Enter the Clockworld

by Jared Mandani

  “From what I know,” I told her, “the place looks awful in 2099.”

  “What, New York?” Daphne smirked. “Yeah. Its skyline doesn’t look like this, not like a forest of glowing old-school Christmas trees. In fact, it looks more like a huge concrete pillbox, all these beautiful skyscrapers hidden inside. Or what remains of them.”

  “Skyscrapers on top of skyscrapers underneath a concrete ceiling,” I said. “Must feel like living inside a shoebox.”

  “Not at all,” she said. “There’s an emulation of skies inside of it; they’re a bit murky but almost like real. It often rains inside, and there are still some trees. It’s not a terrible place, no more terrible than this one, the world a hundred years younger. I have to admit I still miss this place more though. I’m a retrograde.”

  “Aren’t we all, these days?” I echoed. I was in love with the past as well. Not just that; same parts of it Daphne seemed to be into. Our dating index was unusually high from the start, a ninety-eight-something percent match, a bond made in digital heaven. I was just like her, in love with everything old, because back then, the best things were real.

  My position back at home was insane by modern standards, as I was one of the last remaining business owners, and even worse than that, landowners. I inherited the motorcycle workshop from my old father; he transferred the business to me digitally after it became clear the End of Gasoline would destroy what was left of it anyway. It’s the last real custom bike shop, where you can buy a chopper or two, assembled right in front of you, made of freshly 3D-printed components, every detail weathered the natural way before your own eyes via sandblasting and oxygenation and added layers of artificial rust and oil.

  No one will ever ride a bike again in the future. Or drive a car. Or fly a helicopter. The fuel is gone, and the dwindling oil market is finally buried, just in time — we were about to run out of oil anyway, or so they say. Now everything runs on microfusion, a small reactor battery with a thousand years of electricity inside. No more refuels or recharges. No more choppers or cars, only self-driving electric things, which, again, cost quite a lot of money. We hardly move around in the future anyway.

  But we visit all kinds of places at night. The dream places made real. Better than real. All united into a huge Dreamweb. It’s a theme park of a world, a realm of enjoyment and entertainment for the entirety of humankind — because the real world of the future, this place we call Wakeworld, cannot offer much joy or fun anymore. Too many people. Too many robots.

  “So what do you do for real?” she asked me then, lowering the machine down to a vacant cemented lot next to the wharf. The night was forever young and the ground below us dark, but a huge nightclub across the street — a former shopping mall turned illicit dancing place — lit the area up so much Daphne had no problems with landing.

  “What do I do?” I asked. “Oh, I’m a bike mechanic.”

  “Really?” Her eyes widened. “How unusual.”

  “Yes… merely another useless skill in a world of useless skills, huh?”

  “Why?” Daphne said, killing off the helicopter engines. “You can earn money with this knowledge. Mechanics? There’s an entire world full of mechanics of different kinds, you know. Ever heard of Clockworld?”

  She was referring to another dimension, a world her attire must have been brought from. A half-mystical clockwork-powered universe where little parodies of British and German empires existed, along with Turkish lands of the Crescent, and a musketeer-themed French republic, and so on. Despite being much more compact than their real-world counterparts, these lands were a huge supercluster taking up most of the European part of the Dreamweb.

  “A bit far from this American place,” I said, and then pointed at the neon-lit nightclub. “What’s this?”

  “The last illegal rave you’re ever gonna find,” Daphne said with pride. “I told you I’d surprise you with something that beats your usual dates.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Not that I’m a big fan of their dance music, though. Did humanity ever invent anything more primitive, before or after techno music?”

  Daphne only smirked. She opened the cabin doors, and we disembarked and jumped down to the beaten ground of the vacant lot. She locked the machine, primed its alarm, and we headed for the rave, its neon lights playing across the street and beckoning us, its bass booming in our faces, thumping hard; the kind of music as old as this entire place.

  “You’re German, then?” I asked.

  “I’m French-Canadian. I’m with US/C.”

