I beckoned the referee — a long gentleman with a boney face — and bet the money I had on my own dog; all of it, down to the last bitpenny. The referee gave me an amused look. He was sure I was bound to lose tonight. I wouldn’t be so sure if I were him.
“Aaaaaaand in the Eastern corner of our rink is the machine called Ramming Bull, and you can tell by its looks it’s not here to churn butter!” the referee announced as he returned to the arena. “In the Western corner, there’s Powerhorse — ooh, this name gives me goose bumps!”
Both rival machines didn’t excite me at all. One of them was clearly a ram, sort of a small bulldozer. Each fight in the Pit tends to have at least one of them. It was a heavily armored tortoise with a small cow-tipper up front. The second one, Powerhorse, was little different, except its side armor was replaced by two more tippers, these ones resembling a rotating door key. Both machines had zero brains or even the semblance of a brain — they were meant to dart across the cage in a random pattern, changing course when bumping into something, and, hopefully, overturning the dogs that happened to cross their paths.
“In the Southern corner, we have a Fiery Dragon! Oh, watch out for its flamethrowers because they’re HOT!” the referee announced.
This one was a smarter design, the most dangerous enemy of all — a small lightly armored thing resembling a flat camel, with a couple of gas lanterns protruding from its front hump. This Fiery Dragon definitely had a guiding system hidden in one of its humps: the lanterns were supposed to spit flames on contact with another dog, this I could clearly see. These lanterns weren’t exactly flamethrowers, although the design resembled my own tuned forklift which I’d fried the Cartel men with.
A gas lantern would spit out a single cloud of flame meant to interfere with gears and springs of the rival machine. Sudden heating-up could kill any kind of clockwork at once — when heated, those gears and springs expand, their connection with neighbor gears breaks down, and the whole mechanism goes haywire. It was truly an intelligent design, and I can’t say my own dog, a simple Archimedean device with lots of cogs and gears in its belly, was fully immune to it.
“In the Northern corner, brought to you by a veteran of today’s battle… Rabid Dog!”
My only hope was that my dog would approach this one from a side, or from behind — this was highly unlikely though, as I could see the rival dog could perform a 180-degree spin if it detected something on its six.
“Aaaaaaand may the battle commeeeeeence!”
On delivering his final line, the referee slid out of the cage and locked it behind him. Now, only four machines remained in the central arena, each one in a designated corner, the nearest of them mine. This was the third machine I’d built for the Pit. The one I bet all of my money on. Not just the bitpounds earned in these two weeks, but also those from Mr. Reaper. Somehow, I felt a certain aversion towards that money, like I should get rid of it. Besides, it’s not like my father seemed ready for his procedure.
A red light went on, which meant each machine was free to act on its own now.
I watched Fiery Dragon closely, the rest of my attention dispersed between Ramming Bull and Powerhorse. The latter was the first one to unlatch its springs and dart ahead — blindly and dangerously unguided. It caught Ramming Bull’s left side and made another stupid battering ram perform a U-turn. Right the next moment, Fiery Dragon found them both, and blew a cloud of green flame right into Ramming Bull’s mechanisms.
“Wow, the battle is surely heating up!” The referee kept up with his humor. All the heat was absorbed by Ram’s thick side armor though, so the green flame did no harm.
Powerhorse clashed with the Dragon next. Another puff of green flame — and this one wasn’t in vain. The burnt machine screeched and skidded past the others. It crashed into mine, and was instantly upturned by the roaming levers of Rabid Dog, following their intricate Archimedean trajectories.
“One dog out!” The referee nearly went insane, pointing his bullhorn around. “Powerhorse is out, disabled by Rabid Dog!”
It was no time for celebration, because Fiery Dragon’s homing systems were locked on my dog now. My machine had no protection from high temperatures at all. The green flame lashed out once, twice — and missed the gears of my Rabid Dog by an inch. Then, as if possessed by true intelligence, my machine turned around and fled…
… Just to be caught by Ramming Bull. Its cow-tipper crashed into my dog’s side and upturned it in an instant.
