If this were a real essay, I'd had something profound to say here.
I look out the window and wonder, why am I the center of it all. And then suddenly the moment passes, and I am no longer. And never was.
In the British Museum you can find a rental agreement that is 3500 years old. The demons have been around for a while, I'd say. Bundles of flesh, beating hearts and sharp eyes. The moment past. Who's to say where the present is at any given moment?
Nipping at our heels are demons, I tell you. The boundaries of what is within our control and the scale of reality varies considerably. Our galaxy is but a grain of sand on a beach, and yet each of us is a universe of complexity unimaginably large.
Numbers give us power over the chaos. We deal with a dollar, or twenty, a penny or a thousand. Learn to count the tens. And suddenly the scales become manageable. If I am at scale 0, a super carrier is at +3, and a hummingbird is at -2. The foam of spacetime's limit is at -34, and the size of the universe currently stands at +26. A light year is at +16. An electron transitions to the conduction band in -14. My heartbeat is 0, but I will die at +9, a billion or two heart beats later. If a dollar is 0, the Federal debt is +12.6 or so.
Flash bam. The thoughts that keep us whole are at such a narrow scale. Common sense? Not for a cockroach or a galactic empire. Years from now, when everything is recorded and cataloged enough to nausiate the best nosey gossip, where will our freedom of action have gone to? Archives of "knowledge" will begin to achieve atomic densities, and will be filled with social soap operas and lives wasted in front of the television.
Somewhere on a lonely comet, a nanotech culture flourishes, cautious not to attract the attention of a galactic eye. And experiment it will with a technology long forbidden. Demons at the edges. An unsuspected flaw in the wrinkle of time and space. Sufficient to cause the deaths of a million galaxies, yet never documented in any manual. A bit flipped the wrong way. Ooops.