Voyages to the
End of the World
does science save us, or does it hand us over to the devil? four guys, four centuries apart, all asking the same damn thing.
Bacon’s Bensalem
1626. a book gets published after the man’s already dead.
Francis Bacon wanted to kill disease. He wanted to kill natural disasters. He wanted to kill bad luck itself. And he wanted to kill god, but he didn’t say so out loud.
He wrote a book about it. Called it New Atlantis. Then he died and let the rest of us figure it out.
On the surface the book is Christian. Bacon was good at that. He quoted scripture the way some men quote it to skip out on a debt — fluently, with conviction, and you don’t catch on until later.
Read it close though and something crawls out from under it.
A boat full of Christians gets blown five months west from Peru. They wash up on an island called Bensalem. Hebrew for son of peace. The locals are nice. They heal the sick sailors. They feed them. They take them in.
But the place is running on something. A research lab called Salomon’s House. The scientists there spy on Europe — twelve-year missions, stealing every invention they can get their hands on. They decide which truths the world gets and which truths stay buried.
The Christians on the boat don’t notice any of this. They get drunk on the place. By the end of the story they’ve forgotten everything they came from.
Then there’s Joabin.
Jewish. Gay. Smart. Runs the whole island from behind a curtain. The narrator calls him wise. Nobody else in the book gets called wise. He talks about Christ the way you’d talk about a man you used to drink with — yeah, decent guy, knew his stuff, what about it.
Here’s where it gets ugly.
The Bible says the Antichrist won’t follow his father’s god. Won’t want women either. Will come riding the words “Peace and Safety.” Will be from a lost tribe of Israel.
Joabin: Jewish. Gay. Lost tribe. Welcomed onto an island called son of peace.
Bacon hid an Antichrist in his utopia and then died before anyone could ask him about it.
the winds that blew the boat to the island weren’t winds at all. SOMEBODY SET THE WHOLE THING UP
“many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased”
The book ends with a deal.
The chaplain — that’s the narrator, our guy on the boat — finally gets a meeting with one of the scientists running the place. The scientist tells him the goal of the whole operation. Wants to know “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”
That last part. All things possible. Read it again. The Bible says only god gets to do that. The scientist on the island just claimed it for himself.
He hands the chaplain two thousand ducats. The chaplain takes the money. He doesn’t renounce his faith out loud. He doesn’t have to. The deal is done.
That’s Bensalem. That’s the new world.
Heaven without god. Just better engineered.
The Little Horn
in 1953 a guy said the word “antichrist” sounded weird. that was 73 years ago.
Three hundred years ago every drunk in the tavern knew who the Antichrist was. Now nobody does. That, if you believe the old books, is one of the signs.
So here’s the rundown. You’re going to need it.
The prophet Daniel saw a vision. Four beasts, four empires. The last beast had ten horns. Then a smaller horn pushed up between them and ate the rest. The little horn had a man’s eyes. It had a mouth. The mouth talked big.
That’s the Antichrist. A small thing that grows. A thing with eyes and a loud mouth. It takes over the world for three and a half years. Then the lights go out.
and i saw a beast rise up out of the sea
having seven heads and ten horns REVELATION 13:1
Christians spent two thousand years pointing at suspects. Nero. Muhammad. A few popes. Napoleon. Hitler. FDR. Anyone they didn’t like, basically. Some writers gave up trying to spot him in the news and started writing him into novels instead.
Bacon was one of those writers.
Now here’s the part that matters: how does the Antichrist take the world?
You can’t conquer a planet that’s 71% water unless you’ve got the boats. Unless you’ve got the planes. Unless you’ve got the thing nobody else has.
You need science.
The medieval picture books drew the Antichrist surfing the sea on the back of Leviathan. Revelation says when god finally comes back to fix everything, the first thing he does is delete the ocean. “There was no more sea.” No more chaos. No more place for the beast to swim.
For Bacon that wasn’t a prophecy. That was a to-do list. And the sea was first to go.
Swift’s Laputa
1726. a different book. a different bottle.
