My name is Josephe Salzano and I am 78 years old and the maternal grandfather of St.

Carlo Autis who was officially canonized by Pope Francis on October 15th, 2023 during a historic ceremony that gathered more than 600,000 pilgrims in St.

Peter’s Square. And for 18 years, I have kept in absolute secrecy the most extraordinary and devastating conversation of my life, which consists of the words, “My grandson Carlo entrusted to me exactly 14 days before his death when he was only 15 years old and revealed to me something that would forever change my understanding of holiness, sacrifice, and the divine purpose behind human suffering.

I have decided to break this silence today, October 12th, 2024 from my home in Milan.

Driven by a specific event that Carlo himself predicted nearly two decades ago. I worked for 45 years as an industrial engineer at Fiat in Trin, a profession that shaped my mind to value logic, tangible evidence, and structural integrity above all else.

I was always a traditional Catholic, attending Sunday mass and respecting the sacraments, but I was never particularly devout nor prone to mysticism.

My faith was like the chassis of a car, necessary, structural, but not something I spent hours admiring.

My relationship with Carlo, however, was the anomaly in my structured existence. From his birth, he was my first grandchild, and he possessed a combination of youthful normaly and spiritual depth that fascinated me even before I could fully comprehend it.

Between 2004 and 2006, the final years of his brief life, Carlo and I spent every Sunday together at my house in Milan.

These were simple afternoons where the generational gap was bridged by mutual curiosity. He would teach me about computers, the internet, and video editing with a patience that was rare for a teenager.

And in return, I would tell him stories about our family history and the war or explain the mechanics of engines.

He was a completely normal adolescent who played football, loved video games, had a sweet tooth, and joked with his friends.

Yet, there was a stillness in him, a sort of calibrated peace that I could sense but not name.

I never imagined that during our last private conversation on September 28th, 2006, exactly 2 weeks before the first symptoms of the fulminant leukemia that would kill him appeared, he would entrust me with a secret so heavy that it has taken me 18 years to find the courage to reveal it publicly.

It was a Thursday afternoon late in September. The air in Milan was beginning to turn crisp, signaling the end of summer.

We were in my garage, a place that smelled of oil, old rubber, and dust, working together to repair an old bicycle that had belonged to his mother, Antonia, during her own childhood.

I remember the scene with photographic clarity, the sunlight filtering through the small high window, dancing on the dust moes, the metallic clinking of the wrench as I tightened a bolt, and Carlo kneeling beside me, grease smudged on his cheek, wearing his usual polo shirt and jeans.

We were discussing the gear mechanism when Carlos suddenly stopped working. The silence that filled the garage was not the comfortable silence we usually shared.

It was heavy, charged with a sudden, inexplicable gravity. I looked up from the wheel rim to see him staring at me.

His expression was devoid of the usual playful spark. Instead, his eyes held a seriousness that seemed far too ancient for a 15-year-old boy.

He placed his hand on my forearm, his grip firm and warm, and said something that made the blood freeze in my veins.

“No, no,” he said, his voice steady and calm. “I need to tell you something very important, something you cannot tell anyone, not even mom, until after I have died.”

My first reaction was a nervous laugh. The instinctive defense mechanism of an adult faced with adolescent drama.

I thought perhaps he was in trouble at school or had broken something valuable. But Carlo did not smile.

He waited for my nervous chuckle to die down, his gaze never wavering from mine.

I am going to die in exactly 2 weeks, he continued, the words hanging in the air like smoke.

I will die on October 12th, which is the same day the Virgin Mary appeared for the last time in Fatima in 1917.

My death will not be an accident. And it will not be a tragedy. It will be a voluntary offering that God has asked me to make to save specific souls who without my sacrifice would be lost forever.

I dropped the wrench. It clattered loudly against the concrete floor, the sound echoing sharply in the small space.

I stared at him, my mind racing to find a logical explanation. Was he depressed?

Was this some morbid joke he had picked up from the internet? I tried to interrupt him, to scold him for speaking of such terrible things when he was perfectly healthy, a vibrant boy in the prime of his youth.

Carlo raised a hand gently to stop my protest. “No, no, please listen,” he said, and the authority in his voice silenced me.

Since I was 12 years old, I have known exactly when and how I am going to die.

God revealed everything to me in a vision I had during Eucharistic adoration at the parish of Santa Maria Seaga.

He then proceeded to describe the vision with the clinical precision of a doctor, a contrast to his age that was terrifying to witness.

He told me he saw his death complete from the first symptom to the final breath.

He spoke of fulminant leukemia type M3. He spoke of being hospitalized at San Herardo in Monza.

He described intense suffering that would last for 10 days and a peaceful death at 6:45 in the morning surrounded by family.

As an engineer, my mind rebelled against what I was hearing. It was impossible. He was glowing with health.

We had just played football in the garden an hour prior. I wanted to shake him, to take him to a psychiatrist to do something practical.

But I remained frozen, pinned by the absolute certainty in his eyes. He wasn’t guessing, he was reporting.

He told me that he also saw the spiritual consequences of his death. He said his passing would inspire a worldwide devotion that would bring hundreds of thousands of young people back to Christ.