“Second dog out!” the referee shouted. “Rabid Dog… was put down by the Bull! All hail the Bull!”
I was about as dumbstruck as I was this morning, when the Spiders of the Crescent descended on our heads and went on to slaughter our rear forces.
But soon my dog used its levers to bring itself back into the attacking position, belly-down. I totally forgot I programmed this stunt. It was marvelous. Even the referee had to correct himself, fast.
“Oooooh no, it seems this is a cat, not a dog! Seems like Rabid Dog has no less than nine lives!”
I had certain doubts about it, and still, we were back in business. Right on time, because Ramming Bull was revving up all along, and now this rival machine released its brakes and darted ahead, guided by a single stupid algorithm with no arithmometer involved. Its cow-tipper crashed into Fiery Dragon, which crashed into my dog, and all three machines swerved to a side, pushed by the mighty effort. For a while, it seemed like the Dragon would flip. The rival dog was a smart design though, as I already pointed out. It rolled over the Ram and slid off, safe on the other side. My dog used its Archimedean levers on the Ram then, making it lean to a side, exposing its belly to Fiery Dragon, gears and pistons and all. Puff! — another blast of green flame wasn’t lost on the Ram. It moved further, but its trajectory became erratic. It crashed into a border of the cage, right side first, and stopped, forever immobile.
“First round over!” the referee’s voice thundered above the cheering crowd. “First round over! Disengage! Disengage!”
The two remaining machines, Fiery Dragon and my Rabid Dog, were disengaged about enough already. In fact, they were facing in two opposite directions, with no chance to ever detect each other. It took two referee’s henchmen wielding long sticks with hooks on the ends to pull the two dogs apart and place them in two opposing corners of the rink. Another two henchmen disposed of the two defeated machines.
Right before he was to announce the next round, the referee bent over my Rabid Dog and did something. The gesture was well-practiced and so swift no one would notice it even if they looked. Even I wasn’t sure he touched my machine. Something happened next, however, and reassured us all.
“In the next round,” the referee started. “The fearsome Fiery Dragon is… to face… the… vile and dangerous… Rabid Dog.”
Then he collapsed on the ground and despawned, leaving behind an empty ragdoll.
“What happened?” people were asking, the fight forgotten. “What happened to the referee?”
“Poison!” The word was then. “He was poisoned, poison, poison!”
“Calm down!” I cried out, holding my hands up. “Calm down! It was my dog! I booby-trapped it!”
Then there was silence, every pair of virtual eyes looking at me.
“It was my dog,” I repeated. “I made a trap so no one would touch it during the fight. This man touched it, to tamper with it somehow, and now he’s dead.”
Two huge bouncers approached me then.
“The boss wants to see you,” they said.
“Fine.” It was of no use to resist them anyway.
The thugs escorted me through the crowd of spectators, all of them suddenly silent and cooperative, and past a few parting drapes of heavy cloth. One of them opened a heavy oaken door, another ushered me in, and I found myself in a Victorian business office, all tapestries and carved wood. The bulky figure of the owner rose from behind a massive desk to greet me.
“I see you’re
one crafty fellow, you,” the owner said. “I’m minus one referee thanks to your tricks, you know. These types aren’t easy to find, you know. Good referees, I mean.”
“The game was rigged from the start.” I merely shrugged. “My tricks… I simply rigged it all over again, the way that favored my dog, is all. He shouldn’t have touched it. It’s against the rules.”
The owner sighed. “Any other day, we’d make you swim down the Thames with boots of cement on,” he said. “This time, however…”
Then he waved the bouncers away, stepped towards one of the bookcases framing his office, and pushed it. The bookcase rolled back, revealing a dark passage with stone stairs winding further down. After a moment of hesitation, I shrugged, walked past the fat owner, and tried the stairs. They were narrow but firm enough, so I walked down them all the way.
The spiral staircase brought me into a wine cellar of some kind, its walls made of barrels and cobwebs except for the one in front of me, of regular masonry, a crude wooden workbench propped against it.