A century after Bacon, Jonathan Swift sat down to slap him.
Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels and most people read it as a comedy. His friend Pope read it different. Pope said the book was the work of “an Avenging Angel of wrath.”
That’s the version we’re after.
Gulliver hits four countries. Tiny people. Giant people. A flying island. A country run by horses. Swift makes fun of nearly everyone in his England — except the church. He leaves the church alone. Not an accident.
The third voyage is where Bacon takes his beating.
Gulliver gets captured by Japanese pirates and ships out to a place called Laputa. Swift was a smart man. La puttana in Italian means the whore.
Laputa floats. It floats because science. The men on it are all lost in their heads, doing math, watching stars, terrified the sun is going to burn out, terrified a comet is going to hit. They have to hire flunkies to slap them with little paddles when it’s their turn to talk. They never enjoy a minute’s peace.
Below Laputa is a regular country called Balnibarbi. The king of Laputa rules it from the sky. When the people don’t pay their taxes, the king blocks out the sun. When they fight back, he threatens to drop the whole island on their heads.
Now read this part slow.
The king won’t drop the island anywhere there’s a high church spire. Because the spire would punch through the bottom of his floating empire and bring the whole thing down on him.
Swift drew the map himself. The little towers on Balnibarbi sticking up at Laputa like middle fingers — those are churches.
the king blocks out the sun for taxes. the church spires keep him from landing.
The fourth voyage finishes the job.
Gulliver lands in horse country. The horses are philosophers. The humans there — Yahoos — are slaves. Gulliver realizes he’s a Yahoo too.
The horses want to kill all the Yahoos. They debate it like a tax bill. The parliament of horses meets and the only thing they ever discuss is whether or not to wipe humanity off the map.
the parliament of horses had only one question:
whether or not to exterminate the humans
from the face of the earth VOYAGE FOUR — HOUYHNHNMLAND
Eventually they let Gulliver go. On the condition that he leaves and never comes back.
He builds a canoe out of human skin. The young ones, because the old skin is too thick to work with. He gets in the canoe. He sails off.
That’s Swift’s whole point.
Take god out of the picture and you don’t get Bacon’s perfect city. You get a parliament of philosophers debating whether or not to kill you. You get a man rowing away from civilization in a boat made of his neighbors.
Bacon told you the future was a paradise. Swift told you it was a slaughterhouse with better lighting.
Moore’s Watchmen
1986. the cold war won’t end. somebody finally writes it down.
Swift won the popularity contest. People still laugh at Gulliver’s Travels. Nobody reads New Atlantis anymore except weirdos and graduate students.
Bacon won the actual fight.
Look around. Light bulbs. Cars. Vaccines. Airplanes. Submarines. The College of Salomon’s House got everything it asked for and a hell of a lot it didn’t. We made it. The new Atlantis exists. We’re standing on it right now.
Then we made the bomb.
After the bomb, science had a problem it couldn’t solve. It had built the thing that could end the world. Now it had to figure out how to keep the world from ending.
The answer everybody kept arriving at was the same: one world government. One law. One peace.
A 1946 propaganda film put it plain — One World or None? Either we unify the planet under a single government or we all die. Choose.
Forty years later Alan Moore wrote Watchmen.
The setup: Cold War still going. Nixon’s been president for five terms. Superheroes used to walk around but the public got sick of them and Congress made them illegal. Somebody is now killing the ones who are left.
The killer turns out to be Adrian Veidt. Billionaire. Genius. Calls himself Ozymandias after the Egyptian pharaoh. Vegetarian. Pacifist. Smarter than everybody. Wants to save the world.
His plan: fake an alien invasion. Build a giant monster. Drop it on New York. Kill three million people. Scare the Soviets and the Americans into burying the cold war.
It works.
The world unites. Posters go up — One World, One Accord. Veidt’s logo gets stamped on the rebuilt city. Earth is at peace. The doomsday clock pulls back from midnight.
“even in the face of armageddon i shall not compromise”
One man refuses to play along.