Specifically those who had lost their faith due to what he called digital secularization. He spoke of the internet not as a tool for entertainment but as a fishing net for souls, a concept he had been developing with his website about eukaristic miracles, but which I now understood was part of a much larger design.

The most shocking part of the revelation, however, was when he explained the specific reason God had asked for this sacrifice.

“No, no,” he said, leaning closer. “In the year 2020 20 exactly, the world will face a global pandemic that will kill millions of people and destroy the faith of many families who will blame God for allowing such suffering.”

My beatification in October of 2020 will provide the specific hope necessary during that world crisis.

I remember staring at him trying to process the date. Turn out 20 was 14 years in the future.

How could a boy in 2006 speak of a global pandemic with such specificity? It sounded like science fiction.

Carlo continued detailing things that were impossible for him to know. He said that during this pandemic, churches would close for the first time in modern history.

He said young people would be completely isolated through technology and many would lose contact with spiritual reality.

He told me that his example as a digital saint who used the internet to evangelize would become exactly what that generation needed to reconnect with Christ.

He spoke of masks, of lockdowns, of a world paralyzed by fear and of his image, the boy in jeans and sneakers being a beacon of light in that darkness.

Then the conversation turned personal. And this is the burden I have carried in silence for nearly two decades.

No, no, he said, his voice softening. I also saw that you will live until you are 78 years old exactly and that you will keep this secret until October of 2024 when you will have a minor stroke that will remind you that your time is also running out.

That will be the moment when God wants you to reveal this conversation publicly because the world will need to understand how saints knowingly accept specific sacrifices for a mission larger than themselves.

I felt a cold shiver run down my spine. He was predicting my own life, my own health.

He told me that in 2019 I would develop diabetes which would force me to retire early.

He said that in 2021 during the pandemic I would experience severe depression. Wondering if it was worth living without being able to see my family regularly.

He told me that in 2023, I would weep during his canonization because I would finally understand that his death was not a tragedy, but a necessary completion of a divine mission.

Every single one of these things seemed abstract and distant in that garage in 2006.

Mere words from a boy with an overactive imagination. But then came the final prophecy, the one regarding my own end.

And no, no, he said, taking my hand again, your own death will be in March of 2027, 3 days after your 80th birthday, but it will not be a sad death because I will come personally to accompany you during the transition.

And immediately after, we will be reunited in a dimension where you will be able to see clearly how every moment of keeping my secret contributed to God’s greater plan.

For 18 years, I have lived with this knowledge. I watched in horror as the first part of his prophecy came true just two weeks later.

The leukemia struck exactly as he said, the hospital in Monza, the 10 days of agony which he offered up for the pope and the church.

The time of death, 6 to 45 a.m. On October 12th, 2006. I stood by his bedside, a grieving grandfather, but part of me was already terrified because I knew this was only the beginning of the script he had recited to me in the garage.

I watched the years pass. I developed diabetes in 2019 exactly as he predicted and I retired from engineering.

Then came 20 and 20. When the news of the virus began to spread, when the world shut down, when the churches closed their doors, I sat in my living room in Milan, trembling not from fear of the virus, but from the overwhelming realization of Carlo’s accuracy.

The beatatification in Aisi in October 2020 happened exactly amidst the crisis, providing a surge of hope to a desperate world.

I saw his face on screens everywhere, the cyber apostle inspiring a generation trapped in their rooms.

And then just days ago on October 1st, 2020, I suffered a minor stroke. I was rushed to the hospital confused and frightened.

But as the doctor stabilized me and told me I would recover, the realization hit me with the force of a physical blow.

I am 78 years old. The timeline is complete. The signal has been given. The fear of being thought crazy or scenile has been replaced by the fear of disobeying the final instruction of a saint.

This revelation changes completely our comprehension of Carlos sanctity. He was not merely a holy child who died young and became a saint afterward.

He was a young person who consciously accepted a mission that required his death as a necessary sacrifice for the salvation of others during a specific historical crisis that only God could foresee.

He was a conscious collaborator in the divine plan rather than an innocent victim of a random tragedy.

Now, as I sit here recovering with the date of my own departure predicted for March 2027 looming in the distance, I feel a strange sense of peace.

I have fulfilled my promise. I have kept the secret until the appointed time. I am sharing this now because there are families who have lost young people and wonder about the divine purpose behind early deaths.

There are scholars studying the prophetic dimensions of sanctity who need to know this. Carlo was not just a good boy.

He was a prophet of the digital age. A soul who saw the storm coming and offered himself as the shelter.

If you are reading this and you feel a stir in your heart, if the precision of these events speaks to a logic beyond our human understanding, I ask you to share this testimony.

The world needs to know that holiness is not accidental. It is a choice, sometimes a terrifying one, made with eyes wide open to the cost and the glory.

My name is Josephe Salzano, and this is the truth I have carried for 18 years, the secret that Carlo entrusted [music] to me in a dusty garage, amidst the smell of oil and the golden light of a September afternoon.

The physical act of typing those final words left me more exhausted than I had anticipated.

My right hand, still slightly clumsy from the stroke I suffered 10 days ago, trembled as I pushed the laptop away on my mahogany desk.

The hum of the computer fan seemed deafening in the quiet of my Milan apartment, a modern sound that clashed with the antique silence I had cultivated since my wife passed.

