Enter the Clockworld

by Jared Mandani

  The barrel was filled to the brim with fuel, not the future petroleum replacement concentrate but real petroleum, smelly and wonderful.

  An idea struck me then. I grabbed the welding gear and four plates of steel, and I tried reinforcing the little forklift to transform it into a small tank. It turned out to be as easy as clicking the parts of a puzzle together, and welding two sheets of metal was about as difficult as sealing a cardboard box with scotch tape.

  “Man,” I said, “the crafting part is surely dumbed down here.”

  Then again, I had the skill in the Wakeworld. For a kid unable to impersonate a police officer properly, this task would likely seem very hard. I could see the point: the computers didn’t try to teach you the real thing, the idea was to keep you interested in all kinds of knowledge we humans might need again one day — for instance, if robots failed us.

  And I must admit it was awfully fun.

  I tested my little steel-plated tank, and to my surprise, it was as fast and nimble as before, despite all the weight I’d piled on top of it. A forklift had to be powerful of course, but I suspected another simplification meant to encourage my mechanic’s ambitions, of which I now had plenty.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s try something even crazier.”

  I found a drain in the cement floor and emptied two barrels of gasoline right down it. Then I welded them to the sides of my little tank and filled them with more gasoline. Then I went back to the crate with metal pipes and picked a few, also grabbing the air pump. The compressor pump I screwed to the back of my forklift — it was as easy as welding stuff together, as soon as I found me a monkey wrench. I wired the pump to the forklift’s ignition.

  Next I came up with a complex system of metal pipes wrapped around the little forklift tank, four of them connecting the backs of the barrels to the pump so it would fill them with air, which would mix with the fuel and raise the pressure. Six more pipes ran from the front of the barrels pointing forward, for the nozzles to sprinkle the mix of air and fuel straight ahead. I tested it and it worked just fine — as soon as I turned on the ignition and killed it the next moment, my little tank sneezed with two jets of vaporous gasoline mixture, each one almost thirty feet long.

  Now all I had to do was disassemble my welding gear and bolt two of its gas pilot lights to my exhaust pipes on both sides. These I wired to the forklift’s ignition as well.

  This entire procedure took me less than an hour of local time — I must admit I was driven, the way I always felt back at my real workshop. I just love putting stuff together, and it’s really sad that those robots and men wearing hovershoes are so bent on taking it away from me.

  It took another thirty or forty minutes of waiting in ambush before I heard commotion behind the warehouse door. Something clanged, then rattled, then clicked and hummed, and the large metal gate of the warehouse began to slide up, nice and slow, letting the fresh night air in.

  There was a whole army waiting for me at the threshold: no less than eight people dressed in assorted Hawaiian shirts, each one of them holding an AK, with two heavy off-road vehicles parked behind them, blocking the way out.

  My little tank was positioned right in front of the gate, with me inside. Upon seeing it, one of the bandits cursed and lifted his weapon. Two more followed his example, however before they could fire, I kicked on the forklift’s ignition, and then — WHOOSH! — two jets of flaming napalm blocked out my entire view, their flame so hot the world seemed white.

  I heard screams and curses and automatic fire. Several bullets hit my armored cabin with a loud ricochet PING, like someone dropped a skillet on a metal oven. But my little tank was fully armored and not a single slug broke through. Slowly moving the vehicle forward, I kept drowning my adversaries in flames, watching them run around and burn like human candles, drop and lose their weapons, disoriented and blind.

  I wasn’t sure my makeshift flamethrowers would kill them — as hot as the flame was, I only felt this sunburn sensation on my face and arms, something I could easily shrug off. To the men who came for me, however, the burning napalm must have caused real pain, and even if they weren’t really dying, the demoralizing effect was great.

  Soon my supply of fuel was gone and the two flaming jets winked out, the nozzles hissing hollowly, blowing out nothing but air. The Hawaiian shirts of my enemies were still burning, though. A couple of the gangsters managed to beat the flames down. They jumped inside one of the off-road monsters and started the engine, either planning to ram me or block the escape route I’d managed to create.

