The End Has Come

THE UNCERTAINTY MACHINE Jamie Ford

May 1910

When the end of the world came and went, the accidental prophet Phineas Kai Rengong sat in his lavishly appointed comet shelter wrapped in robes of red silk that had been bathed quite literally in the tears of his followers. And in that moment of stifling calm he asked himself the most important question posed to any great Daoist master: What the hell am I gonna do now?

Phineas rubbed the stubble on his cheeks. He was now trapped thirty feet below the streets of Seattle’s Pioneer Square, alone, save for the lifeless bodies of the curvaceous twins who had enjoyed his company the night before. Both had eaten snow-skinned mooncakes laced with pure opium as Halley’s Comet, the great and terrible Broom Star, had crossed the night sky and the Earth roared and the building shook. Now in the glow of his oil lamps and a single battery-powered tungsten bulb that somehow remained unbroken, the girls’ figures, arms and legs akimbo, looked like unfinished sculptures, their long dark hair a tangle of shimmering cobwebs; their eyes — still open, stared back at him accusingly. He wished he’d known their real names. He’d jokingly called them Yin and Yang, because one was hot and one was cold, one was bold while the other was retiring. And now his bed servants were both gone. So young, so innocent — well, somewhat. But at least his secret (one of many) had died with them. To his radicalized followers, Phineas was a eunuch, a self-inflicted condition that was expected of all Daoist Anarchist leaders. Like the philosopher Wunengzi, the ultimate Master of Non-Potency, self-castration was seen as a token of piety, the ultimate destruction toward a reorganized peace — a sign of greatness. But . . . well . . . Phineas had never gotten around to that odious task. A procrastination that he’d been thankful for twice last night.

As the foundation of the building creaked and settled once again and dust rained down through fingerling cracks in the ceiling, soiling his rugs from Persia and Turkey, Phineas stared at the collapsed doorway to his bunker. A ruin of concrete occupied the space where a golden door had once been hinged, and upstairs, his lavish apartment was surely demolished. He frowned and chewed his lip as he regarded the broken window to the light well that had been his only means of seeing the reflected sky. The polished silver mirrors that lined the walls of the shaft had shattered and the well had filled up with brick and rubble. He sighed and pursed his lips disapprovingly as pulverized mortar poured in like sand to the bottom of an hourglass, slowly counting down to the moment when Phineas’ air would become scarce and then nonexistent.

He waited in minutes of silence that stretched into hours. He tried to distract himself by rereading for the umpteenth time passages from books by the philosopher Jean Reynaud and the skeptic Chuang Chou, gifts, translated into English. But Phineas couldn’t stop worrying about his followers, wondering who, if any, had survived the comet’s poisonous tail. And more importantly: When would they rescue him?

To his minions, Phineas was Yueguang Tongzi. A great scientist and the Prince of Moonlight predicted in the Sutra on the Extinction of the Dharma. And his people, they considered themselves members of the Way of Former Heaven, poor slaves who had fallen off the wheel of reincarnation and had been stuck here forever when the wheel began moving again. But the leaders among his followers were affiliates of the White Lotus Society — a triad with dreams of an anarchist revolution. If they knew Phineas was nothing but a charlatan, they didn’t let on. They sailed along in his boat of falsehood, adrift on a sea of lies, paddling in the same ruinous direction.

“The future is a deep river, flowing,” his predecessor, Professor Franz Der Ling had explained. “I have found a way to navigate the bends, the rapids.”

Phineas had thought the late Professor Ling to be a madman, a raving lunatic who rambled on and on about Gaussian reduction, polynomial interpolation, and the Greek island of Antikythera — just another intellectual prisoner banished to the stockades of Hong Kong where Phineas had been sentenced to nine months for selling phony treasure maps. Another jailed respite in his long history of arrests for schemes and petty crimes against the Crown of Britannia who had smashed China’s Celestial Empire long before he’d been born. And during his many stints behind bars he’d been locked up with liars and thieves, smugglers and spies, but never an innocent man. Or a genius.

Professor Ling happened to be both.