  United States and Canada, I thought. Not EU like me. These abbreviations, this is how countries are named in the future. Their currencies are made of blockchains, their governments meet exclusively in virtual space, and their citizens are kept under supervision in every possible world. In the Wakeworld, it’s all surveillance drones and indestructible patrol bots, sorta-kinda like heavy garbage cans on rubber wheels. Start misbehaving, you’ll be quickly pacified with directed sonowaves. Or zapped. Or injected. No crime is possible in the Wakeworld. Nothing is illegal in the Wakeworld anymore. And nothing is real.

  As we walked towards the nightclub, there was a flash of lightning above us — a bolt of such power we felt it even through the thundering music. A car swerved from around the corner then, a long and red vehicle, totally retro, not a hundred years old but two hundred, no less. All chrome pipes, klaxons, and leather folds; this miracle of an automobile drifted all the way across the road, its tires screaming and burning rubber. This ancient gasoline-guzzling rocket was unable to stop itself at all, because of all its bulky mass and the inertia it must have had. I knew how heavy choppers behave in the Wakeworld, and this thing was heavier than a chopper, or even five of them welded together. It crashed into a bus stop and mowed it down like a dandelion, then hit a streetlight right next to me and Daphne. The impact made the streetlight wink out of existence, glass raining down on the two of us. The crash was so loud my ears popped, and the suddenness of it all made me feel lost and dizzy.

  “What the hell, Buff?” I muttered, deaf and dumb. “Is this your concept of a romantic date then?”

  “Back,” Daphne mouthed, dragging me away past a couple dumpsters and into a back alley.

  The red antique vehicle’s door was thrown open and a gentleman wearing a tuxedo stepped out, a long hunting rifle in his hands, his face slightly bloodied but showing a lot of contempt towards his present surroundings: the nightclub, the music, everything. He walked around the car in a peculiar nervous stride, visually unsure about each step towards the bass-booming and neon-streaked innards of the illegal rave. His posture and movements looked a bit mechanical to me.

  “Who is it, Buff?” I asked Daphne as we watched from behind the dumpsters.

  “Shh.” Her eyes gleamed in the darkness, big and worried. “Be quiet. Something’s wrong.”

  “Who is it?” I asked her again.

  “Baron Plunkett,” she said.

  My surprise was huge. I’d hardly have believed her at all if it wasn’t for the circumstances. A strange car in a strange place, and this weird British fellow in a tux steps out of it. Baron Plunkett? The last surviving aristocrat, preserved post-mortem?

  “It’s him,” Daphne confirmed, and something in her voice told me she wasn’t surprised to see this digital person at all.

  A distant police siren screamed all of a sudden, and then a couple more rang out, all of them converging on our location from every direction. Baron Plunkett, or whoever it was, raised his long rifle towards the nearest disturbance.

  And all hell broke loose — police cruisers, SWAT vans, a news helicopter, a couple police helicopters, a fire truck, and an ambulance, all crashing the party from different directions.

  “PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON, SIR,” a white-and-blue police helicopter blared from the sky, its searchlight trained on Baron Plunkett.

  Something about the British man was very off. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then the Baron
fired his gun and there was a crackle of small arms fire from the cop cruisers and a hail of machine-gun fire from the helicopters. Through this hell, a sniper bullet lashed out and decapitated the Baron in one clean sweep, painting half the street with the burst of ketchup that had been the man’s head just a second ago.

  “The Baron has been wasted,” I observed.

  “No!” Daphne looked at me, her eyes open wide and genuinely scared. “Ben, I don’t understand this, but you must leave. Right now.”

  “But we’re on a date!”

  “Ben, listen to me!” she urged me, her eyes and hair flashing with shades of blue and red. “Leave. Meet me at the Bradbury Hotdog Diner on Third. It’s a block away from my apartment. You’ll wait for me there? Yes, no?”

  “What do you mean — ” I started to ask.

