Tokay spent most of the last days of 1999 on a ladder cutting hieroglyphics into the side of a twelve-foot tall penis. This penis featured a solid rock core, but then was sleeved in bronze, and at its base it sat on four delta-shaped rocket fins that made it appear like a prop from an old Sci-Fi porn movie.

His wife, Barbara – a thin, spidery woman in her late twenties – opened the door to his studio and called out in to him. “Sweetheart, Jimmy Lowbarker is here.”

“Ugh,” Tokay grunted, then called down. “Send him in.”

To Tokay, Jimmy Lowbarker looked like a clown who forgot to put on his makeup. Big nose, short pear-shaped body, and inordinately big feet – or at least shoes. Tokay could hear those footsteps coming all the way down the outer hall.

“God, it looks great!” Lowbarker said the instant he clown-stepped through the doorway. “Tokay, you’re brilliant.”

“Thank you. Were you able to get the plutonium?”

“Plutonium?” Lowbarker laughed. “You’re dreaming, man.”

“I’ll take that as a no. Did you even try?”

“Tokay,” the man said, shaking his head, “the Atomic Energy Commission isn’t going to allow you to have plutonium, even if it is for a great work of art.”

“I told you. If you want this piece to be finished, it needs plutonium.”

“How about a really powerful neodymium magnet instead?”

“Neo-dim-ium? What’s that?”

“It’s a super magnet.”

“Super conducting?”

“Almost.”

“Does it have a half-life of 80 million years?”

“Yeah, sure.” Lowbarker shrugged. “Look, I’ve got a guy coming by later to install the webcam we talked about. I’m throwing in an extra computer for you and your wife just to use and enjoy.”

“No thanks. I don’t like computers. And you can shove your magnet up your ass. I need plutonium-244 for this piece or it’s worthless.”

Lowbarker’s expression had seemed amused up to this point. Now it looked annoyed. “Listen, we’re paying you a shitload of money for this big boner rocket of yours, and we don’t want any fucking plutonium in it. Got it? Am I clear? So fucking drop it.”

“Oh, okay. Well fine, it’s finished, have your boys pull up with a crane and a dump truck and pick this piece of shit up, then. I’m done.”

“You fucking artists are all alike, aren’t you? Goddamn prima donnas.” He took a step toward Tokay and leaned so close they were almost nose-to-nose. “Don’t jerk me around or you won’t see another fucking penny, and I’ll have attorneys hounding you to get our deposit back. Got it?” The man turned on his heel and clomped away, his oversized shoes slapping angrily at the concrete, and he was out the door and gone before Tokay could think up a snappy reply.

His wife opened the door a moment later to give him the Glare of Death, but didn’t say a word. Tokay turned away, thinking he didn’t need this in his life. And he didn’t need any goddamned computers, either.

#

His name used to be Francis Boughwade, which he doubly hated. One, a guy having the name “Francis” in high school was bad enough, but he also hated it when people tried to pronounce his last name and inevitably came out with something like  “boyd.” It was “bow-wade,” two W sounds. Two.

Finally when he was 19 he got sick of it and changed his name to Tokay. Just Tokay – no last name. Like Cher, or Prince, or Madonna, he thought it best suited his future as an artist. It gave him a brand, a one of a kind stamp. Plus, it was in memory of his favorite pet – a gecko that could actually lick his own eyeballs clean.

He still thought that was the coolest trick in the animal kingdom.

His wife, Barbara, who was not happy with him for insulting and arguing with the man who was giving them money – money, she reminded him over and over again, that they desperately needed – she burst into the studio to lead in a burly, hairy man who wheeled in a dolly loaded with boxes.

“What is this?” Tokay demanded from high on his ladder. “What is going on? Who is this person?”

“This is Tim from Mr. Lowbarker’s company,” she told him tartly. “He’s here to set up the webcam.”

“Under no circumstances are you putting any kind of computer in my workspace!”

“Honey,” she said, “you agreed that this would be part of the art.”