I looked at the calendar on the wall. It was October 12th, 2024. The date was circled in red ink, a marking I had made months ago without fully understanding why, compelled by that subconscious clock Carlo had wound within me 18 years prior.

Now the circle felt less like a reminder and more like the closing of a circuit.

I needed to breathe. So I maneuvered my way to the balcony overlooking the street.

The city of Milan was bustling below, indifferent to the revelations of old men or the prophecies of dead boys.

I watched a tram rattle by its steel wheels grinding against the tracks and my engineers’s mind automatically calculated the friction and the load.

A habit I could never quite break. But today, the mechanical world felt thin, like a veil draped over the true machinery of the universe that Carlo had briefly allowed me to see.

I was not just an old man recovering from a cerebral event. I was a courier who had finally delivered a package that had been burning a hole in his soul for nearly two decades.

The doorbell rang, sharp and intrusive. I knew who it was before I even checked the intercom.

Antonia, my daughter, the mother of the saint. She had been coming by every day since my hospitalization, bringing food I didn’t have the appetite to eat, and a worried furrow in her brow that mirrored her mother’s.

I buzzed her in and made my way slowly to the living room, clutching the print out of the testimony I had just composed.

This was the second part of my obedience. The world would know, yes, but Antonia had to know first.

Carlo had been specific about the timeline, but my own conscience dictated the hierarchy of delivery.

When she entered, she looked tired. The years since 2006 had been a whirlwind for her.

Traveling the globe, speaking to cardinals, managing the foundation, and carrying the immense public weight of being the mother of a blessed and now a saint.

She carried a Tupperware container of rsado and a fresh bag of oranges. She stopped when she saw me standing in the middle of the room, not resting in the armchair as the doctors had ordered.

She saw the papers in my hand and the look on my face, a look that must have been a strange cocktail of grief and liberation.

Papa, she asked, setting the bags down on the console table. Is everything all right?

Are you feeling dizzy again? Sit down, Antonia,” I said, my voice raspier than I would have liked.

I gestured to the sofa where Carlo used to sit, the spot where he would plug in his PlayStation and explain the logic of coding to me.

“I need you to read this. I need you to read it now before I lose the courage to show you.”

She hesitated, her maternal instincts warring with her filial duty, but she sat. I handed her the warm sheets of paper.

I watched her as she read. I saw her eyes scan the first paragraph, the introduction of dates and facts.

As she reached the section about the garage, about the bicycle repair and the sudden change in the atmosphere, her posture stiffened.

She was a strong woman, forged in the fire of loss and raised in the discipline of our family.

But as she read the words her 15-year-old son had spoken to, met a precise prediction of his death.

The leukemia, the pandemic of 2020, I saw her hand fly to her mouth. The silence in the room, stretched, heavy, and suffocating.

I watched a tear escape her eyelid and track through the light makeup she wore for her public appearances.

She didn’t make a sound until she reached the end. The part about my stroke and my own appointed time in 2027.

She lowered the papers slowly, her hand shaking just as mine had. When she looked up at me, her eyes were not those of the public figure who spoke about the eukarist to thousands.

They were the eyes of a mother who had just realized she had only known half the story of her son’s departure.

He knew, she whispered, the question barely audible. All that time, those last two weeks, when we thought he was just tired, when we thought it was the flu, he knew he was dying.

He knew about the virus, about the lockdowns. He knew everything, Antonia, I replied, sitting heavily in the armchair opposite her.

He described the empty squares and the fear. He told me that his canonization would be the antidote to a despair that hadn’t even been invented yet.

He protected you. He forbade me to speak because he said you needed to focus on being his mother, not the witness to a prophet.

He wanted your last days with him to be about love, not fear. Antonia stood up and walked to the window, turning her back to me.

Her shoulders shook. I feared anger. Anger that I had kept this from her. Anger that I had let her grieve without this vital piece of the puzzle.

But when she turned back, her face was illuminated by a profound agonizing awe. It makes sense, she said, her voice gaining strength.

The calm, the way he looked at us in the hospital. He wasn’t afraid, papa.

I always thought it was just his faith, his innocence, but it was certainty. He had seen the script.

She came to me then, kneeling beside my chair, just as Carlo had knelt beside me in the garage, and took my hands.

“And you,” she said, looking at the bruising on my arm from the IV drips.

You carried this alone through the funeral, through the beatatification, through co. You knew about the pandemic before the first case was reported.

I thought I was going mad. I confessed. The engineer in me finally admitting the collapse of my logic.

When the churches closed in [music] 2020, just as he said, I sat in this room and wept.

Not for the world, but because my grandson was right. And if he was right about the disaster, he was right about the hope.

That was the only thing that kept me sane. And 2027, she asked, tightening her grip on my hands.

He told you the date? March? I said, feeling a strange lightness as I spoke the date aloud to another living soul.

Three days after my 80th birthday, he promised to come for me. He said it wouldn’t be a tragedy, but a transition.

Antonia nodded, wiping her face. She didn’t try to argue with the date or offer false platitudes about longevity.

She had lived too close to the miraculous to deny the precision of the divine.

She accepted the data point just as I had learned to. Then we have time, she said firmly.

We have 2 years and 5 months. We have to prepare the publication. The Vatican will need to examine this.

It changes the theological understanding of his offer of life. I am ready. I said the stroke was the signal.