“My invention has made me an exile in my own country,” The professor had said. “The British think I’ll use it to rally the people, to incite a rebellion, or call down the Golden Horde from the Steppe. So when you get out, you must find it for me — use the device and tell me my fate. When will I ever be free?”

Phineas closed the book in his lap and walked to the sturdy bank vault that had been added to his comet shelter years ago. He entered the combination that only he knew, turned the handle, and opened the iron door with both hands. Inside was his most prized possession, its secret location in the Chinese countryside gifted to him by the professor. The machine was the size of a hatbox, but made from silver, gold, and curious alloys inscribed with Chinese characters describing zhou yi.

When Phineas had first laid eyes on the device, he had no idea what it was, though he recognized the word change. He’d hoped the machine was an auto-abacus, the kind of pinwheel calculator that Chinese clockmakers had tinkered with in hopes of predicting lottery numbers. But Professor Ling had been an adjunct of the Royal Laboratory of Psychical Research so Phineas assumed the thing must be some kind of automatic writing machine, something from the burgeoning field of pyschography.

Now as Phineas sat with the device on his lap and opened the lid, he marveled at its intricate construction just as he had all those years ago. He stared in awe at the countless iron gears, the copper wiring, and scores of spinning tumblers carved from yarrow root with calligraphic writing on four sides, all driven by an ornate silver handle.

“My invention can predict the future,” Professor Ling had said as his wild eyes flashed beneath matted hair that hadn’t been washed or cut in a decade. “But because the machine uses the primitive, subconscious mind, it can never interpret the operator’s own future. You must use it on my behalf!”

Phineas had no intention of returning the device. Though he remembered skeptically asking the box when the professor would be free, turning the handle, and observing how the word tsum yut appeared.

“Yesterday?” He’d muttered. So much for the future.

It was only after Phineas learned that Professor Ling had died the day before, only then did he realize that the old man’s invention did indeed speak the truth. The professor had created a difference engine based on the ancient Book of Changes. But instead of divulging sixty-four vague answers left up to interpretation, his device broke those answers into four-thousand and ninety-six specific words.

Professor Ling had forged an I-Ching machine.

Three nights had passed since the apparition of the Broom Star, and Phineas began to worry. He still had brass bottles of oxygen (though he felt an occasional draft, which was chilling, yet comforting to have a meager source of air), tins of canned salmon and caviar, canisters of sea biscuits and pilot bread, crates of apples, pears, and lychee, and stores of water as well as casks of fine wine made from rice and barley, enough to last a month — two if he rationed. But where were his followers? His devotees, many of them silver miners, were men with ashen skin experienced in plumbing the noxious pits beneath Mount Rainier. Surely they’d risen up by now and were employing their steam drillers, working their way toward his rescue as planned.

Two years ago the I-Ching machine had predicted that the Vile Star would cleanse the Heavens, that the great comet would bring death to all but the very rich and the very poor. That the sky wanderer would poison those above, drain the Pacific, and would cause drops of iron to rain on Britannia for a full day. Upon hearing the news, some of Phineas’ followers had given him everything to build this shelter — their homes, their possessions, (even their daughters), making them destitute and Phineas wealthy beyond measure, a faithful gesture to ensure everyone’s survival, a win-win in his mind.

Phineas held the machine and asked, “Are my beloved followers alive?” As he waited and then turned the handle he desperately wanted to ask when will they rescue me, but he knew that asking about himself was folly. He’d tried once, out of curiosity, and the machine returned an error message: Cuowu. Now as he listened to the whir of the gears and tumblers, he thought about his followers until the machine settled on the Chinese words for Healthy and Strong.

Phineas breathed a sigh of relief. He’d rarely, if ever, doubted the machine, but then the device had never predicted something as imperious as the end of the world. He asked again, “Are my followers, especially my lieutenants, the ones I hand-picked to lead in my absence, are they guiding my people? What are they doing?” He knew his question was somewhat muddled, but as Professor Ling had once said, “Diction is less important than intent. The machine interprets the beating of your heart, the quaking of your thoughts.”

This time the machine said: Gathering.