“I agreed to a camera, not one of those damn computers. They’re all going haywire in two weeks anyway.”

“Sir,” the burley man said, “I can assure you this computer is Y2K compliant.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want it going all whizbang in here while I’m working.”

“Ignore him,” his wife told the man. “We have a contractual obligation and we’re going to honor it. Go ahead and do what you need to do.”

He looked from Tokay to Barbara, then back again. “Um,” he said.

“Just do it,” Barbara told him.

He shrugged, having decided who the boss here really was. “Okay,” he said.

Barbara approached Tokay as Tim began unboxing the equipment. She reached up and grasped the ladder a few inches from Tokay’s right foot. “You’re thinking I’m a bitch right now.”

Tokay didn’t respond, though he was agreeing with her in his mind.

“If I’m a bitch, and I slap you right now, it would be a considered a bitchslap, wouldn’t it?”

“What?”

“You’re lucky you’re up that ladder. I’m really pissed off at you.”

“Why?”

“Why? I’ll tell you why! I thought you were a jackass when we got married, but back then it was cute. Since then you’ve cranked it up to the point you’ve broken through the top of the jackass-o-meter!”

“I’m trying to accomplish something here, Barbara. Something bigger than you, me, and all of humanity.”

“Well, if you and I are broke and living on the street, exactly how are you going to do that? I spent the good part of a freaking year getting this commission for you! Don’t blow it!”

He wanted to argue with her, he really did. But for one thing he knew she was right, and if that weren’t bad enough … she was always right. And that was worse.

He hated that.

#

Ten years ago, Tokay had been driving home from a nightmare of a morning spent at a bank after a computer had deleted his account – and all his money – because he didn’t have a last name. Gripping the wheel of his little blue Volkswagen bug, tooling down the upper part of a freeway in Oakland, California, he still fumed at the idea that the machine had simply decided he didn’t exist. He was so incensed he wasn’t really aware of his surroundings – that is, until the road dropped out from under him and the world seemed to come to an end.

The next thing he knew he was weightless. The truck right in front of him flew straight into the air and turned sideways, and – oddly – Tokay was still eye level with it. His Volkswagen had also gone Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang and was flying as well. Their tires were at least five feet off the ground, and when you’re tires aren’t on the ground your brakes don’t work. The front of his beloved VW slammed into the side of the truck and bounced backward, and the truck tumbled past the railing, falling off the raised freeway. Had they not collided he would have gone with it.

Returning to the freeway pavement below him, though, was still traumatic. The Volkswagen’s tires crushed up into the car’s body, his seat broke, and the impact wrenched his neck to the point where he thought it was broken. The car came to rest against the opposite guard rail, and it took a few moments for him to realize that the roadway both in front and behind him looked like broken blocks, with cars smashed everywhere, and dust and smoke rising into the sky. It took a few more minutes to climb out of the car, and the first thing he did was fall down and vomit. The roadway under him still swayed like a dock on the ocean.

Only then did he think: Earthquake.

Directly beneath him, on the lower deck of the freeway, cars were smashed flat. Black, oily smoke billowed out of the giant concrete sandwich, and he could hear survivors screaming in terror and agony as they slowly died. He tried to help, injured as he was – he managed to climb down into a crack to the next level, where others were climbing up. Office workers. Construction workers. Gang members. All doing what they could. That night there were fires everywhere and he heard the bay bridge collapsed as well.

It was the end of the freaking world.

But no, it was just a twitch, a tick in Nature’s eye. Tokay couldn’t imagine what would happen when Nature really got pissed off. It would happen, too — it was inevitable — and everything he’d ever done, or worked for, or created would all be for nothing. Everything would be gone, and over time everything would be erased.

That is, unless he planned for it.

#

Tokay had a date for the next doomsday. Midnight, January 1st, 2000. People called it Y2K.