The bell has rung. We spent the rest of the afternoon not as father and daughter but as two engineers of a legacy dismantling the machinery of the past to understand how it had been built.

We talked about the specific details. Carlo had mentioned the digital secularization, a term that hadn’t really existed in 2006, and how he had foreseen the smartphone addiction that would enslave his generation.

We realized that his sanctity was not accidental. It was a targeted missile of grace designed for a specific bunker of modern despair.

As the sun began to set over Milan, casting long amber shadows across the floorboards, I felt a peace that had eluded me for 18 years.

The chassis of my life was rusted and worn. The engine was sputtering, but the steering was finally aligned.

I looked at the picture of Carlo on the mantelpiece. A photo taken the summer before he died.

He was smiling, that half smile that always seemed to know a joke he wasn’t telling.

“You win, Carlo,” I whispered to the empty room after Antonia had left to call the postulator of the cause.

“The logic holds. The structure is sound.” I closed my eyes, exhausted, but unafraid. I had two years left to finish my work, to organize my affairs, and to wait for the boy in the jeans and polo shirt to come back and walk me home.

The secret was out. The countdown had begun. And for the first time in my life, I was looking forward to the deadline.

The days following my disclosure to Antonia moved with a velocity that defied the slow rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in my hallway.

If the previous 18 years had been a long static endurance test of material strength, the weeks after October 12th became a rapid assembly line of ecclesiastical bureaucracy and public scrutiny.

Antonia, true to her word and her efficient nature, had not let the sun set twice before contacting the postulator of Carlo’s cause.

The machinery of the Vatican, often criticized for its glacial pace, engaged with surprising swiftness, perhaps because the subject was not a dusty figure from a medieval fresco, but a millennial boy who had worn Nike sneakers and predicted [music] a global pandemic with the accuracy of a supercomput.

Three days after I handed Antonia my testimony, my doorbell rang again. This time it was not a family visit.

Antonia was accompanied by Monsior Moretti, a man I knew by reputation as a meticulous theologian, a devil’s advocate in the old sense of the term whose job was to find cracks in the masonry of sanctity.

He was a tall spare man with spectacles that seemed to magnify his skepticism. They sat in my living room, the very room where I had wept in 2020 and where Carlo used to hook up his cables to the television.

The atmosphere was less like a pastoral visit and more like an engineering audit, which strangely put me entirely at ease.

I knew how to defend a blueprint. Moretta held my printed testimony as if it were a volatile substance.

He asked questions that were precise, probing for senility, for retrospective falsification, for the natural desire of an old man to insert himself into the narrative of a famous grandson.

I answered him with the dry, unmbellished facts of a fiat engineer. I showed him my medical records from 2019 confirming the diabetes diagnosis Carlo had predicted.

I showed him the discharge papers from the stroke unit dated October 2024. I described the garage, the light, the specific wrench.

I had dropped a 13 mm chrome venadium spanner [music] and the exact inflection of Carlo’s voice.

I did not try to sell him a miracle. I simply presented the data points of a timeline that had been mapped out before the events occurred.

When I recounted the part about the pandemic, Moretti paused. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

He asked me to repeat the specific phrasing Carlo had used regarding the closed churches.

I told him again. Carlo had said the eukarist would become physically inaccessible but digitally omnipresent.

The man senior looked at Antonia then back at me and for the first time the skepticism in his eyes was replaced by a look of unsettled wonder.

He realized that this was not merely a prediction of disaster, but a theological blueprint for the church’s survival in the digital age, a contingency plan drafted by a 15-year-old boy in a Milan garage 14 years before the emergency began.

By November, the testimony was released. The decision was made to publish it not as an official addendum to the canonization immediately, but as a spiritual testament of the grandfather, allowing the faithful to discern its weight.

The reaction was exactly what Carlo had foreseen. It did not explode in the traditional newspapers, which treated it with polite curiosity, but it ignited the digital continent.

My email inbox, managed by Antonia’s foundation, was flooded. I saw the metrics, the shares, the comments, the fishing net Carlo had spoken of was hauling in a catch that was staggering in its diversity.

Young people from South Korea, Brazil, the United States, and Nigeria began to write. They didn’t write to me as a holy man.

They wrote to me as the grandfather of a friend. They spoke of their anxiety, their addiction to screens, their feeling of being lost in a world of infinite data but zero meaning.

They confessed that during the lockdowns of 2020, they had felt abandoned by God. But reading that Carlo had seen it, that he had accepted his death to offer hope specifically for that moment changed the texture of their suffering.

It retroactively gave meaning to their isolation. The narrative of the victim was replaced by the narrative of the mission.

My health predictably began to decline as winter settled over Milan. The stroke had left me with a permanent tremor in my right hand and a fatigue that settled into my bones like damp fog.

But my mind remained crystalline, sharpened by the necessity of the task. I spent my morning sitting in the armchair dictating responses to selected letters, acting as a reluctant bridge between the prophecy and the people it was meant for.

I was no longer an engineer of cars. I was a maintenance worker on a spiritual bridge, tightening bolts and ensuring the structure held for those crossing over.

One afternoon in January 2025, a young seminarian from Rome came to record a video interview for the foundation.

He set up lights and cameras in my study, turning my quiet sanctuary into a studio.