Phineas smiled. Sensing an imminent rescue, he looked around the room. There was still a certain morbid decorum to be had. With that in mind, Phineas dragged the bodies of the twins to the vault and sealed them inside. Then in a magnanimous gesture, one foretelling his release, he opened the copper cages of his collection of mockingbirds, whippoorwills, and nightingales. Their even songs had comforted him. Their singing reminded him that the world had kept on spinning, that despite the comet which shook and poisoned the world, the sun was still rising and falling, days and nights were passing unmolested. But while the birds sung, chortled, whispered and flit about — none left their cages. Their wings had been clipped long ago. That’s how Phineas felt as he sat in his chair and waited, wondering how long his oil lamps would last.

After ten days, Phineas decided it prudent to only eat one meal a day. Though a grumbling stomach only stoked his fears as he would occasionally bang a golden spittoon on the walls, hoping to be heard, screaming at the ceiling until he was exhausted.

Now in the awful silence, he huddled in his blankets and furs of Russian sable as he watched a trickle of fetid water seep down the wall.

It’s . . . raining. I have water. I have air.

He hadn’t predicted that, though he hadn’t asked. He also hadn’t asked about the loyalty of his followers, because he couldn’t ask something that benefited him directly, but moreover, why would he need to? The machine had never been wrong — or so he’d thought. In the early years, Phineas was unsure of how to use the device, for what purpose and to what end, so he’d found work as a village matchmaker — the most legitimate scam he knew. Most intermediaries were numerologists, superstitious old crones who used birthdates and astrology to assuage conflicts of interest between families. When Phineas showed up with his machine, marriage became a science (though an imperfect field of knowledge if ever there was one).

In the beginning, Phineas’ predictions connected peasant families, but eventually he was being paid handsomely to bind sons and daughters of the rich and powerful merchant class. He delighted in his calling, because if people married and were happy, his wisdom seemed infallible. But if wives failed to produce a son, or accept a husband’s concubine, if there was discord, that contention was usually seen as a sign of the couple’s hidden weaknesses, their vices, not his. His fame spread from Guangzhou to Nanchang, until a young girl rebuffed the cousin whom she’d been betrothed to and ran away. Her absence drew the ire of the British Territorial Minister who had her arrested along with the entire village, which had been declared unruly, given English courtesy names and sold to the West — Phineas included. But to his surprise (and sincere delight) his reputation had preceded him. He arrived in the West, not as a village scryer as the British described him, but as a prophet like Lao Tzu, one of the great masters reborn. And the girl’s disobedience became a parable of what would happen to those who disregarded his predictions.

Because of his lofty status, Chinese merchants spared no expense to smuggle him to the Underground, a hidden part of Seattle, for his safety, with everything given to him.

He was treated as a god.

A month later, Phineas scraped the last of the canned fish into his mouth with his dirty, unclipped fingernails and drank the briny oil. His only question as he sat in the pitch black, overcome by the smell of the twins’ decaying bodies and his own bodily waste was: Will I starve first or go completely mad?

He tossed the empty can into the darkness of the room and heard it clatter among garbage and the shattered lamps, which had since run out of fuel. He crawled to the battery powered light and switched it on. He only used the simple bulb to operate the I-Ching machine, to ask what day it was as he scratched what he thought was the correct date onto the wall with a jewel-encrusted letter opener. He’d twice forgotten to reset the pulley on his mantle clock (and once let it run down on purpose because of the incessant ticking) so now his chronological bearings were off by a few hours, but in the darkness, the isolation, did it really matter? Now as he slept, his dreams seemed like wakefulness and his waking hours, an endless nightmare.

His only hopeful, productive activity was the three minutes each day that he allowed himself to use the battery powered light to operate the machine. In those fleeting, precious moments, the device became a periscope to the city above, a telegraph of questions and answers, his gear-driven silver-handled radio to the outside world.