The giant rocket-ship penis-statue he’d conceived and now worked on, it was inspired by a story he’d read when he was younger. “The Big Space Fuck” it was called, by an author named Kurt Vonnegut. It depicted a desperate human race sending sperm samples in a giant rocket into the heart of the galaxy. Since Tokay couldn’t actually build a working spaceship, he settled on a statue that would last for millions of years right here on Earth, tagged and easy to find – he’d hoped – by loading the tip with a core of plutonium-244. Whatever society replaced mankind in the far future, they were bound to find it … as long as they knew how to work a Geiger counter. They should, he thought. He couldn’t imagine an advanced society that didn’t have a Geiger counter.

Then again, maybe a super powerful magnet would be better after all. You wouldn’t need anything more sophisticated than a metal divining rod to find something like that. They’d find it, dig it up, decipher the pictographs, and then know that the human race had once existed. Whatever crab-cockroach-lizard society it was, no matter how different they were, they’d still be our successors, and in them the memory of humanity could live on.

#

The magnet was so powerful that the woman who delivered it gave him a detailed sermon on how many ways it could injure or kill him if he weren’t extremely careful. She went on for a full ten minutes, and he kept thinking, Come on lady it’s a magnet, not a hand grenade. As far as he was concerned, he would treat it exactly like he would have the plutonium-244 – he’d leave it in the case until it was time to insert it into the hole at the top of the statue and seal it in.

“Also,” she told him, “whatever you do, don’t take it anywhere near that computer you have over there. You’d fry its brains instantly.”

“It would?” Tokay said.

“Oh, yes, definitely.” She brushed a strand of curly red hair away from her face. “Keep it on the far side of the room, in fact.”

Tokay couldn’t help but glance over at the unblinking spherical webcam sitting on top of the computer. It had been watching him work for the best part of two weeks now, making him think of the menacing eye of HAL 9000 in that Kubrick movie. He’d thought maybe two dozen people might ever watch – to his dismay his wife informed him they were up to 1100 people, with more showing up every day. “Far side of the room,” he said. “Got it.”

Just a couple more days, he thought, it will all go kabloowey anyway.

#

There was massive party on New Year’s Eve, of course. James Lowbarker’s big corporate shindig. Barbara said they were required to go, telling him that it didn’t matter if he hadn’t finished the sculpture yet. The stockholders were going to be there, and they wanted to meet the artist of the soon to be famous piece for which they’d authorized the big bucks.

Tokay made sure the studio was stocked with food, water, and a generator. He had a flashlight his coat pocket for the party, because when all the lights went out and the cars stopped running, they would have to walk home – in the dark.

Even if they only had a short while to live, he had to get back to the studio and finish his work before the end came. He couldn’t bear the thought of dying and leaving it unfinished. That would be a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

To Tokay the party was a blur of sparking lights, tuxedos, pompous assholes, and booze. Men bellowed their laughter too loud and the women screeched like buzzards on road kill. He kept pulling at his bow tie, which threatened to choke him. After he caught Barbara and some other women tittering and covertly passing a joint back and forth, he handed her the car keys and told her to meet him at home. He took a cab.

Midnight struck while he stood on the ladder. Car horns and fireworks marked the occasion – it sounded like a war zone outside. Tokay wondered if some of the fireworks were actually gunfire. He climbed down the ladder, pulled the flashlight out of his pocket, and waited for the lights to go out.

The lights, however, didn’t so much as flicker.

Across the room, the computer screen showed a picture of him from the webcam. It hadn’t crashed. It still watched, recorded, sent signals out. Computed him and his existence. He couldn’t help but feel an ironic bit of disappointment that it survived this so-called Y2K doomsday. Fucking computers, he thought, they’ll probably outlive us.

Tokay grabbed the super magnet – still sitting in its box – and had to slide it off the metal workbench because he lacked the strength to lift it, it had stuck so hard. Carrying it across the room, he saw the computer screen distort and change colors even though he was still several paces away. By the time he reached it, the image of him had pinched down to a point all surrounded by digital rainbows, and when he plunked the magnet down on the computer itself it made a strange noise and then popped. The screen went blue, covered with pictographs – not unlike the ones he was painstakingly carving in bronze – and then issued an unending tone. Gotcha, he thought, but then the lights flickered.

