The station had been decommissioned in 1961. The city had grown around its absence in the way cities grow around all absences � by filling the space with something else and then forgetting what was there before. The building above it was an insurance office. The building before the insurance office had been a sorting depot. Before that, for eleven years, it had simply been a locked door at grade level, opening onto a staircase, which opened onto the original platform substructure, which had been sealed when the track was rerouted to the northern junction.
The Oracle had been there since the original construction. This was the account in the records that Miriam had found in the regional archive, written in a hand she could not date precisely but estimated at somewhere between 1890 and 1910, which put the machine's continuous operation at not less than a hundred and twelve years, and possibly longer. The record was a maintenance log � not for the building, but for the Oracle itself, including notation of every question presented to it and the date of each presentation. The log ended in 1913. The most recent entry read: Third question received. No return expected for some time. The machine continues.
No one had presented a question since 1913.
Miriam was not, she told herself, the kind of person who visited things like this. She was a structural engineer. She had obtained access through the council's archival permissions process, on the stated grounds of documenting an unstudied historic structure. This was true. It was also incomplete.
The staircase was intact. The platform substructure was dry, which surprised her, and lit by what appeared to be gas lamps that were not connected to any gas supply she could identify � they were simply burning, with a steady flame that did not gutter. The platform extended perhaps forty metres, ending in a bricked wall where the tunnel access had been sealed. At the far end of the platform, positioned against the wall, was the machine.
It was approximately the size and proportion of a grandfather clock, constructed entirely of brass, and it was ticking. Not the irregular settling-noise of old metalwork: a regular, deliberate tick, one per second, consistent. She stood in front of it for some time before she understood what she was looking at. There was no mechanism visible that could account for the continued operation. There was no winding key, no access panel she could identify, no visible power source. It had been ticking at one beat per second for a minimum of a hundred and twelve years � in itself, without considering anything else about its nature, an impossibility she could calculate precisely.
There was a panel on the front, at approximately chest height. A slot, three inches wide and one deep, flanked by two rectangular openings that she concluded, after examination, were intended for the input and output of written material. Above the slot, engraved in the brass in a letterform she associated with the late Victorian period, were the words: THREE QUESTIONS. STATE CLEARLY. ONE AT A TIME.
She had brought paper. She had told herself on the tube that this meant nothing � that she was documenting the structure, that the paper was for notes, that she was a structural engineer who had found an interesting historic artefact and was behaving professionally toward it. She had believed this as far as the bottom of the staircase.
The first question she wrote was the one she had been preparing for seven years, since the inquest. She wrote it plainly, without preamble, because the machine's instructions said to state clearly and she had always been a person who read instructions. She folded the paper and fed it into the left opening.
The machine ticked. After precisely eleven seconds � she counted � the right opening produced a single folded sheet, not of the paper she had used but of something older, heavier, with the colour and texture of documents she had handled in archives. The response was written in the same brass-engraved letterform as the instructions, but transferred to the paper in a way she could not account for. It answered her question in fourteen words. The answer was not what she had expected. It was more accurate.
She sat down on the platform. The gas lamps burned without fluctuation. She read the answer a second time and then a third. On the fourth reading she understood that she had arrived at the station knowing what she wanted the answer to be and that the machine had not provided that answer and that this was, in fact, the service the machine had been designed to render. It did not provide comfort. It provided accuracy. These were not always different things, but in this case they were.
She had two questions left.
She sat with the first answer for a long time, in the dry, lamp-lit air, with the tick of the machine measuring the duration of her thinking, before she decided what the second question was. She used it carefully. She used the third one more carefully still.
When she left, she did not seal the staircase behind her. The log she filed with the council's archive described the structural conditions accurately and said nothing about the questions. Several months later, she found her name on an updated edition of the maintenance log that she had not touched and could not account for. Beneath her name, in the same hand as the original entries, was written: Fourth question received. First in one hundred and twelve years. Answers accepted. The machine continues.