He asked me about fear. He asked if knowing the date of my own death march 20 was a burden.

I looked into the camera lens, which looked so much like the mechanical eyes Carlo used to stare into, and I smiled.

“Young man,” I said, my voice scratching against the silence. Imagine you are on a long train journey in a dark tunnel.

You do not know when the tunnel ends. That is anxiety. Now imagine the conductor tells you exactly at which kilometer marker the train will emerge into the sunlight.

You still have to sit in the dark for a while. Yes, the wheels still screech.

The air is still stale. But the fear is gone because the destination is a fixed point in the schedule.

I am not waiting for death. I am waiting for the arrival. I am waiting for the doors to open.

The interview went viral, a term I still found amusingly biological for a technological phenomenon.

It seemed that an old engineer talking about death with the practicality of a train schedule was exactly the stabilizing force a confused generation needed.

I realized then that this was the final part of Carlo’s design for me. He hadn’t just predicted my death to prove his power.

He had given me the date so that I could model how to face mortality without terror.

He had turned his grandfather into a final lesson plan. As Toyota 25 turned into 2026, the world continued its chaotic spin.

There were new crises, new wars, new technologies that promised connection but delivered solitude. Yet within the sphere of influence that Carlo had created, there was a counterurren.

I watched from my window as pilgrims began to stop by my building, not to intrude, but just to stand there, sometimes praying, sometimes looking up at the balcony.

They were mostly young, wearing headphones and clutching smartphones. The very devices that usually severed them from reality, now acting as their compass to this place.

My physical world shrank to the perimeter of my apartment. The diabetes made walking difficult and my heart, tired from 79 years of pumping, began to show signs of strain.

Antonia was with me constantly, her presence a reversal of roles. She was now the one explaining the world to me, filtering the noise, protecting my peace.

We spoke often of the transition, as Carlo had called it. We made practical arrangements.

I updated my will. Not leaving money, but leaving instructions for the archives, ensuring that every conversation, every note I had regarding Carlo was preserved with the same rigor I used to apply to engine schematics.

On my 79th birthday, I sat with a slice of cake I could not eat, looking at the calendar.

One year left. The countdown was no longer an abstract concept. [music] It was a visceral reality.

I found myself looking at the corners of the room, half expecting to see him there already, leaning against the door frame in his polo shirt, checking his watch.

The veil was thinning. The logic of the material world was beginning to fray, revealing the light underneath.

I had one final task to complete. I needed to visit a CC one last time.

It was a logistical nightmare for a man in my condition, a risk that the doctors advised against.

But engineers know that sometimes you must exceed the operational limits to complete the mission.

I needed to see the tomb. I needed to stand before the body of the boy who had rewritten the code of my existence [music] and tell him in person that the data had been verified.

We made the trip in late spring of 2026. Antonia drove, her hands steady on the wheel, the Italian landscape rolling by like a reel of film.

When they wheeled me into the sanctuary of the spoliation, the silence of the stone walls wrapped around me.

I was brought to the glass tomb where Carlo lay, preserved, looking as if he were merely sleeping before a football match.

I saw the Nike sneakers, the jeans, the face that I had kissed thousands of times.

I asked Antonia for a moment alone. The tourists and pilgrims were held back respectfully.

I sat in my wheelchair staring at my grandson. I didn’t pray in the traditional sense.

I spoke to him as a colleague. The timeline held. Carlo, I whispered, my hand trembling on the glass.

The pandemic happened. The depression came and went. The secret is out. I am tired, little one.

The machine is breaking down, but I trust the schedule. I waited, half hoping for a voice, a sign, a flicker of the lights.

But there was only silence, not the empty silence of the garage before the revelation, but a full pregnant silence like the pause between a lightning strike and the thunder.

It was the silence of a promise kept. I felt a warmth settle over my chest, a specific localized heat that eased the constant ache in my ribs.

It was a confirmation. The contract was valid. We returned to Milan and the final year began.

The calendar pages turned with relentless precision. October 2026, December 2026, January 2027. With each month, my body shed more of its capacity.

I became bedridden. In February, the world reducing itself to the ceiling of my bedroom and the faces of those I loved.

But my mind remained lucid, fixed on the date, March, the third day after my 80th birthday.

On March 10th, 2027, I turned 80. The apartment was filled with flowers I couldn’t smell and cards I couldn’t hold.

Antonia sat by my bed reading them aloud. She looked older, her hair silver now, but her eyes were steady.

She knew. We both knew. We didn’t speak of birthdays. We spoke of the arrival time.

Three days, I whispered, my voice barely a rustle of dry leaves. I know, papa, she said, squeezing my hand.

I’ll be here. We’ll all be here. The next two days were a blur of sleeping and waking, the boundaries of consciousness becoming porous.

I dreamt of the Fiat factory, the rhythmic clanging of the presses, but the machinery was made of light, and the workers were angels in denim.

I dreamt of the garage, the dust moes dancing, the bicycle wheels spinning endlessly without friction.

Then came the morning of the third day. It was early, the light just beginning to turn the Milan sky a pale industrial gray.

The room was quiet. Antonia [music] was asleep in the chair beside me. My breathing was shallow, a mechanical failure imminent.

I felt the familiar constriction in my chest, the cold creeping up my extremities. The biological shutdown had begun exactly on schedule.