Oh Jeeze.

The lights didn’t go out, but it seemed they’d dimmed. He blinked his eyes several times in an attempt to clear the shadows away, and took a breath or two to remain calm – because something had just happened. Something bad. He didn’t know what, but he could feel it.

To his dismay, the computer had come back to life. The webcam image showed him standing there looking at himself in the screen, but it didn’t look right. He didn’t look right.

Of course, he thought. The magnet is distorting the image. He picked up the box to slam the magnet down on the computer again, to kill it for good this time, but the box was feather light. It felt empty.

Tokay stared at it, feeling the hair at the back of his neck doing its ‘fraidy cat thing.

He fought the urge to open featherweight box and look. Instead, he placed it back on top of the computer and slowly moved away. Work on the sculpture, he thought. Finish it before the end came.

Quick as possible, because he could feel the end coming soon.

Walking felt wrong. His body felt too light, too limber. There was a buzz in his head, a 60-cycle hum coming from the back, and his teeth felt like plastic.

Am I drugged? he wondered. Or … did the computer … do something to me?

No, that’s ridiculous. Get a fucking grip. You’re okay, you’re still breathing. Climb back up the ladder and go back to work.

Tokay walked in a daze around the statue to the ladder, but as he put his foot on the first rung he looked up and froze. The carvings were done.

The statue stood finished and ready.

Tokay looked over at his old grungy wall clock, wondering if he’d blacked out and missed time. If he’d had a lapse of memory.

Nope. The clock read thirteen past midnight.

Thirteen minutes into doomsday.

His left eye twitched, like bit of dust or perhaps a hair collided with it, and Tokay’s tongue snaked out and up and licked the eyeball clean. He didn’t realize he was doing it but after he had, his whole body jumped, startled. “What the fuck!” he exclaimed.

A voice spoke from across the room – its pitch high and oddly mechanical. “Did you just experience an anomaly?” it asked. “Was something not expected?”

“What the fuck!” Tokay exclaimed again. He was now in full fight or flight mode, looking frantically for the source of the voice. He stood alone in the room, unless you counted the computer. “Who’s there?”

“You are not expecting the computer to talk?” asked the voice.

Tokay raised his hands up to the sides of his head. Someone had drugged him. It was the only explanation. Someone at the party – one of those corporate jackasses – thought it would be funny to put LSD in his drink. Or maybe his own wife had done it – lord knows she hated him enough, lately. Dropping his shaking hands to his sides, Tokay licked both eyes to make sure they were clean and clear and then looked once again at the statue.

It was, indeed, completed. Finished.

But the magnet? Was it in the box, or in the tip of the giant penis? Tokay walked over to the box and with shaking hands opened it to confirm it was now empty.

“What was inside the box?” asked the computer voice, startling Tokay once again. “This is one of the central mysteries.”

Tokay dropped the box. It made a hollow, empty-cardboard sound as it struck the concrete floor, and he stepped slowly back from the computer. His heart should have been jack-hammering in his chest but he couldn’t feel a pulse at all. Everything felt wrong, alien, and he had to get out of there.

Kicking the empty box out of his way, Tokay scrambled across the room, his body swaying off-balance as if he were drunk, and he slammed through the door leading from the studio into the living area, but it was pitch black and he couldn’t see anything. Behind him he could hear the voice calling after him, asking what was in the box, please tell it what was in the box.

He felt around in the dark, trying to navigate from memory, but he couldn’t. The light switch was nowhere – and it should have been right there, next to the door.

Nothing.

He’d left his flashlight on his workbench, so he rushed back into the studio to grab it – to his horror, the computer had moved – it had turned and was now closer to the door. “Please,” it said, “we must know. Our data is incomplete.”

Ignoring the machine, Tokay flicked the flashlight on and off a few times to make sure it worked, and then dove back out the door.

