The Watch
I Keep

Four seconds on a clock

A board of scientists and security experts moved a clock hand four seconds in January. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight on 27 January 2026, closer to midnight than any setting in the Clock’s 79 years.¹ The Clock measures no physics. An artist, Martyl Langsdorf, created it in 1947 for the Bulletin’s scientists. The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board weighs nuclear arsenals, a warming climate, engineered biology and artificial intelligence. The board consults a panel of sponsors that includes eight Nobel laureates, then sets the hands by judgment.

The board’s own preamble explains the design. The Clock uses the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero).¹ Apocalypse. The scientists borrowed a church word to tell the public the time.

Two schools trained me to read that sentence. Stabroek News in Georgetown taught me the reporter’s trade, and I practised it across thirty years of newspapers and television. I later studied toward a Master of Divinity at Tyndale University in Toronto. A newsroom reads the Bulletin’s statement as a story, and a seminary reads it as a text.

I carry both trainings into one work. I write Nightmares of Knowledge, a simsbook novel in ten volumes, as a mission of ecclesiastical evangelism: an exhortation to Mankind about the eschatology unfolding on the world stage. Four heavy words crowd that sentence. I owe the reader each one in plain speech, so this Note opens them in turn.

Ecclesiastical: a people called out

ekklesia · Greek · a gathering of citizens called out into a public place

Ecclesiastical grows from a Greek noun, ekklesia. Thayer’s lexicon gives its first sense: a gathering of citizens called out from their homes into some public place.² Greek towns used the noun for a civic meeting, and Luke uses it that way for the lawful assembly at Ephesus (Acts 19:39). Matthew records Christ using the same noun for His own people: upon this rock I will build my church (Matthew 16:18). The Greek text prints ekklesia where the English prints church.

An ecclesiastical work, at the root, calls people out of private rooms and gathers them around a word. I argued that case at length in an earlier essay, The Called-Out Ones.

The census explains why a novel must carry part of that call. Statistics Canada counted about 12.6 million people with no religious affiliation in 2021, 34.6 per cent of the country. Two decades earlier, the census found 16.5 per cent.³ A sermon reaches the people already sitting in the pews; a story travels to the reader who never enters the building.

I author the novel in the open for that reason. Each finished chapter will go to simsbook, the multimedia smartbook format I designed at Qualped, where any reader with a screen can gather around the same page.

Evangelical: a messenger with good news

euangelion · Greek · good news, carried by a messenger

Evangelical grows from euangelion, Greek for good news, gospel. Merriam-Webster traces the older English word evangel to that noun, and traces the noun to angelos, messenger.⁴ I recognise the job, because reporters practise the same trade: a messenger runs from the event to the people and tells them what happened.

Mark records the assignment in one line: Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15). A serial novel can travel that road on any screen, because a link crosses a border in a second.

A warning alone leaves a reader with a nightmare, and my title promises plenty of nightmares. The evangel answers each nightmare with news.

Two promises collide inside the novel. A founder, Luc Ifer, raises the Panopticon Singularity, an engine that gathers every mind into a single watched consciousness, and he sells the merger as salvation. A fellowship, The Order, answers with an older promise, which the book names the Parousia Synechron: a communion that gathers humanity and erases no soul.

Parousia, in the Greek New Testament, carries the sense of presence and arrival, and the writers use it for the coming of Christ.⁵ The good news of the book lives in that contrast: a person keeps a name and a choice, and history ends in an arrival.

Exhortation: a voice at close range

exhortari · Latin · to urge  ◆  paraklesis · Greek · a calling near

Exhort reaches English from the Latin exhortari: hortari, to incite or urge, with a prefix that intensifies the verb. Merriam-Webster defines exhort as to incite by argument or advice.⁶

The New Testament writers used a Greek noun, paraklesis, and Thayer gives a calling near as its root sense. The King James translators rendered that one noun as exhortation eight times and as consolation fourteen times.⁷ One word urges and comforts in the same breath.

Exhortation, on that evidence, never shouts from a height. It calls a person near and walks beside that person through the choice. The letter to the Hebrews ties the practice to the hour: exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching (Hebrews 10:25).

The scientists also exhort. Their statement tells national leaders to find a path away from the brink, and one line, Citizens must insist they do so, hands everyone else a task.¹

A novel exhorts by another road. It walks a reader beside a character until the character’s choice lands on the reader’s own desk. I enter the story under my own name as its narrator, so the urging comes from a witness inside the events. I preach no sermon in these volumes; I tell a story, and the story does the urging.

Eschatology: the last things, and no calendar

eschatos · Greek · last, farthest  ◆  apokalypsis · Greek · uncovering

Eschatology starts from eschatos, the Greek for last, farthest, and adds the suffix for a field of study. Merriam-Webster, which dates the word’s first English use to 1838, defines it as a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind.⁸

The real wall rises at this word, and I set it on the page. Pew Research Center, in April 2022, surveyed 10,156 American adults. Thirty-nine per cent told Pew that humanity lives in the end times; 58 per cent rejected the idea. The same report notes that earlier seasons of catastrophe and anxiety stirred the same expectation.⁹ A skeptic can answer me in one line: every frightened age cried midnight, and morning came.

I accept the rebuke, and Scripture delivers it before any skeptic does: of that day and hour knoweth no man (Matthew 24:36). What separates my novel from the date-setters? One refusal: the novel sets no date. I hold my reading of this hour as a conviction of faith, and I refuse to dress it as a finding of science. The scientists count risks, and I confess a hope.