  Except I rammed their off-roader first, and oh boy, was it fun! The steel fork of my little tank was still operational, and the forklift’s armored bulk massive, so the two prongs went through their vehicle’s side like it was butter. I pulled a lever, then another one, pushed the acceleration pedal down to the floor — I flipped their car over, then pulled back, turned, and whizzed past their overturned pickup as fast as I could.

  I rolled along the docks happy to breathe in the cold, salty air of freedom again, ignoring the fact that I didn’t know where to go and what to do now. Daphne was gone, the diner was gone with her, and the local police was, apparently, not an option — the cops sold me out to the Cartel. What did the Cartel need me for, I had no idea, but they were local gangsters and they had AKs, which was all I needed to know.

  Dark silhouettes of loading cranes towered high above me, and the ocean waves sloshed somewhere to the right. The ocean, I knew, was infinite — or rather, you could swim away from the shore as far as you wanted, then turn around and still find yourself next to the beach. It was this world’s limit, because in the Dreamweb, you don’t travel between different worlds by sea. There are certain gateways, sort of like doors to Narnia, except they’re guarded and monitored like custom checkpoints. As far as I was concerned, I was trapped in this NYC Gangworld until the next Web session.

  I needed to wake up as soon as possible, except to do this I had to return to that shabby apartment first, back to my spawn point, and I had forgotten where it was. The other way was dying, but virtual suicide seemed far too stressful to me after this entire excruciating adventure.

  The next thing I knew, a motor roared somewhere behind me, and then my cabin was filled with the bright glow of headlights, and then — CLANG! — the second off-road truck of the Cartel rammed my little tank full-speed and sent it skidding to the right, then flying through the air. I found myself hovering in midair as the embankment underneath disappeared. A second of stasis, and my armored forklift crashed into the waves, its cabin quickly filling up with salty seawater rushing in from all sides.

  This was a problem. The forklift went down like a piece of lead. I tried to open the armored door and failed, the ocean pushing back so hard I would have needed the strength of a bulldozer to counter it. The portholes I left between the sheets of front and side armor were wide enough to look outside, yet far too narrow to squeeze through. As the waves swallowed my little deathtrap of a tank, I flopped around the little cabin for a while, still looking for an exit, but the bitter saltwater pressed on me so hard it soon made its way into my mouth, and then my nose, and my lungs. After hovering for a few seconds in the underwater calm, suddenly peaceful and weightless, I blacked out and died.

  Then a gap of greyish light opened up above me and I saw the unshaven face of a hobo, the matte strip of VR goggles holding his greasy hair back. I was inside a refrigerator again.

  “Hey man,” the hobo said. “Sorry to disturb you. It’s just the cops came looking for you, man.”

  ***

  After paying the hobo a little bit on top in exchange for his silence, Ben left the umbrella of the crumbling overpass and crossed the short stretch of the open ground towards his workshop, his collar raised to hide his face from waves of light foggy drizzle coming down in one mysterious wet shroud after another, a veil after a veil falling from above.

  Ben entered the shop, making the little old b
ell overhead ding, and the cops were there all right — and they were human cops, not some droids of a patrolling beeping trashcan dummy kind inspired by R2D2 from Star Wars. One of them was short, potbellied, red-haired, and sleepy-eyed, another thin and dry, his eyes a bit bulging and his teeth bad. Ben could tell this one was local, and the other from somewhere else.

  They were waiting for him sitting on top of his desk. Upon seeing Ben, the redhead jumped down to his feet, took a step forward, and pulled out a US/C federal police badge.

  “Hello, Benjamin. May I call you Benjamin?”

  “You may,” Ben said, not hiding that he wasn’t too comfortable with it.

  “My name is Detective Heart, I’m visiting on behalf of the US/C Federal Police; this is Chief Inspector Braggs of Scotland Yard — ”

  “Just back from my retirement,” Chief Inspector Braggs said. “Yet you can tell I look better than him, jetlagged.”