Throughout the week he’d asked a litany of questions, none of which seemed helpful. Yes, his followers were doing well. And yes, his survival predictions had come true — living underground in the mines had spared them. The most affluent of the rich had survived as well, with tinctures of colloidal silver, but many more were gone. Yes, the survivors were fighting each other in the streets, the Luddites were smashing the machine-works because few science ministers had survived and those who had lived, unfortunately had left their servants to die. Revolution was happening. But his followers had left the heart of the ruined city. That answer had been crushing, pressing in like the walls around him. Somehow he’d been forgotten, or worse, deemed unnecessary. He prayed to all the gods he could remember that his people were battling above, waging a war and when the fighting stopped he’d be rescued, but as each day passed . . .

Phineas heard himself laugh hysterically as his voice boomed off the walls and he realized how much he sounded like Professor Ling. He started crying as he pulled out fistfuls of hair and rocked back and forth as he asked the machine one final rhetorical question for the day, “What do nightingales taste like?”

He saw the word, Cuowu, and turned out the light.

Three months later, as near as he could tell, Phineas’ greatest regret was not preserving the bodies of the twins. He’d long since run out of food. And if he had misgivings about subsisting on human flesh, those had passed, lost somewhere in the lucid dreams he now had about sucking the raw meat from the last of his precious mockingbirds.

“I wasted the twins. Who knew that lapse in judgment would be my undoing,” he muttered to himself as he picked at scabs along his scalp.

Phineas guessed that he hadn’t eaten in weeks. His battery powered light had run out, so now he lived in perpetual darkness, trying to remember the days, to count them, feeling the numbers he’d scratched on the wall, occasionally waking up and adding another tic mark. But he still had rice wine in abundance and the alcohol soothed as the sugar sustained him. He regularly drank until he lost consciousness, waking up, imbibing more, vomiting, crawling, finding a dry place in the darkness to collapse, repeating the cycle again and again. It was better than sobriety, which made for unpleasant madness.

Though occasionally he’d be clear-headed enough to remember the I-Ching machine. He’d feel his way through the pitch and the filth and find that device, cradling the cold metal box like a long lost child. Sometimes he’d sit for hours, the machine in his lap, as he asked questions and talked to Professor Ling’s cursed invention like a friend, turning the handle, receiving revelation and outright hallucinations. But in blackness that had become his world, he was never able to read the answers.

It was during one of those manic sessions that he thought he’d died, passed through the veiled, onion-skin of reality and slipped into the ether as he saw a flickering glow that grew into a light as bright as the sun. The heavenly orb blinded him as he called out to his rescuers, tears flowing down his greasy, soiled cheeks.

But in the silence, his eyes finally adjusted. And he saw that the sun was merely the burning coil of the tungsten bulb. He reached out and touched the lamp with the dead battery, turning it off and on. Yet, the light remained. Twitching, he unscrewed the bulb and it glowed in his hand, even brighter still, as he became aware of the chamber of horrors that his comet shelter had become. Phineas could feel the hum of electricity in the air, on his arms, and the fine hairs on the back of his neck. The World Wireless System was still functioning, but more importantly, someone was using a Tesla coil, beaming spark-excited voltage in his direction, which could only mean one thing.

Finally, someone was searching for him.

Or perhaps, just the machine. Maybe that’s all they wanted. His lieutenants, the men with lotus tattoos, had waited for him to expire, to take it from his lifeless grasp. As fearful, angry, vicious thoughts clogged his reason his prison became a fortress, his tomb became his castle. And his followers became traitors, worse, they became fallen foot soldiers. The terrible enemy was coming, the Mongols had risen up again, but instead of wearing cloaks sewn from field mice the hordes were arriving in great steam-driven airships sewn from the skin of their conquered dead. They would come in waves, they would search, but they would never find him. The British wouldn’t find him. Neither would the boastful Americans. He’d never allow it. He’d smash the machine — he’d destroy the professor’s creation if he had to.

Holding the glowing bulb like a torch, he rested the machine on his lap. He wiped grime off the metal and asked in a breathless panic, “Will someone else ever use this beautiful device. Could the I-Ching ever be attuned to another. Will they come digging to claim this clever machine.” Phineas cranked the handle, listened to the gears thrum with clockwork precision, and watched the lettered tumblers spin and spin and spin . . . until the static charge in the room faded as quickly as the light.

The answer, his answer came, as he smiled in the darkness.