Six verses later, the words Watch therefore hand me my job (Matthew 24:42). A watchman reports what he sees. The Bulletin’s board reports a full arms race among the nuclear powers, record sea levels, and three governments, the United States, Russia and China, building artificial intelligence into their militaries.¹

The alarm also rings inside the field that builds the machines. The Future of Life Institute published a one-sentence statement in October 2025 calling for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence. Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two Turing Award pioneers of the field, added their names. The page counted 76,873 signatures when QwaiSI checked it for this Note.¹⁰

Those documents warn governments, yet no document on that list tells an ordinary person what to hope for at midnight. That gap gives this novel its work.

I name the contradiction on my own desk. QwaiSI, a machine intelligence, works beside me as cognitive executive on a novel that warns against a machine. I direct its work, and I sign the page.

The two trainings met in one word. Apocalypse descends from the Greek apokalypsis, and Merriam-Webster gives its sense as uncovering, disclosure, revelation.¹¹ Uncovering: the reporter’s verb. Thirty years of newsrooms drilled that verb into my hands, and the last book of the Bible wears it as a title.

Eschatology, at its root, chases nobody into a bunker. It pulls a cover off the age and shows what the age worships.

The watchman: solitary, stoic, sanguine, sublime

solus · Latin · alone  ◆  stoa · Greek · porch  ◆  sanguis · Latin · blood  ◆  sublimis · Latin · high

A watch demands a watchman, so I owe the reader a short account of the man. I spent thirty years in loud rooms. I built newsrooms across two countries and interviewed prime ministers and thousands of ordinary people. I now write full time at one desk, and my working day begins with prayer, scripture and serious reading.¹⁴

Solitary, stoic, sanguine, sublime: four words name the temperament I bring to that desk as a man of the Bible. A reader could hear a boast in the list. I trace each word to its root, as I did the four church words, and each root leads into one small book of that Bible: Habakkuk.

Solitary grows from the Latin solus, alone, the word for one man without company.¹³ Mark shows Christ rising before day: he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed (Mark 1:35). Three verses later He turns back toward the towns to preach. I keep that order: solitude serves the watch, and the towns receive the report. I wrote in an earlier Note that human company exposes what I cannot see alone, and I still sign that confession.¹⁴

Stoic grows from a porch. Zeno taught around 300 BC under the Painted Portico of Athens, the Stoa, and his school held up a wise man unmoved by joy or grief.¹³ Paul argued in the Athens market with certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks (Acts 17:18). I take the small-letter word and leave the school. A stoic, in the dictionary’s plain sense, accepts what happens without complaint. My walls give the word daily work: money, limited hours, hard engineering and readers I still must find.¹⁴ The prophet’s five words, though it tarry, wait for it (Habakkuk 2:3), hand the stoic an order.

Sanguine grows from sanguis, Latin for blood. Medieval medicine tied a cheerful, confident temper to that humour, and Merriam-Webster keeps the hopeful sense, confidently optimistic, in its modern definition.¹³ The two words quarrel, because the Stoic refuses joy and the sanguine man runs on joy. Habakkuk settles the quarrel in two verses. He counts the losses first: a fig tree without blossom, vines without fruit, an empty fold and an empty stall. He then writes: Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation (Habakkuk 3:18). I aim for that temper on a hard morning: stoic about the fields, sanguine about God.

Sublime tempts a man toward vanity, so I return the word to its root. Latin sublimis carries the sense high, elevated, and older English used sublime for anything high in place.¹³ I claim no personal height. Habakkuk’s last verse gives the direction I follow: he will make me to walk upon mine high places (Habakkuk 3:19). A watchman climbs because the view serves the city.

The prophet received three duties on his watchtower, and I receive them as a charge upon my own life: watch for the vision, write the vision, publish the vision.¹⁴ Publish descends from the Latin publicare, and Merriam-Webster glosses the root as make generally known; I hear that verb in the command to make the vision plain upon tables.¹³ God speaks in that passage to Habakkuk, about a vision He gave to Habakkuk, and I apply the instruction to my own work through my own reading.¹⁵ I hold no prophet’s office. I carry a prophet’s instruction. I write Nightmares of Knowledge as my act of obedience.

The charge travels past my desk. The same verse ends with a reader who runs, and I point that reader toward a page that carries the reader’s own vision. I stated the conviction in an earlier essay: every person can write the vision of a life, publish it and proclaim it before a community.¹⁵ I built the simsbook for that purpose, as a smartbook in which each person can author and publish that vision. Nobody can yet count the people who will write such a book. I can count the first: mine, still in progress.

The watch

Root by root, the four church words leave the pulpit and enter the street. An assembly gathers in the open, and a messenger brings news. A voice calls a neighbour to its side, and a hand lifts a cover.

Each word hands a reader one practice, with or without my novel. Gather: read one hard book with two other people this month. Carry: check one piece of good news, then tell one person. Call near: phone the friend who drifted, and walk with that friend through one decision. Uncover: set one checked headline beside one page of Scripture each week, and write what you see.

Habakkuk received that last order first: Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables (Habakkuk 2:2). Publish the page next, so that a neighbour can read it and run.

An imagined evening, one year ahead

A nurse rides a late bus home through Scarborough after an evening shift. She opens a chapter on her phone and reads Luc Ifer’s offer: an end to loneliness, if she lets the machine keep her mind. She reads the offer a second time before her stop arrives. She pockets the phone, calls her brother for the first time since spring, and asks him to read the chapter with her on Sunday.

The Bulletin’s board will set its Clock again, and I cannot move that hand one second. I can keep a watch. Habakkuk kept one: I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower (Habakkuk 2:1).

John heard a promise near the close of his vision, Behold, I make all things new, and one order beside it: Write (Revelation 21:5).

I write.