Wattpad isn't kind to math symbols, so please bear with me in what follows. Actually you can gloss over the math if you prefer. If you're following me, you may already agree that the accepted science is the fiction here.

Modern science says that a photon has no mass. But it has energy. Its energy is proportional to its frequency. The formula for this is E = hf, where f is the frequency and h is Planck's constant (a very small number). The chief function of a photon is to carry a tiny amount of energy from one place to another.

The Theory of relativity says that, being massless, the photon is the only particle that can travel at the speed of light. Actually it defines the speed of light. All other particles must travel more slowly than the photon. This is because the others all have mass. And mass is made of energy. To achieve the speed of light, a particle with mass would have to acquire an infinite amount of energy. The math of Relativity demonstrates this as follows.

When a particle with mass is accelerated, its mass energy (momentum) increases. This increased mass energy is known as relativistic mass. This mass is given by m = γmr, where mr is the rest mass and the gamma factor γ = 1/sqr(1–v2/c2) [where sqr means square root and v2 means v times v or v squared, and c is the velocity of light, also squared].

If a particle's velocity v could equal the velocity of light, then in the equation above v2 would equal c2 and gamma would be 1/0, which equals infinity. That would make m equal infinity, which is not allowed. So no particle with mass can go as fast as light.

But the gamma factor has another effect. When a particle moves faster, its time slows down. As its speed approaches the speed of light, the rate at which time passes for it approaches zero. We know that this is true because examples of it have been measured in particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland.
(The name CERN is derived from the acronym for the French "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire", or European Council for Nuclear Research.)

Thus for a photon, travelling at the speed of light, no time passes at all. In a sense, while a photon is moving it doesn't exist. And a photon only stops moving when its energy is absorbed by another particle, increasing the particle's mass. The photon then no longer exists as a separate particle. In effect, then, a photon never exists at all. We could say that a photon is nothing but a handy mathematical fiction, used to account for the transfer of energy across space.

If we accept this account, we can say that a photon exists only in the mind of a person who thinks it does. And this applies to everything we think a photon helps us see.

Footnote: After writing this I found the following link. It simplifies the thinking.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/real-reason-faster-than-light-speed-spacetime/
When Einstein's theory was pushed harder, what was revealed was that every object travels through spacetime at a single speed — the speed of light.
A stationary object isn't moving through space at all, so the object is moving through time at the speed of light. Furthermore, an object moving through space at the speed of light has no speed left over to move through time.

Here's another footnote from the same source. Gives further clarification.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/light-speed-relativistic-mass/
"...the issue is not that the claim of a maximum speed is wrong; the issue is that the explanation is wrong. So how does it arise?
"The issue arises because we conflate two ideas: mass and inertia. Inertia is really the property that resists changes in motion. It's just that at low speeds inertia and mass are the same thing. But this isn't true at high speeds.
"This is easiest to see with equations, so I'll sketch them here, but if you're not a math person, I'll only use them sparingly. Everyone has seen Einstein's most famous equation, E = mc², where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light. Taken literally, it says that energy equals mass times a constant. However, this equation is actually a special case. The fully correct equation is E = γmc², where γ is a factor that arises in essentially all of the equations of relativity. The factor γ is related to velocity, increasing as velocity increases. At zero velocity, γ equals one, while as velocity gets close to the speed of light, γ approaches infinity. This parameter γ changes, not the mass. Mass is constant."