The universe doesn't know anything, it doesn't put the consciousness anywhere. There's no reason to assume consciousness is anything but the result of a computational system modelling itself in the world to a high enough degree of accuracy. Talking about where it's "put" just means you're starting from fundamentally broken assumptions.

Your argument about "conscious integers" is utter nonsense. Integers don't interact with themselves, other integers, or the physical world. They don't model anything. They may be at most match a Gödelized snapshot of a complex system at a certain point in time, but they still don't DO anything.

Consciousness isn't a state, it's a process. There is no "hard problem" of consciousness, because the "problem" is based on assumptions that are not even wrong... they have no explanatory value in any realm.