Enter the Clockworld

by Jared Mandani

More people showed themselves out of the smoke, some of them yeomen, some of them Knightwalker boys who just finished off the Musketeer invaders. The French airships had fled already, and the kingdom of Albion was once again victorious. Everyone was talking, discussing our prospects and sudden shifts in diplomatic allegiances.

  “No Crescent fellows showed up, I wonder why!”

  “Those Jerries, can you believe it? Brought one of their killer cans here, just like that.”

  “I wonder what happens now. Are we enemies with the French and the Germans?”

  “Oh, nothing happens, I assure you. Tomorrow they’ll tell us it was all a mistake, and we’re still in love with Teutonia and La Republique, all the same. You think we can afford this kind of war now? Naaah. They’ll mop this thing up the best they can.”

  “We showed them though, didn’t we? Who took out the German walker?”

  “It was this young fellow! Hey man! Are you a Master of some kind?”

  “An Apprentice,” I said. “Or . . . let me check, you know?”

  I pulled out my clockwork wallet and browsed through the deck of Tarot cards characterizing me. The wallet was pleasantly heavy with today’s earnings. The new card I found, along with a brief note, came almost as no surprise.

  Congratulations! For your valuable contributions to the prosperity and military might of the Empire of Albion, you’ve been granted a new rank within the British Royal Fusiliers!

  Journeyman Mechanic

  You are an experienced mechanic of the second class, no longer just an apprentice. Your crafting skills are outstanding, and you deal with your daily invention tasks with ease.

  Crafting Speed +33%

  “A Journeyman,” I said.

  “Oi, not bad, my friend.” Tranh smiled, looking at my cards. “Not bad at all!”

  It was to get even better than that, and then suddenly worse.

  “Good Sir!” I heard a voice behind me, of a quality so well-groomed it only could have been an AI-controlled voice.

  I turned around, and there he stood, a barrel-chested redcoat, an emissary of the Albion government, a computer-controlled dummy dispatched automatically when the job was too tedious and insignificant to employ a human courier.

  The redcoat trumpeted on: “In the name of Her Majesty the Queen of the Empire of Albion, I was sent here to invite you to the ceremony.”

  “Which ceremony?” I asked, all the yeomen and mechanics around now staring at me.

  “For your actions during the battle, you’ve been awarded a medal,” the AI dummy told me. “The ceremony will commence in the palace within the Royal Keep, which — ”

  “Fine, fine,” I said. “I’d like to bring my girlfriend though.”

  I rummaged through my wallet and pulled out Daphne’s contact card.

  “Would you please invite her for me?” I asked.

  The redcoat’s expression didn’t change, yet his tone did.

  “I’m very sorry, good sir,” he said. “This person happens to be a resident of La Republique, a party which seems to be involved in the treacherous attack our troops just had to fend off. All persons potentially involved with our new hypothetical rival were detained and are currently being kept in custody, awaiting the investigation which is to begin shortly after — ”

  “Detained!” I stared at him in disbelief. “Could you please let me know where I can find her?”

  “In the Royal Dungeons, I believe,” the redcoat said. “Except you, good sir, must be aware no visitors are presently allowed to attend the prisoners I aforementioned.”

  Daphne, my poor girl. She was a DC. That meant she was to spend the entire term of her imprisonment right in one spot, inside these awful dungeons under the Royal Keep, without a single break in the Wakeworld. Days and days, as far as I knew the legal system of Albion.

  I had to save her. The problem was my sleeping nook woke me up a few Clockworld minutes later.

  And then it was another grey day in the actual reality.

  ***

  Ben entered his workshop in haste. He squeezed in without waiting for the sliding doors to open completely. The doorframe rattled and the bell above the door rung so violently its sound resembled a fire alarm. His only employee Diego, stretched in the automold chair as usual, lifted his head in amazement.

  “Hey, man,” Diego said. “Anything happened? Are we being shut down or something?”

  “No.” Ben shook his head. “No, nothing of this kind. Sorry, I have work to do.”

  “Wow!” Diego, the last biker, climbed out of his chair, which slowly returned to its basic shape, as if unsure of what it was. “May I help? Please? I haven’t worked on a thing in quite a while, you know.”

  “I know,” Ben said. “Except I don’t know. It’s kinda private. Sorta. Also, I’m not sure if it’s entirely legal.”

  “Wooow.” Diego shook his head. “Now we’re talking! Do you plan to rob a bank or…”

  “Not exactly.” Ben pulled out a big whiteboard the shop had once used for blueprints — back in his father’s time, perhaps. There was nothing to blueprint for years now. Ben said: “Not a bank, and not rob, but still close enough.”

  He pressed his finger to the board’s lower right corner and said: “I need the floor plans of Queenstanding Royal Dungeons, in Albion, Clockworld, please.”

  “Request denied,” the board said in a mechanical lady’s voice. “The access to this information is limited to the registered members of Albion Royal Guard and members of any Thieves Guild of the Dreamweb.”

  “Damn,” Ben said. He wasn’t a member of the Royal Guard, and never roleplayed a Thief.

  “Wait, wait,” Diego intervened. He pressed a finger to the board and said: “Same request, via Joanna, the Elven Infiltrator of the Enchanted Woods.”

  “Request confirmed,” the board said, and the next moment, grey dancing lines started to appear all across it, quickly weaving a complex maze of the Royal Dungeons.

