It was the first time Dr. Derek pulled an all-nighter. With the new arrival of a supercomputer at his science lab, he had been able to calculate countless digits of the irrational number pi, and he had been using it to find strings of numbers coincidentally clumped together to indicate some meaning of why pi was that exact number. He had first fumbled around, searching for strings of digits like 000000 or 12345, and it seemed like every number he tried to find was hidden somewhere in that number.

The deeper he searched, the more impressive the number got. Every single birthday could be mapped by the number, weather patterns in numerical form in the last billion years, neural maps of brains, and beyond the 10^23rd digit, the seemingly random string of numbers contained the digit form of the DNA of every single living thing, alive or extinct. Derek supposed that since pi is infinitely random, theoretically, it has to be possible that after putting a string of digits from pi into graphical order, it could map out the entire observable universe, as well as things that didn’t even exist in our universe.

They say when you memorize a number so large that it can’t be written in the space of the observable universe, your brain physically collapses into a black hole. Derek experienced something similar. So captivated by the number, his brain escaped reality, and he was put in an endless room filled with bookshelves and glowing books.

Each book contained a figment of pi, and every single thing that existed was somewhere in the bookshelves. The room was as dark as a void, and when he went up to touch the book, it turned into some sort of memory in his brain. He smelled a sort of heavenliness, as in these books was every secret to exist, every particle, every person. And in the center of the bookshelves was a golden glowing book.
“Don’t look for meaning in the number. The number is the meaning.”