But there was no fear. My engineers’s mind noted the symptoms with detachment. Oxygen saturation dropping, heart rate irregular, system failure imminent.

And then the room changed. It wasn’t a visual hallucination. It was a shift in density.

The air became charged, electric, smelling of ozone and bicycle grease. The gray light of the window was overwhelmed by a different luminosity, a clarity that made the furniture in the room look like clumsy sketches.

I turned my head, an effort that felt like lifting a mountain. He was there.

He wasn’t floating. He wasn’t glowing with wings. He was standing by the window, leaning against the seal, looking exactly as he had that day in the garage.

He wore the red polo shirt and the jeans. He looked healthy, vibrant, solid, more solid than the fading world around me.

He was smiling, that playful, knowing smile that said, “I told you so.” Ciao. No, no, he said.

His voice was not in my head. It was in the room, acoustic and real.

Carlo, I breathed, and I realized with a jolt of joy that I wasn’t struggling for air anymore.

The pain in my chest was gone. The weight of 78 years of the stroke, of the grief, had evaporated.

>> [snorts] >> He walked over to the bed, his sneakers making no sound on the floor.

He reached out a handwarm strong callous from the handlebars of a bike. “It is 6:45,” [music] he said, checking a watch that didn’t exist.

“You are right on time. The logic holds.” I looked at Antonia, still sleeping in the chair.

I wanted to wake her to tell her he was here but Carlos shook his head gently.

She will know. He said she feels the peace already. Come on. No, we have work to do.

The network is much bigger from up here. I reached out. My hand, which had trembled for 3 years, was steady.

I grasped his hand and he pulled. The sensation was not of dying, but of standing up after sitting in a cramped chair for too long.

I stood up. I looked back at the bed, at the old worn out shell of Jeppe Salzano.

And then I looked at my grandson. “Where are we going?” I asked, feeling the energy of a thousand engines humming in my veins.

Carlo laughed, and the sound was like music. To the control room, he said. I need help with a project.

And no, no. Yes. Bring the wrench. I grasped the invisible tool, the weight of it familiar and reassuring against my palm.

As I stepped away from the bed, the sensation was not of floating, but of gaining traction.

The room did not dissolve into mist. Rather, it gained a terrifying, beautiful definition, as if someone had finally adjusted the focus on a blurred lens.

I saw the molecular structure of the air, the woven lattice of the sunlight, and the vibrant golden threads of prayer that seemed to hum through the walls like fiber optic cables.

Carlo didn’t look back. He simply walked through the bedroom wall and I followed him.

My engineer’s mind accepting the impossibility because the structural integrity of this new reality was undeniable.

We emerged not into the hallway of my apartment building, but into a vastness that defied dimensions.

Carlo had called it a control room, and true to his nature, he had translated the ineffable into a language I could understand.

It was a place of infinite connection, a sprawling, luminous network where every soul was a node pulsing with light.

I saw the net he had spoken of years ago, the digital ocean where he had cast his lines.

I saw the millions of teenagers staring at screens in dark rooms, their loneliness visible as a dull gray static.

And I saw the sparks of hope bright piercing white light signing wherever his story and now my testimony had touched them.

It was the most complex schematic I had ever witnessed. A perfect design where no variable was random and no suffering was wasted.

But the final verification, the stamp of approval on the blueprint, had to happen below.

Carlo paused and gestured downward, and through the floor of this new dimension, I saw my bedroom again.

It was a scene of stark, quiet dignity. Antonia stirred in the armchair. The sun had just cleared the horizon, casting a pale industrial beam across the bed sheets.

I watched my daughter open her eyes, the instinct of a mother alerting her to the change in the room’s frequency.

She sat up, her gaze darting immediately to the body I had left behind, the shell of Jeppe Salano, mouth slightly open, chest still.

She did not scream. She did not panic. She stood up and walked to the bedside, placing her hand on the forehead of the body.

She held it there for a moment. Feeling the absence of the spark, the engine finally cold.

Then, with a trembling hand, she lifted her wrist and looked at her watch. I could see the dial clearly from where I stood.

It was 6:46 a.m. 1 minute past the departure. The train had left exactly on schedule.

Antonia let out a breath that was half sobb, half prayer, and whispered a single word into the silence.

Graci. She wasn’t thanking death. She was thanking the precision of the promise. The fear of the unknown had been conquered by the accuracy of the prophecy.

The days that followed were a blur of earthly activity viewed from a place of timeless rest.

The news broke within hours. Grandfather of St. Carlo Audis dies on predicted date. The headlines flashed across the digital devices of the world, vibrating through the network I now helped to maintain.

The skepticism that had lingered in the minds of the cynics evaporated. The math was too perfect.

The timeline from the garage in 2006 to the pandemic in 2020 to the stroke in 2024 to the final breath in 2027 was a closed loop.

A sealed circuit of divine logic. My death became the final seal on Carlos [music] canonization.

A tangible proof that the spiritual world operates with laws as binding and precise as gravity.

My funeral was held in Milan, but the crowd was global. I saw the young seminarian who had interviewed me standing in the back weeping not for loss but for the confirmation of his faith.

I saw Monsia Moretti, the skeptic, bowing his head near the coffin, his dossier of doubts finally closed.

