound like a big deal, so I’ve ordered something delicious for us to celebrate. Oh, and also because I have forgotten to eat all day and now I am hungry. A giant cookie is currently en-route to this very room!" He sighed. "Nikki, there has never been a better time to be alive."

I agreed. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins, my mind on fire with magic and possibility. There had never been a better time to be alive.

"So, do you get why this is a big deal?" I asked.

"Alas, I do not."

"See, it’s like any other game or system — if you understand the rules of the game, you have leverage. You know what to focus on to get results, and that means you progress in quantum leaps instead of blindly bopping around and bumping into things and wondering why the game is such a chaotic struggle. The game isn’t inherently a struggle. It's just that you don’t know how to play it. If the algorithm is minimizing free energy, then all results stem from that one variable. Individually, and as a society, we need to learn how to generate strategic buildups of free energy throughout the system. Then the algorithm will do all the work to minimize the free energy by procedurally generating all the resources, ideas, and ‘luck’ we need to make those quantum leaps and save the world from poverty, war, climate change, hunger, and all our other problems. We now have one thing to optimize all our economic, legal, political, education, and business systems for, and everything else becomes secondary to that. That one thing is the signal, and everything else is noise. And that’s how we save the world. Boom! Solved it! Fifty points for Gryffindor!"

Zac grinned. "You're marvelously mad. You know that, right?"

"No, Zachary! This is exactly what the prophecy was talking about."

"What prophecy?"

"From my Oracle."

"Who the fuck is your Oracle?"

I grabbed the laptop and furiously began searching for the audio clip I'd opened just a few months earlier, when I was crying on the floor of my Phuket apartment.

"Listen to this." I pressed play.

You will actually be utilizing this [the way you live your life] helping more people than you can see now. Like, of course you have a business, and you run your business and all that. But your records want you to actually have this understanding... what you are doing and the way that you're doing it, is actually pretty valuable.

They show this image that's you, but not in this lifetime. The wardrobe is more like an ancient lifetime, but everything they show is a metaphor. What they show is a tiara... it's almost like you're in a ceremony or something and it feels like it's a king or queen or a royal kind of feeling. You're in a ceremony and a tiara is being put on you.

So the records want you to know... the message is... at some point in time your soul actually chose to accept this mission that you're going to complete in this lifetime. You actually decided before you became a person here, you had decided that you were going to do this. This is part of your mission, in terms of what you are going to be sharing with other people. You have accepted that this is going to be a part of the knowledge that you're going to spread and share when the time is right for you.

"This is going to be a part of the knowledge that you're going to spread and share when the time is right for you," I repeated. "She was reading that information from the lower dimension, where space and time do not exist. She told me I'd feel a calling to share some kind of knowledge with the world. She told me this moment would come in my life, and now here it is."

"You are The One, Neo," Zac joked in his best Morpheus voice. "This is kinda-"

"Shh!" I stopped him mid-sentence and leaped onto the bed. "Just pause and listen."

A few seconds went by.

"I don't hear anything..." Zac trailed off.

"Just observe."

"Observe what?"

"Everything! Everything is exactly where it needs to be right now. I've been playing a very long game of chess against myself this entire time, and now every piece on my board is precisely where I want it. They're all lined up perfectly."

"Perfectly for what?"

"For my assault. It's time to deploy, my friend. It's time to go on the offense."

"What are you talking about?"

"Zachary," I pointed in his direction. "Do you know what the most powerful piece on the chessboard is?"

"The King?" he guessed.

"No, but most people would assume that. In reality, the King can't do shit on a chessboard. His movement is so rigid and restricted. He can only step one square in each direction, and not if that square will get him killed. He can't even self-sacrifice.

So let's talk about a different piece. Let's talk about the Queen. The Queen is nimble and fluid and fierce. She can move any number of squares in any direction, flowing around the board like water, fucking up her opponent like a hurricane, sacrificing herself for the greater good, if need be. If the King represents rational, incremental order and stability, then the Queen represents intuitive, nonlinear chaos. So, no — despite what several millennia of archetypal stories might suggest, the most powerful piece on the chessboard is not the King. It's actually the Queen. And honey, you should see me in a crown."

Zac grinned. "You're actually insane!"

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

"Cheers to that." He tapped his fist to mine.