The Plaque in the Room

Before you is a nondescript door that opens into an equally nondescript room. On the far wall at about eye level is a plaque with a written engraving, henceforth referred to as the Inscription. The Inscription can be extremely long or remarkably short, but it is finite in length. The plaque can be as large as needed to accommodate the Inscription, and the room will similarly accommodate the size of the plaque. There is a handheld telescope near the door to help you read whatever is beyond your natural reading distance. Only one person is allowed inside at a time. The unknown author of the Inscription—let us refer to them as the Plaquesmith—is nowhere to be found. In fact, no one has ever met this Plaquesmith, and their existence is simply presumed from the existence of the plaque.

For reasons that cannot be known and therefore do not matter, the Plaquesmith wants to induce some behavior in you, which we will call the Act. The Act can always be attempted, but may be trivially easy or impossibly hard, done privately or in public, and considered legal or illegal depending on jurisdiction. The Act could be an atomic instruction, like jogging one mile, or a more sustained behavior, like always playing some instrument at least five minutes daily for a certain period, possibly the rest of your life. You have no hint as to what the Act could be prior to entering the room, and at best can infer the Act from the Inscription, though this isn’t guaranteed to be possible. Furthermore, even a supposedly apparent ask within the Inscription may in fact be a red herring as to what the Act is—or not. Again, nothing is guaranteed. Finally, it is common knowledge that the Plaquesmith doesn't interact whatsoever with the world outside the room, physically or communicatively. A hypothetical Inscription could threaten to, say, harm a loved one in order to compel you to Act, but you know intellectually the threat carries no weight, agnostic of its emotional impact.

There is one rule that must be obeyed if one is to enter the room: you must read the Inscription in its entirety—with full attention, without distraction—at least once. You are fully literate and thus the Inscription is not inaccessible to you in that way, but its content may include grand truths, half-truths, complete fictions, brazen lies, stories both captivating and dull, questions both sincere and rhetorical, requests, commands, allegories, metaphors, poetry, prose, brilliant arguments, utter nonsense, humor of all sorts, and anything else in the wide realm of mortal language. The Plaquesmith may use any alphabet, symbol, character, diacritic, emoji, etc. as long as the final Inscription is, again, intelligible to you. For example, the Plaquesmith won’t inscribe in Spanish if, for you, it is an unfamiliar tongue, save for perhaps an imported word you know or something that can be inferred or explained from context. You may read out loud or in silence. Once completed, you must exit the room. There is nothing else remarkable about you, the room, or the situation.

There is no promised prize, money, or status for entering the room and returning. Regardless, countless people have gone inside and read their custom-made Inscription as stipulated by the rules of the situation. Upon exiting, their observed lives have been astonishingly varied. Some continued on in a manner indiscernible from how they lived prior, at least from surface appearances. Some seem to have upended their lives all together, as if transformed by their experience. Most lay somewhere in between—whether behaving in an unrecognizable manner for some amount of time before settling back into their old persona, or living an innocuous life until a great amount of time has passed, at which point they did something completely unexpected. More interestingly, if one were to interview all entrants of the room, many would seemingly admit that the Inscription made them do something. Many would also seem to fervently deny the Inscription affected them at all. To the extent any causality is believed, it has ever only been postulated, not proven.

Nestled in this debate is the nature of the Plaquesmith themself, who has garnered a reputation as someone that had written these Inscriptions with what can only be named omniscience. Unfortunately for a curious public wanting to investigate these claims, the only way to know what a particular Inscription said is to ask the corresponding participant and hope they willingly—and truthfully—give their testimony. Not all do.

All alleged Inscriptions as testified by their only known reader are continuously compiled by volunteers into an unending tome called the Anthology, a book of which that has come to have its own influence, despite its secondhand nature. Linguists, theologians, psychologists, philosophers, many learned others, and members of the general public pore over the voluminous and rather incoherent text.

An area of great inquiry has been to catalog what the Act is for each Inscription. Sometimes the Act is deducible from the Inscription alone, though more often is the case that the observed behavior of the corresponding entrant is used as a critical clue. The Acts—or, what are believed to be the Acts—are obviously impossible for one person to do, and in fact subsets of them contradict each other. Nonetheless, various blueprints for how to live one's life have been put forth by all sorts of individuals—gurus, salespeople, politicians, self-help coaches, cult leaders, and more. Sustaining all these practices is an almost fundamentalist belief that the Acts, once distilled into yet-to-be found edicts, encode the true intent of the Plaquesmith—and their ultimate ask of humanity.

Many who have studied the Anthology have been affected in ways not dissimilar to those who originally entered the room. Believed to be a dangerous—indeed, radicalizing—artifact, governments worldwide have banned its distribution. Some states have gone further, persecuting all involved in the text's dissemination—from the book-binders to the original entrants themselves.

In light of all the happenings involving the room, people continue to go. There are those who go to demonstrate it's all a farce. There are others still that go out of hopes to be "remade" somehow. Most go out of sheer curiosity. Whatever their views or motivations, a strange sort of pilgrimage has emerged for a significant segment of society, with the room as its holy site, the Plaquesmith as its deity, and a folly few hoping to become a chosen prophet.

Before you is a nondescript door that opens into an equally nondescript room.

Would you enter?