And I saw Antonia standing strong in black, holding the hand of a new generation, telling them the story not of a tragedy, but of a mission accomplished.

The secret I had carried for 18 years had done its work. It had transformed the chaotic, frightening randomness of modern death into a structured narrative of hope.

Now I am here. The wrench is in my hand. There is much work to do.

The machinery of grace requires constant attention and the network is expanding every day. Carlo was right.

The internet, the world, the suffering, the joy. It is all part of a design we are only just beginning to comprehend.

I was an engineer who spent a lifetime building cars to move bodies across the earth.

But in the end, I helped build a bridge to move souls toward the light.

The chassis is strong. The engine is eternal. And for the first time in my existence, I understand that the destination was never the grave.

The destination was always this view, this clarity, this perfect logical love. My name is Josephe Salzano.

I am 80 years and 3 days old. I have arrived and the view from here is magnificent.

The news of my death traveled faster than any telegram or phone call of my youth could have managed.

By 8 till 0 a.m. On that March morning in 2027, the digital network that Carlo had patronized and sanctified was vibrating with the confirmation.

The headlines were not sensational, for reality had outpaced sensation. They were simply factual, citing the timestamp of my departure against the timestamp of the prediction made 21 years prior.

For a world drowning in fake news and uncertain futures, the mathematical precision of my exit served as a singular, undeniable anchor point.

It was the final data point required to close the case, transforming my testimony from a grandfather’s memoir into a verified historical document of the supernatural.

My funeral was held at the Duomo de Milano, a venue far too grand for a retired industrial engineer who preferred the quiet corners of a garage, but entirely necessary for the grandfather of a saint.

From my new vantage point, I observed the proceedings not with vanity, but with a detached appreciation for the logistics.

The cathedral was packed not just with the pious elderly and black veils, but with thousands of young people in hoodies, jeans, and sneakers.

They held their smartphones a loft, the screens glowing like thousands of votive candles in the dim gothic interior.

To the uninitiated, it might have looked like distraction. To me, seeing the invisible architecture of the moment, I knew they were transmitting the liturgy to millions more outside.

The net was casting itself wide. I saw Antonia in the front row. She did not weep with the desperation of the berieved, but stood with the quiet strength of a woman who has seen the blueprints of the universe and knows the structure is sound.

Beside her sat Monscior Moretti, the once skeptical theologian. During the homaly, I watched him take off his glasses and wipe them, humbled by the realization that the theology of the future was not written in dusty books, but in the precise lived experience of a teenager and his grandfather.

The coincidence of the dates, the pandemic, the stroke, the death was a statistical impossibility that shattered his remaining doubts.

He looked up at the vaulted ceiling, and I could hear his silent prayer, a concession to the superior logic of the divine architect.

But the earthly ceremony was merely a faint echo of the reality I now inhabited.

Carlo had been right about the work. This control room, this dimension of active grace, was a place of ceaseless joyful industry.

It was not a static paradise of harpstrumming, but a dynamic center of operations. Here, prayer was not a wisp of smoke, but a beam of structural energy capable of reinforcing a soul on the verge of collapse.

My engineering mind, once limited to torque and friction, now applied itself to the mechanics of intercession.

I understood how a grandmother’s rosary in Naples could provide the tensil strength for a teenager in soul to resist suicide.

I saw how Carlo’s digital legacy acted as a rooting system directing these beams of grace to the nodes where the network was weakest.

I spent what would have been earthly months working alongside my grandson. We were no longer separated by age or infirmity.

The tremor in my hand was gone, replaced by a dexterity I had not possessed even in my prime at Fiat.

We worked on the circuits of the church, repairing the frayed connections between the generations.

Carlo with [music] his red polo shirt and his infinite energy was the lead architect and I, Joseeppe, was his foreman.

We laughed often, a sound that created new galaxies of light. Especially when we looked down at the skeptics who were finally beginning to understand that science and faith were merely two different languages describing the same schematic.

One specific moment stands out in this timeless flow. It was October 12th, 2027, the first anniversary of the revelation of our secret.

A young boy in Brazil, hospitalized with the same leukemia that had taken Carlo, found my testimony online.

He was terrified. His family was crushing under the weight of despair. I watched as he read the words about the garage, about the fearlessness of the timeline.

I saw the exact moment the logic clicked in his mind. He realized that if the schedule was in God’s hands, then the fear was unnecessary.

I saw his heart rate stabilize. I saw him turn to his mother and smile.

From the control room, Carlo nodded to me. We reached out together, tightening the bolt of courage in that boy’s soul, ensuring the structure would hold for whatever outcome the master engineer had designed.

The narrative of the victim had been fully rewritten. I was no longer the old man who lost his grandson.

I was the collaborator who had helped launch his final [music] project. The grief that had defined the last two decades of my earthly life was revealed to be nothing more than the friction of the chisel shaping the stone.

It was necessary heat. Now as I stand at this parapit of light, looking down at the blue marble of earth spinning in the velvet dark, I feel a sense of completion that no earthly retirement ever provided.

The wrench is still in my hand, metaphorical yet heavy with purpose. The work continues, for the project of salvation is vast, and the workers are few.

But the anxiety is gone. The train has arrived. The passengers are disembarking. I look at Carlo, who is busy adjusting a stream of light directed at a lonely teenager in a basement in Tokyo.