Waving the spot of light frantically too and fro in what should have been his apartment, it revealed grimy walls too far away, and angled unexpectedly. This was clearly impossible – Tokay knew it had to be wrong – and even as he discovered his studio now sat in the middle of a round chamber the size of a small stadium, his eyes kept trying to interpret it as something else. Reflections in mirrors, or video projections, or something – anything – that would make more sense.

At the edge of the big round wall he found a door that slid aside as he nudged it, and he was immediately hit by a blast of hot dry air. Outside was only marginally less dark than inside, but there were little red lights everywhere, all moving – some sliding smoothly, some bobbing up and down. Tokay pointed the flashlight into the middle of it all to reveal machinery of some kind. Everywhere. Rolling, crawling, walking, tiptoeing, stomping, and just as he realized they were robots he heard a noise to the right, very close, and swung the flashlight around in time to see a mass of metal and red lights as it collided with him. Hard.

The impact shoved him skyward into the blackness, spinning madly, the flashlight careening in the air beside him. He bounced off the grimy outside wall of the dome which held his studio, and he and the flashlight landed together right in the path of something with tractor treads. Numb, he felt it running over his legs and lower torso as a crushing pressure that relented only after sending his ruined body spinning into the air again after it passed. He felt a distant sense of pain that was more like warning signs than agony, and he found he could only move his arms. Desperate, he crawled to the flashlight, which miraculously survived, dragging the dead weight of his legs behind him.

A large stomping machine on what sounded like 2-ton feet rapidly approached from his left, and Tokay grabbed the flashlight and crawled as fast as he could back toward the wall of the dome, but his progress momentarily halted when one of the feet came down on both of his, no doubt smashing them to bloody mush. He didn’t feel much, probably due to shock and perhaps a severed spine, so as soon as he could move again Tokay resumed his doomed crawl to the relative safety of the dome.

The ground under his tortured hands and elbows felt like dirt on metal, and he made it to the wall and then back to the door from which he’d emerged. It wouldn’t open so he lay crumpled outside it, trapped in this robotic Hell, and when he’d built up enough nerve he pointed the flashlight toward his legs to see what there was left of them, and perhaps estimate how long it would take before he bled to death. There was some blood but nowhere as much as he thought there would be, but on closer inspection it wasn’t red – it was black, looking more like oil or perhaps hydraulic fluid. Instead of crushed meat and bone, his mangled legs looked like shredded plastic and metal rods. His own hand holding the flashlight was also ripped open, a great swath of flesh hanging to one side, and inside Tokay could only see more metal rods.

The door to the dome slid open and metal claws grabbed him and pulled him back inside. “I don’t understand,” Tokay croaked in a low, rasping voice.  “What happened to me? Please tell me what happened!”

“What was inside the box you sat on the computer?” a voice asked. “And why did you send this message to us? How did you know we would be here to find it? You must tell us quickly as we’re about to loose the temporally entangled connection.”

“What happened to me? Why am I here?”

“This is 23,921 years in your perceived future. You are a recreation of the sender of the Great Phallus Message. Your mind is temporally entangled to the human mind at the time where our records stop. Your mind – as is the entangled mind – is an unknowable black box inside which we cannot read. You must tell us what you know.”

Tokay didn’t understand any of this, but whatever shred of self-preservation he had left wouldn’t allow him to admit he’d killed that computer on purpose with a super magnet. He put his head gently against the grimy floor and concentrated on his simulated breathing while his simulated, temporally entangled life ebbed away to blackness. His last thought, his last realization, was that his message had reached humanity’s successors – and it wasn’t the crab-cockroach-lizard people.

The computers had outlived them after all.

#

Tokay slammed the box with the magnet in it down on top of the infernal computer and felt an oddly haunting sense of déjà vu as the screen flickered and died, and the light in the room suddenly changed. What the Hell had just happened? Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.

The screen came back to life, reading “Simulation #2 Now Running,” and Tokay gave a horrible, involuntary start when the computer actually spoke:

“Please, you must tell us. What was inside the box?”

 

The End