On the workbench, my Daphne was seated, dressed like a man and wearing a tricorn hat.
“Took you a while,” I said, struggling in vain to hide the emotions I felt and play the cool cat.
“Oh! I could have said the same to you, you know.” She smiled at me. “I sent Colombians to fetch you, but they messed it up I guess? They were never quite specific.”
“What? You mean those Cartel boys I fried? They were yours?”
“They take pride in their work,” Daphne said. “You caused them a lot of trouble. Oh well.”
She shrugged, and I knew what she meant. All of these things were in the past, two weeks ago. In this time, both worlds had changed.
“Come here,” she said.
And then we kissed. And I forgot everything for a while: the Pit, the Baron, the Wakeworld. My girl was with me again.
Then she took a step back and produced a clockwork device resembling a cat-sized bronze grasshopper. The thing was elliptic, with long flexible metallic limbs, each one as thick as my finger.
“Do you know what this is?” Daphne asked me.
“No idea,” I said. “But it looks a bit like a human stick figure. Arms and legs and all.”
“This was attached to the Baron’s corpse, fixed to his back, under the suit,” she said. “It made his corpse move, and shoot, and drive that car.”
“Wait, this thing?” I examined the metal grasshopper with newly-found curiosity. “You mean he was dead when we saw him in New York City that night?”
“Yes,” Daphne said. “Long-dead. He was killed somewhere in here. Then someone attached this thing to him, programmed it to drive, then get out and shoot, create this illusion, see?”
“Like he wanted a shootout with the police,” I said, and then gasped. “Wow! So he wasn’t killed by a sniper bullet. What killed him, then?”
“We don’t know,” Daphne said. “All we know is Baron Plunkett is a citizen of Clockworld. And this thing also comes from Clockworld. You and me, all the same. Clockworld. That’s why I think the Baron was killed somewhere around here.”
“Wait.” I examined the device once more. “This technology, it’s incredible! I haven’t seen anything like this here, not even in the army. Not with Royal Fusiliers.”
“It’s not used by Royal Fusiliers. It’s used by their enemies,” Daphne said. “Someone killed the Baron and made it look like the Assassins killed him, someone affiliated with Faith, while this piece of technology comes from — ”
“Divine Kingdom!” I gasped once more. “Of course! We were ambushed today, by Spiders of the Crescent. They were supposed to be Turkish, or Arab, or whatever… and yet they had gunpowder! They firebombed us!”
“Divine Kingdom, all over again,” Daphne said.
This Kingdom was virtual Asia loosely united: Japan, Korea, Vietnam… mostly China of course. One thing I knew about these people was their ways were totally obscure. Tranh… wasn’t he one of them? The situation grew suspicious by the second.
“So what are their goals then, the Kingdom?” I asked her.
“To start a war, I think,” Daphne answered, looking straight at me. “To start a big war all over this place. And dispose of the people they want to dispose of, while the Web is torn apart. We’re at the brink of a Virtual World War One, Ben. And there’s little we can do to stop it.”
“Wait.” I cringed, thinking hard. “The Fusiliers. I think we’re already at war with the Crescent, except it wasn’t declared yet!”
Daphne shrugged. “And so, it has begun.”
Then she stepped up to me and made me hug her.
***
Technically, you don’t need to go anywhere to look up something while in the Wakeworld. You just have to think of it, or read it, or simply look at it, then give a mental command, which is quite personal — Ben always imagined a big book falling down for some reason — and there you go, all the information is right there in your head. It lingers for just as long as it matters to you, and, even if you’re a forgetful type, the procedure itself is so quick and simple you can just look it up over and over again, never worrying about your forgetfulness. They had no problems with short memory in the future.