He pauses, sensing my gaze, [music] and turns. The love in his eyes is the fuel that runs the universe.

“The logic holds,” No, no, he says, his smile bright enough to outshine the sun.

“Yes, Carlo,” I reply, gripping my tool, ready for the next task. “The design is perfect.”

“My name is Joseph Saltzano. I am eternal and for the first time I understand that the end of the story is actually just the beginning of the real work.

The weeks following my departure from the physical plane confirmed the final variable of Carlo’s equation.

While my body was laid to rest in the family crypt, the testimony I had left behind, the document Antonia had courageously published began to operate with the viral efficiency of a computer code designed to rewrite the operating system of a desparing world.

It did not merely recount a prophecy. It dismantled the modern fear of randomness. In a world paralyzed by the dread of accidental suffering, the revelation that a 15-year-old boy and his grandfather had mapped out the coordinates of their own exits two decades in advance offered a terrifying, beautiful proof.

The chassis of the universe is not chaos, but order. From the control room, that luminous intersection of grace and activity where Carlo and I now stood, we watched the ripple effect.

I saw a mother in Ohio grieving a son lost to the same leukemia, read my words, and finally sleep through the night.

Realizing that her child’s departure might also be a scheduled arrival rather than a tragic malfunction, I saw the skeptics, the men of pure logic like I once was, pause over their tablets and smartphones, forced to acknowledge that the data points of our lives, the dates, the diseases, the global crisis, formed a line too straight to be drawn by chance.

The secret was no longer a burden I carried. It was a key I had handed to humanity, unlocking the heavy door that separates grief from hope.

But the true conclusion of my earthly narrative required one final tangible act of closure, a gesture of engineering precision for the one person who had borne the weight of our departure in the physical realm.

It happened 3 months after my funeral. Antonia was in the garage of my Milan home, the place where the air still smelled of oil and old rubber, preparing to sell the property.

She looked small amongst the boxes of tools and spare parts, a solitary figure trying to dismantle a lifetime of mechanics.

She was weeping, not out of despair, but out of a sheer exhaustion induced longing for a sign that the connection remained unbroken.

She stood by the workbench where Carlo and I had repaired the bicycle in 2006, her hand resting on the empty vice.

“Papa,” she whispered into the dusty silence. “Carlo, I believe the theology. I believe the prophecy, but I missed the noise of you.

I missed the work. Up in the control room, Carlo turned to me. He didn’t speak, but his smile was the command.

He adjusted a dial on the console of light, a shift in the atmospheric pressure of that garage in Milan.

“Go ahead, No,” he said. “Tightighten the bolt.” I reached out. It requires a different kind of effort to move matter from this side.

Not a flex of the muscle, but a flex of the will. A concentration of love so dense it becomes physical.

I focused on the bicycle wheel hanging from the rafters, the same wheel we had fixed 21 years ago.

I focused on the physics I had studied for a lifetime. Potential energy, gravity, friction.

With a flick of my intention, I released the catch. The wheel spun. It didn’t just creek.

It spun with a smooth, silent velocity. The bearings I had greased with Carlo decades ago, moving as if they were brand new.

The motion caught Antonia’s eye. She gasped, stepping back, her eyes wide. The wheel continued to spin, defying the friction of the years, a perfect impossible rotation in the stagnant air of the garage.

And then, as she watched, the sunlight filtering through the high window shifted, catching the chrome spokes in a way that cast a strobing rhythmic reflection on the concrete floor.

It wasn’t random flickering. It was a pattern. Long, short, long, short. Morse code. The first language I had taught her when she was a child before she became a mother before she became the guardian of a saint.

L O G I C. Antonia froze. She watched the light dance the word again.

L O G I C. And then the wheels slowed, coming to a rest exactly as the sun dipped behind a cloud.

The message was received. The tears on her face stopped, replaced by a smile that mirrored the one Carla wore in heaven.

She understood. The separation was an illusion. The mechanics of love were still operational. She picked up the old 13 LEA wrench from the bench, the one I had dropped in shock all those years ago, and kissed the cold metal, placing it in her pocket, not as a souvenir, but as a tool for her own ongoing work.

“Message delivered,” I said, turning back to the vast glowing network of the afterlife. “Good work, engineer,” Carlo replied, clapping me on the shoulder.

But don’t get comfortable. We have a lot of prayers and coming from the 2030s.

The network needs expansion. I looked out at the infinite horizon of the divine plan.

I had spent 78 years on Earth measuring life in horsepower and torque, terrified that the machine would break down.

I had spent 18 years carrying a secret that felt like a bomb, waiting for the explosion.

But now, standing beside my grandson in the heart of the great design, I finally understood the blueprint.

Holiness is not a mystical vapor. It is the ultimate structural integrity. It is the alignment of the human will with the divine trajectory so perfectly that even death becomes just another gear shift, a necessary transfer of energy to a higher velocity.

I gripped my ethereal wrench, feeling the joy of eternal utility. My name is [music] Josephe Salzano.

I am the grandfather of a saint, the keeper of the secret, and the newest apprentice in the workshop of God.

The chassis is solid. The engine is roaring. And for the first time in the history of my soul, the road ahead is perfectly beautifully