His name is Rorschach. He’s a paranoid, anti-social, half-mad street preacher in a stained trenchcoat. He’s the only character in the book with a moral spine. Moore meant him as a critique. Readers loved him anyway. Some things you can’t control.
Rorschach figures out what Veidt did. He decides to tell the world even if it ruins the peace.
there is good and evil.
and evil must be punished.
even in the face of armageddon
i shall not compromise. RORSCHACH, KNOWING HE’S ABOUT TO DIE
Doctor Manhattan kills him before he can talk.
In the last panel of the book, Rorschach’s diary — with everything he knew — sits in a slush pile at a small newspaper. Some intern is about to pick it up.
Moore’s question is one he asks but won’t answer. Who watches the watchmen?
In a world without god the question goes on forever. Somebody has to watch the watchers and somebody has to watch them and so on down the line until you fall off the bottom and there’s nothing.
Moore couldn’t find god in 1986. So he settled for “nothing ever ends.” Doctor Manhattan says it. It’s supposed to be hopeful.
It isn’t. It’s just exhausted.
Oda’s Imu
1997. a japanese cartoonist starts drawing pirates. nobody’s noticed yet.
Four years after Watchmen ended, the cold war finally ended too. George Bush called it the new world order. Clinton spent the peace dividend. Globalization rolled. The 90s.
In all that quiet, a guy named Eiichiro Oda started writing a comic book about pirates.
The book is called One Piece. It’s the most popular fiction on earth. Half a billion copies sold. Twenty-eight years running. Five million people on a single discussion forum trying to figure out what the next chapter means.
Most people I know would call it a kids’ show.
Most people don’t read it close.
The setup: a kid named Luffy wants to be the King of the Pirates. There’s a treasure called the One Piece. He’s looking for it. He’s got a crew. He wears a straw hat. He stretches like rubber because he ate a magic fruit when he was small.
The world he lives in is run by a thing called the World Government. The government has been on top for eight hundred years. They came to power right after a “Void Century” that nobody is allowed to study. The government is run by five old men who call themselves saints. Behind the saints is a single hooded figure that none of the old men will say the name of.
In chapter 908, after almost twenty years of buildup, Oda finally shows us the figure.
Its name is Nerona Imu.
a small black spike with eyes and a mouth and a crown. just like the book said.
Nerona — like Nero, the Roman emperor who killed himself in 68 AD and never quite stayed dead. The early Christians believed Nero would come back as the beast in Revelation. His name in Hebrew adds up to 666.
“imu” spelled backwards is “umi”
japanese for “the sea”
nerona imu = “nero of the sea”
he was hiding in the name the whole time. CHAPTER 1,115
Imu doesn’t have a face. It has eyes and a mouth and a crown. It’s a small black spike on a throne. It looks exactly like the thing Daniel described twenty-five hundred years ago — the little horn with eyes like a man’s eyes and a mouth speaking big things.
The government’s full name, when Oda finally tells us, is “the allied powers.”
Read that one again.
Luffy on the other side of the board is starting to look less like a pirate and more like something else. In the last few hundred chapters his hair turns white. His eyes turn to flame. Revelation describes Christ at the apocalypse with white hair and eyes of fire. Oda is following the script almost word for word.
His straw hat — red ribbon around the brim — looks more and more like a crown of thorns the longer you stare at it.
Moore set his clock at five minutes to midnight. Oda sets his eight hundred years past midnight.
The Antichrist is already here. The world ended a long time ago. We’re living in the after-part. And there’s still a kid on a boat looking for the treasure that’s going to crack the whole thing open.
The philosopher’s choice was always the same. One world or none. Antichrist or nuclear ash. Pick.
The Christian’s answer is: neither.
He keeps praying for new technologies and new miracles and a third option that nobody’s drawn up yet. Oda hasn’t told us how One Piece ends. Nobody knows. But it can’t end with Imu winning. And it can’t end with the whole sea on fire.
It has to end some other way.
We have faith that it will.
FINIS
and i saw a new heaven and a new earth.
and there was no more sea.
— REVELATION 21:1 —