  Now Ben realized what was wrong with Detective Heart: the man was exhausted. All of a sudden, Ben saw that both cops were pretty old; they looked like dusty museum relics brought back to life by some governmental initiative.

  “Look,” Ben said. “I’m ready to pay for the scooter. I simply needed it, and there was no owner around.”

  This wasn’t exactly true, and he knew the cops could learn so easily. But he was innocent to begin with, and crimes committed on the Web, no matter how bad they were, couldn’t affect a person’s private life in the Wakeworld. This law wasn’t even golden, this law was titanium — even a maniac found killing pedestrians in the same NYC two-something years prior was cleared of all charges by the combined Dreamweb/Wakeworld court, Ben remembered. Both judges and jury agreed unanimously that no Web activity must be censored. The Dreamweb must remain a game that teaches you proper things. And one of them was: you kill in a dream, you don’t go to prison in the real world. It was basic justice. So, Ben was honestly not worried about a thing.

  The cops looked at each other.

  “Sir,” Inspector Braggs began.

  “Would you mind if we go to the station to talk, Ben?” Detective Heart finished for him.

  They went out into the rain and raised their waterproof collars — a common-sense fashion across the entire Wakeworld, its Western part a globalized and uniform place. These two cops though, in everything else, they were about as peculiar as the entire day Ben had experienced so far.

  Ben remembered his father saying things like “a cop is not your friend” though — it was called being street-smart back in his time, and his time was definitely in sync with the era of detectives and inspectors.

  The station was a place sealed with governmental slabs of steel and concrete, the only exits opening to release or let in the police drones or busy criminal-pacifying R2D2 trashcans on wheels. Inspector Braggs pulled out an old-fashioned fab ring and flipped through magnetic cards with the fingers of a skillful gambler. He found the key, pressed it to a circular magnetic keyhole, and — whoosh! — the concrete slab was lifted all of a sudden, revealing massive Victorian doors of carved artificial wood.

  “After you,” the Inspector said, and then threw the wooden doors open. Detective Heart nodded to Ben, so he had to follow Inspector Braggs in. The burly detective walked in next and tightly closed the doors behind the three of them.

  Inside, the station was dusty and smelled of the old artificial leather of many chairs and ledgers, a relic back from the time when human cops were still found here, wrote with real pens, and polished their ceremonial hats, all of them bored out of their minds in a world where robots did their job ten times better, leaving them with no cases at all — even worse, bringing the prevention levels up to 99.92 percent, a number which was expected to climb further sometime soon. To make matters worse for human cops, regular people trusted computer policing much more, believing it to be fair and overall calling it a good means to a difficult end. Everything went down to petty crime, and the most terrible thing a criminal could do to you at the time was tap into your Wi-Fi hotspot or spray-paint an ugly graffiti tag on your door.

  The old dusty cops walked Ben through the old creaky corridors and let him into a room painted wholly in pleasant salad green tones, with red furniture of thick artificial wood and fake leather. The place wasn’t exactly cobwebby, thanks to many unobtrusive cleaning robots mopping around and scuttling underfoot, but even cleaning robots in here were pretty ancient, relics from the eighties, meaning the 2080s. Ben could swear he saw exactly that year stamped on one of the round cleaning devices.

  The place smelled like kindergarten to Ben, not really what he expected. Then, perhaps, it could have been a kindergarten before the streets became totally safe for kids to play in, with cars gone and total surveillance in action. At some point, these places became too expensive — in Ben’s childhood, if you attended a kindergarten, it meant you were a spoiled rich kid. If you attended public school after that, unable to fit in otherwise — it meant you were a poor kid.

  Inspector Braggs pushed an old-fashioned chair made of fake leather towards Ben and sat in the chair opposite a heavy square red table. Detective Heart sat on the table itself.