  “Us meeting each other, it wasn’t accidental,” she replied. “I need you to — ”

  Just then, sniper fire lashed out again and a bullet tossed her body away. My Daphne was gone, shot from a roof across the street, dead as a doornail.

  I looked at the police helicopter’s searchlight, my eyes narrow.

  “Hey you!” I shouted at their lamp. “How dare you? We were on a date!”

  A blaze of fire came in from a rooftop once more, and next thing I knew I was killed too. I spent the rest of the night swimming in black waves of heavy dreamless slumber and woke up to find I was inside my sleeping pod, staring at a sonolamp; another morning in the Wakeworld.

  ***

  “A person must sleep at night,” Ben’s father said. “Not spend it with one’s brains wired up to the Internet.”

  “Not Internet, Dad,” Ben replied, picking at his Chinese food with a pair of chopsticks made of smooth, artificial wood. “The Web. It’s called the Dreamweb these days.”

  “I would stay out of this virtual rigmarole if I were you,” his father said. “You’re young, my boy. You should do something with your life. Make something of yourself. Even if those tin cans are doing everything for us now, it doesn’t mean we humans must become sissies and retreat into some land of dreams, become these mollusks inside our shells. Grow up, Ben. Find yourself a real girl, not a chatroom date, not inside a videogame.”

  “It’s not a videogame, Dad,” Ben replied patiently. They’d been through this conversation a thousand times. “The last videogame existed when you were a little kid. This is like your Internet, yes. All virtual worlds connected into one. The dream reality is good for you, Dad. It’s like sleep, only better. More than safe. And it’s good for your brain. It’s good for our education. And for creating jobs.”

  “They don’t want to create jobs,” Ben’s father got back on track. “They just want to kill off as many of us as they can and replace us with digital doppelgangers, that’s what they want. They want us all inside this virtual reality where it’s easy for them to control us; the place where they’re gods. This is the kind of afterlife your procedure is about — a hell. With Big Brother watching your every move.”

  “They only monitor our activities electronically, Dad,” Ben said. “Not people. Bots do it, for our own safety. And it doesn’t mean something is restricted on the Web; there is no censorship because you cannot die in there, or get hurt. Well, you can, but it will resurrect you again, not far from where you were. And if you do something that’s good for you, they even pay you in real money. Like Daphne and her movie quotes, did I tell you about her, by the way?”

  “Who’s Daphne? The videogame girl? With that horrible ring in her face?”

  “Yes,” Ben replied. At least, the old man’s memory seemed to hold. This was good. He said: “I could sell the business, Dad. We could take you through your procedure any day now.”

  Before you’re down with dementia and your mind is gone, he thought.

  “I don’t care about your stupid procedure.” His father was fuming now. “I’ll die anyway, don’t you get it? It changes nothing for me. Immortality, the doctors say. It’s no immortality. It’s not how we used to imagine it. Not killing off real people and replacing them with… with…”

  “But Dad,” Ben replied, looking at him, trying to catch his father’s roaming eyes. “This copy of you, it will be a full virtual copy of the last man who knew how to build cars and choppers! Humanity needs such a Digital Citizen! I will be devastated if your knowledge and your skills fade away, along with you.”

  Ben’s father muttered to himself, his grey lips moving. “Not at the cost of our family business, son,” he said. “Not at the cost of my real bike shop.”

  Ben sighed and tossed the remainders of his Chinese drone-delivered takeout into a robotic waste bin. The bin whirred and purred — a giant blender making a smoothie out of the trash, then compressing it all into a small pellet.

  Ben got up and folded the table, which merged with the wall and molded into it, a crack still showing. Unlike the virtual New York place he visited at night, this was the real world, also known as the Wakeworld. And in the real world, everything was slightly broken and imperfect, no matter how hard the little non-intrusive bots toiled 24/7 to keep the world going round.

