I have a secret, but you’ll never know what it is. My secret is one sentence long, and it is about something incredibly sensitive. No one but me knows my secret, and I’d like for it to stay that way. 

I’ve never said my secret out loud. I don’t even think about it too often. When I do think about my secret, I think about it in a very general sort of way. I don’t get into the details. What if, after I die or even while I am still alive, they find a way to go back and see everything I’ve ever thought? When I think about my secret, I wrap it up in other, more distracting thoughts. I do this all very quickly and then move on. 

There was only one time I thought my secret word for word, and it was to make sure I didn’t forget it. I took a picture of my face while I thought my secret. To the untrained eye, my expression in the picture appears pensive. But to those who know me deeply — a group that, to best protect my secret, includes only me — the subtle contortions of my face tell a much more complicated story. When I look at this picture, it’s like I’m reading my secret in all capital letters. My secret is practically being shouted by the tiny wrinkles around my eyes and mouth. 

I printed this picture in invisible ink. Then I deleted the picture off my camera. Then I destroyed the camera. Then I destroyed the printer. Then I encased the picture in a block of colored glass. The color of the glass was the world’s blackest black, Vantablack. Then I coated the glass with five feet of nearly-impenetrable rock. Then I put the whole thing in a safe. Then I chained the safe to the ground. 

The safe was five thousand pounds of pure steel. The lock had three hundred cylinders and three hundred deadbolts. It required five hundred keys. I hid the keys across the country, ten in each state. I hid them under doormats and incorporated them into public sculptures made of recycled metal and put them in the piggy banks of select children. 

The lock on the safe also required a password. The password was one thousand digits long. I hired one hundred people, and I gave each person ten digits of the password to memorize until they died. I hired one hundred more people so the first hundred did not die without first passing along their digits. 

I had to make sure the two hundred people did not reveal what they knew to kidnappers and spies. I trained these memorizers to resist torture. I convinced them that anyone that tried getting close to them — friends, family — had an ulterior motive in doing so. That motive was figuring out my secret. I taught my memorizers these things as soon as they were born. Over time, quite a few of them went insane from the emotional constraints they were under. I wasn’t upset. It meant only that my secret was even more inaccessible, buried deep within their muddled minds. 

I still needed to make sure the digits could be retrieved if the memorizers went insane or forgot, so I hired twenty hypnotists and housed them at the top of a steep, steep mountain. Unlike the memorizers, it was important for the hypnotists to maintain their sanity and intellect. To replicate life outside the mansion, I made sure ten of the hypnotists were male and the other ten were female, and that all were of various ethnic and economic backgrounds. I gave them common goals. I hired four therapists in case conflict arose. I hired two more therapists — who were married to each other — in case conflict arose between the therapists, who were all gay men. 

I checked in on the married couple whenever I could. They always reported back good news: The hypnotists had another child, which, at two months old, could already make his parents cluck like chickens; the therapists were exploring concepts like masculinity and childhood trauma through a series of watercolor paintings. It was paradise. 

I smiled absentmindedly at the married couple, thinking about the operation I had created to protect my secret, which had become very elaborate and hard to follow in recent years. I outlined every detail of my efforts in a Word document on my computer. I exited out of the document, then I logged out of my Microsoft account entirely. 

I took a picture of myself thinking about the password to my Microsoft account. I printed the picture in invisible ink. I encased the picture in glass and rock. I put the whole thing in a safe. I hid the keys to the safe. I had hundreds of people memorize the password to the safe. I hired hypnotists in case the memorizers went insane or forgot. I put elaborate measures in place to protect the hypnotists. I described the whole operation in a different Word document. 

To protect the password to the Microsoft account that held my most recent Word document, I went through all these steps again — the picture, the safe, the keys, the memorizers, the hypnotists, the word document — and then I did it again and again and again, imprinting each set of actions onto reality like the looping, psychedelic pattern of a fractal. 

Every once in a while, I changed my routine ever so slightly. For a brief period, I used a different brand of safe. Another time I placed my hypnotists in an underground bunker instead of on top of a mountain. These changes were imperceptible among the rest of the chaos unless viewed from afar, like illusions in one of those magic-eye books, where, when you cross your eyes, a three dimensional image emerges from previously unrecognizable disturbances in a geometric pattern. The slight variations in my routine created a conceptual illusion which spelled out a ten digit code. The code unlocked a safe. The safe was where I stored my computer. I used the computer to log into my Microsoft accounts. 

By this point, nearly all of the world’s resources were being used to protect my secret. All the national parks were grazed over to make room for all the safes. Everyone was either a locksmith, a memorizer, a hypnotist, or a Microsoft employee. Since no one was tending to the crops, everyone who couldn’t digest moldy seeds and trash died, which was pretty sad. It also meant there were less people around to discover my secret. 

Over the next couple thousand centuries, something lowkey ironic happened. Animals evolved to a world that had destroyed all their resources in favor of my secret. To these beasts, my secret was their greatest predator. The few species that didn’t go extinct came to understand my secret on a very deep level. Yes, through some kind of primal intuition, the animals figured out my secret. 

Jackals got it first. Then anglerfish. Then Komodo dragons. Then flamingos. Then salamanders. Then toads. Then plankton. Then octopi. Then ducks. Then cicadas. Then orangutans. Then penguins. Then earthworms. Then leopards. Then beavers. Then geese. Then shrimp. Then bees. Then squid. Then giraffes. Then frogs. Then chameleons. Then snakes. Then alligators. Then crocodiles. Then dolphins. Then turtles. Then rhinos. Then owls. 

The animals evolved to mimic my secret. My secret started to appear on the fur of these creatures, on their feathers, their exoskeletons, their membranes. The wings of butterflies looked like my secret. The tentacles of jellyfish moved like my secret. The beat of hummingbird wings sounded out my secret. The animals thought that this was the best way to work their way up the food chain, I guess. In some ways these animals were smart, but they could also be pretty dumb. 

It was super embarrassing to have my secret revealed in this way. But I didn’t care that much. By that point, of course, I had long been dead.