They did have a problem with Divine Kingdom though, which meant its Wakeworld counterpart, the Pan Asian Coalition, was most likely involved. Being a citizen of the EU, Ben knew little about the PAC. Ben knew their problems with overpopulation were even more severe than in Europe or America. He knew they had weird places like capsule hotels, and factories where thousands of people labored day and night mining cryptocurrency or doing other strange things, like posting millions of identical comments somewhere, or flooding search systems of the Web with identical requests. When Ben was a kid, he and his peers called this foreign place the Moon. Not the PAC, not China, not Japan, just the Moon, which summed it up nicely. With a telescope, you could see what people on the Moon were doing, but finding any sense to it — good luck.
What Ben knew for sure was that the stakes were incredibly high. The people who killed the Baron wanted to start a world war, and it meant little this war was to be fought in virtual space — pretty much everything done in 2099 happened in virtual space. And if they didn’t hesitate to kill a Digital Citizen…
Given all the circumstances, Ben decided he couldn’t just look up the weird metal grasshopper which could animate dead ragdolls. He chose the safest way possible, the National Archives. This was an old-fashioned place where you submitted your request verbally. And they still dealt in paper, meaning they printed out your query and all the related materials they found, and gave you the actual pages in return. This cost you some of course, but Ben considered the secrecy provided was worth it.
The place wasn’t too dusty or cobwebby — no more than any other building was on the inside. In fact, it looked somewhat majestic, like an ancient church: all columns and mosaic and stained glass windows. The man who processed Ben’s request was old, wrinkled, and bespectacled — an old wise librarian, a relic of the past to match his ancient hardware and software.
“I need to find out something about this,” Ben said, showing him a crude drawing of the metallic grasshopper. “It’s Pan Asian. I mean it’s somehow related to Divine Kingdom, in Clockworld, on the Web.”
“How am I supposed to look for something that resembles your drawing, son?” the old librarian asked him, squinting through a pair of old-fashioned glasses. “I need a verbal description. What it is, what it’s for, this kind of thing? Pan Asian, good. Could you give me more?”
“Well.” Ben rubbed his neck. “It’s a device used to reanimate the dead, I guess. Or, at least, it could be used this way. It’s an intricate thing. I mean, Albion doesn’t have this kind of technology at all. This craftsmanship is totally incredible. Could be Japanese. Honestly, I have no idea.”
“It’s fine,” the old man said. He actually clicked the keys of some input device and watched th
e symbols raining down the screen. The scrolling glyphs didn’t look like anything to Ben — they could as well have been Ancient Egyptian.
The man looked satisfied though. He said: “Animatron.”
“Huh?”
“Your device, it’s called an Animatron, translated to English. It’s not meant to revive the dead. It’s more like an exoskeleton, to improve a warrior’s combat skills. This says it also could help the warrior to keep fighting for a while, in case of a wound or even death. Sounds like your thingy.”
“Indeed,” Ben said. “So, is it widely available?”
“It was, once,” the old librarian said, squinting at the glyphs scrolling down his ancient 2D screen. “It says here they don’t use it much anymore. Too expensive, too hard to program. It was decommissioned a few years back, in ninety-fifth.”
“I see,” Ben said. “Is there a way to upload all the relevant information… here?”
He patted himself on the head. The old man smiled, looking a bit patronizing.
“We have our own ways, son,” he said.
He pressed a few buttons on the ancient keyboard, its keys yellow like old ivory. Some device started to screech, and Ben was surprised to see a sheet of paper slowly emerging from a slot in front of him. The paper looked cheap, and the printer ink was nearly unseen, yet the picture on the printed sheet was quite familiar: the iron grasshopper, spread-eagled, a machine of a bit different design yet definitely the same purpose. An Animatron, the device adapted to driving a car and reviving the Baron’s corpse. The knowledge and cunning involved were just creepy and unsettling.
“Thank you.” Ben grabbed the torn-off sheet of printed paper. He shook hands with the old man to complete the transaction, folded the paper, hid it inside his spacious breast pocket, and left the Archives as fast as he could.
There was a man waiting for him right at the doorstep. The stranger pretended to ignore him, and yet, as Ben stepped into the drizzle and started walking down the street, he could clearly hear the stranger’s footsteps splashing behind him.
Enter the Clockworld Page 12