  The one good thing about the Wakeworld, Ben thought, was it remained exactly the same and unchanged, day in and day out. In 2099, even the four seasons were gone; it was like four different kinds of autumn, the skies permanent solid grey, the drizzle always falling down in gigantic waves descending through the fog. Ben didn’t mind. He loved the smell of wet concrete. He loved every little thing about the real world he could love. This mindset was common among people of 2099 — the reality-cherishing mantra to keep you at least slightly interested in coming back every morning, finding the will to leave behind the lands of lucid dreaming, the realm of all the adventures and opportunities of the Web.

  “Have you seen my apartment key?” Ben called out.

  “What does it look like?” his father responded from the kitchen.

  “Like a piece of matte plastic. Oh, here it is. I’ll be back at dusk.”

  “Spend a night outside. Be a man,” his father’s voice grumbled from the kitchen. “Find a real girl. Go dine and dance someplace for real, make your blood flow. For crying out loud, son.”

  “I can’t!” Ben replied, fixing his hair in front of the mirror wall while reading the news headlines scrolling along the mirror’s edge. “I will plug in early today. I need to go back to Daphne. We were supposed to meet inside this New York diner.”

  He struggled to remember the name. Bread-something. Hotdogs.

  “Don’t you know they hijack people’s minds in there, in that sweet virtual place of yours?” Ben heard his father’s voice as he went for the door. “They download you into a little virtual prison equipped with a torture chamber, and they drive you insane for their own pleasure.”

  “Dad, that was decades back,” Ben said. “That was why the Dreamweb was made seamless, so it doesn’t have any hidden parts no one can access. There are no other virtual worlds besides it, it’s against the law. And the bots watch over the Web to prevent this ancient stuff from ever happening again.”

  “Entrusting your life and your sanity to a piece of code!” His father laughed. “Nothing changed. If they want you, they will find you even in the afterlife. You people, you didn’t conquer death. Death will come and own all of you, ‘til the last one.”

  “Sigma,” Ben said, unlatching the magnet lock on the main door.

  “What?”

  Ben sighed. “See you.”

  And he closed the door behind him.

  The elevators in Ben’s apartment tower went all the way down, from the skies down to the ground and then under. There, they switched direction and travelled on horizontal rails, delivering you straight to the local underground loopstation where you could board a compact vacuum train that, contrary to many expectations, didn’t go all too fast.

  Because many small things break down every day, Ben thought as the creaky lift cabin stopped moving do
wn and froze, then jerked and travelled sideways for a while, its metal doors and chains rattling. Vacuum looptrains reacted poorly to even small defects in their tubes. After a few cars of passengers were liquefied, a new law set the limit for these vacuum thingies, slowing them down to subsonic speed, around forty miles per hour.

  Pretty much like an ancient subway car or a horse would go, Ben thought, mounting the small four-person vacuum carriage. Two people sat across from him. One young and grim, another old and with visible tick; two people who seemed to suffer the world around them like it was an endless chore, the old one most likely on his way to some illegal sleeping nook where a sonoemitter would bring him more of the sweet oblivion. Governments tried to fight illegal Web access points tooth and nail, but Ben knew these points were aplenty throughout the place, and many folks plugged into the Dreamweb during the day as well, not just during nighttime. Many people stopped caring about their real lives completely because of it. They stopped washing, they stopped chewing mint toothsticks in the morning, they grew beards, they fed on decades-old canned goods salvaged from some uprooted cellar and spent as little time in the Wakeworld as possible.

  This wasn’t the worst. Some people digitized themselves and offed themselves the next instant, discouraged by physical existence altogether, switching to digital form even if it meant their own sad analog end. Of to be or not to be, Ben’s generation pretty much always chose not to, this way or another.

  This was where he and his father connected. They wanted to have real lives, and tried to have as much of them as possible. They loved the gray, and moist, and unfriendly place the Wakeworld often seemed to be. They kept their family business running despite every new law limiting their trade, because they both believed in it. Ben wanted to see people riding choppers and motorbikes again, same as his father. Unlike his dad though, Ben wasn’t an enemy to computers or microfusion, and he did spend some time in the Dreamweb, if only to date and relax. In the Wakeworld, dating and relaxation were virtually impossible.