Chapter 2

He filled his pipe and lit it. He drew a deep breath, held the smoke in his lungs for a moment, then slowly exhaled. As the smoke rose languidly through the darkness of the room, the thought in his mind began to change shape along with it.

If the laws of physics held even at the beginning of the universe, then God would have had no freedom to choose the initial conditions. The idea drifted into the air with the suspended cigarette smoke. When the air cleared, he found himself staring into his own reflection in the mirror. He watched himself for a while. Then, as though someone else were sitting across from him, he asked:

“How much freedom did God have to choose when creating the universe? Before God determined the laws of the universe and pressed the start button, what laws was He Himself subject to?”

There was no answer. Worse still, the question itself rested on uncertain ground. In a model where time, space, and the laws of physics came into existence with the universe, what did it mean to ask what had existed before the universe? If time did not yet exist, what could the word before refer to? The very concepts he invoked to explain God’s existence lost their meaning the moment he began to question that existence.

Did the universal laws that allowed complex structures such as human beings—capable of questioning both their own existence and the nature of God—to emerge have no effect on God?

But what truly troubled X was not whether God was subject to gravity. The real question was whether any being could be exempt from the rules it had established for itself. The existence of a lawgiver did not prove that it could stand outside its own laws.

X drew one last breath from his pipe. The ember he left in the ashtray flared for a moment in the darkness, then went out.

As he lay down, one final question slipped between his lips:

Was the human mind condemned, in its search for the beginning of everything, to chase its own tail forever within an endless chain of causes?

When X closed his eyes, the clock on the wall continued to divide the seconds. Somewhere in a corner of the universe, a star was dying; life persisted on worlds its light had yet to reach; distant galaxies sank into their own darkness, needing no witness. Nothing diminished because a human being was falling asleep. Nothing paused to ensure that he continued to exist.

Amid this indifference, X’s consciousness quietly faded. It left no trace behind, no void to announce its absence. The mind that had been contemplating the secrets of the universe only moments before was now unaware of its own existence.

Humanity’s greatest delusion was to mistake having a place within the universe for having meaning to it.

The universe’s delusion, meanwhile, was that it had yet to realize that one of the most consequential events in its own history had already begun.