  “So.” He slapped his knees, wrinkling up his old man’s trousers. “Don’t get us wrong, young man, we were both retired. Well, myself, just suspended technically, but then it’s all the same, I assure you. They told me those computers brought me back from oblivion, and on double pay, because they needed someone with the understanding of human motives on this case. We’re to present all collected evidence back to our computer masterminds, they do the judgment, scan the world populace, identify everyone who could be found guilty, and we human minds get to work on them last, as a final resort.”

  “Do you know anything about my girlfriend, Daphne?” Ben asked. “She’s supposed to be an American federal cop, as well.”

  “My understanding is, young man,” Inspector Braggs said, “you were the last non-digital person to witness the killing of one Baron Plunkett, a Digital Citizen who went missing afterwards?”

  “We won’t play good cop, bad cop in here,” Detective Heart said. “I won’t pretend I don’t despise this job. Back in my time, Digital Citizens were considered all-powerful immortals; they were portrayed in media this way, mainly by Hollywood, so the machine dealt with Hollywood, steamrolled the uprising that followed, and then corrected everyone’s impression of DCs by introducing tons of kids’ content about friendly vampires and monsters and ghosts.”

  “Wow,” Ben said. “You know, I don’t really care — ”

  “He means he’s not in favor of DCs and still considers them the secret overlords of humanity,” Inspector Braggs said. “A cop who is a conspiracy theorist. I laugh at him for this, but frankly, this case reeks so bad of the spooks — and you don’t want to mess with the spooks, young man.”

  “I think it’s who my girlf — ” Ben started.

  “They are much worse people than us old farts,” Detective Heart said. “You, for instance, do own a land plot, I suppose? The one your shop is built on?”

  “It’s the last motorcycle tuning workshop on the entire planet!” Ben replied.

  “So what?” the Detective asked, unimpressed. “We live in a world full of last things on the planet. You own the last workshop on the planet; we’re the last cops on the planet.”

  Ben wanted to object, then remembered about Diego and fell quiet.

  Inspector Braggs pulled out an old-fashioned tablet and swiped through some pages on its screen. “Shall we begin?”

  “I thought we’d already begun,” Ben said.

  “Well, fine,” Detective Heart intruded again. “So the first question is: how sympathetic are you to the ideals of the Awakening, in any form?”

  “You mean the Church?” Ben asked. “I have no idea how I feel about it. Irritated because they spam my inbox while none of them are even supposed to be online?”

  Inspector Braggs smirked. The burly Detective slapped the
table once.

  “A good one, that was!” he admitted. “So then, tell us about the night of the Baron’s disappearance.”

  “Well,” Ben said. “Cops shot him. I mean, fake New York cops, kids playing cops, hunting criminals. I was there with my girlfriend, and — ”

  “You don’t have to lie to us, young man,” the Inspector interrupted him.

  “It’s fine, kid,” Detective Heart said. “We’ve already checked, and we know you were there alone, heading to a nightclub to have some fun, isn’t that right?”

  “Oh,” Ben said, thinking of Daphne’s spy background. “Oh, could be. Yes.”

  Better to keep quiet about her then, he thought.

  “So tell us please,” Inspector Braggs said. “Did you notice something strange about the Baron? Something unusual?”

  “Well…” Ben tried to remember how his second date night ended — the helicopter, the parking lot, a red antique car, a rigid figure in tuxedo getting out of it, moving in this weird stop-motion way, like a pair of scissors, locking, then unlocking.

  He said, “Well, yes. He moved in a very strange way, like a robot.”

  “Hmm,” the Detective said. “Care to elaborate?”

  “What? I dunno,” Ben said. “He just walked like he was on stilts. And aimed like he was aiming at some bright light above, selecting between them, then firing, like that. Pow!”

  He demonstrated the rigid manner in which the Baron had aimed and fired his long rifle.

  “Hmm,” Inspector Braggs said. “So the way we heard it, the story is a chain of miraculous events which all started in the middle of a highway leading to the wharf. How it all started was, this car appeared out of nowhere, just dropped from above onto the road as if by magic. Well, there was a flash of lightning, a thunderclap, a smell of sulfur, and that’s it.”