  Ben gave his employee a puzzled look. “Joanna? Elven Infiltrator? You mean you roleplay a girl on the Web? An Elf?”

  “So what?” Diego shrugged. “It’s allowed, you know. The Web cannot force you into a gender role, it would be discrimination, no? All it can do is make sure your female avatar looks more or less like you, is all.”

  “A girl though?”

  “So what? I like being a girl,” Diego said. “Always wanted to.”

  Ben scratched the back of his head. “Alright,” he said. “I can live with it, I guess. Could you also bring up the points of interest here? Prisoner IDs maybe?”

  Diego shrugged and touched the board again, and a hundred markers popped up across it.

  “Hmm,” Ben muttered. “It’s booby-trapped to hell, as I thought. Also, the guards…”

  “It’s all passable,” Diego assured him. “Would be no fun to infiltrate otherwise, right? It’s all a game of equal possibilities. Either they catch you, or you do whatever you came in for. Fifty-fifty.”

  “Could you perhaps come with me?” Ben asked.

  His employee shook his ponytailed head. “Nah, man, sorry,” he said. “My Elven girl, you see… she’s a supernatural character. In this Clockworld of yours, supernatural stuff is not allowed, magic is not allowed. I would lose most of my abilities.”

  “Okay, no problem,” Ben said, though it was in fact a problem. As far as he could see, these Royal Dungeons weren’t built for a lone intruder, but rather for co-op play. Every trap was constructed in a way it could only be disarmed by a party of at least two people, one of them distracting the guards, another cutting the strings. Ben chewed his lower lip and asked: “What else could you do here for me? Could you locate Daphne?”

  “ID?” Diego asked.

  Ben cringed, trying to remember her ID tag. Then he remembered he wasn’t on the Web now, and fully awake, so he simply looked it up via a mental request. Diego touched the board again, and twenty-something prisoner ma
rkers disappeared, leaving just one, now highlighted and solid.

  “Okay, fine.” Ben pored over the map. “Can you see any, like, ways to get to her? Escape routes perhaps?”

  “Man.” Diego sneered. “You’re asking an Elven Infiltrator!”

  A few courses of infiltration appeared on the map, two of them potentially cut off by guard patrols, two more requiring immense acrobatic skills, another two…

  “No way I’m breaking through all these traps alone,” Ben muttered. ”Nah, it’s just impossible.”

  “Look, man,” Diego said. “All you need is a kamikaze.”

  “A what?”

  “Someone protected against fire.” Diego started pointing with his finger. “Acid, electricity, then able to stand some cutting damage here and there, perhaps even to stand pressure. The fellow dies in the end, of course. But check this out: jump from this route to this one here, spring all the traps on the way with the help of your kamikaze… All these things must be reloaded manually, primed all over again, which of course takes time. So basically, after your kamikaze dies here, and sends a signal to you by doing so, the road will remain clear for some ten minutes. Enough for you to break in and take the girl the hell outta there, no? Then you retrace your way in until this window; I think you’re slim enough to squeeze through, and your girl as well, I presume. So here you jump down into the moat, then swim all the way through the muck to this point, and you extract right here! No guards, no nothing! Freedom!”

  “No way Tranh will agree to this,” Ben muttered. “They will know who did this, right? After he dies? And then they will get him. And he’s, well… no, he will never agree to this.”

  “Well, man.” Diego spread his hands. “Seems like you’re on your own then.”

  “Seems like I am,” Ben said. “Wait . . . let me think.”

  He thought long and hard, so long Diego had time to return to his usual place and stretch the automold chair behind its factory limits. Ben knew there was a solution. Except it was all so hard, and he had no doubt it wouldn’t go according to plan, not ever. A “kamikaze” he could arrange. Protected against fire, acid, and cutting damage, no problem. The course involved though… the task was simply beyond Ben’s creative skills.

  By the time he returned to Diego, the radio had finished playing the third track by the Beatles in a row.

  “Listen,” Ben said. “Do you by any chance know any programmers? Like, computer programmers?”

  Diego regarded him, eyebrows raised. “Man,” he replied finally. “You do know it’s against the law, right?”

  “I know.” Ben shook his head. “But, I mean, it’s not VR coding or anything. No hacking. Just simple algorithms. Well, not that simple, obviously, or I could have dealt with them myself. Anyway. It’s, like, ancient stuff, really. Like, Turing machine stuff. Punch-card stuff.”

  “It’s still programming, isn’t it?” Diego said. “It means someone with a license. And they’re all locked up in ivory towers out there somewhere.”

  “What about no license?” Ben insisted. “Do you know any? Please.”

  Diego made a face. “I might know someone,” he said. “But, I mean. It’ll cost you, no? Cost you a lot of money, man.”

  “This is not a problem.” Ben made a transaction gesture. “Could you call him for me?”

  “It’s a she,” Diego said. “Okay, man. I’ll try.”

  “Thanks! It would be a great help. No way could I do this on my own.”

  “It’s fine. We’ll have to wait though. She lives pretty far. Like, on a farm. Miles from here.”

  And so they waited. The patter of the rain outside hushed down to a drizzle, then returned to a steady hum. Water tricked down the display windows of their workshop. A gutter pipe moaned and screeched in the wind somewhere above. The old battered Web radio ended its musical number and switched to white noise, yet Diego didn’t bother to change the program.

  “Listen,” Ben broke the silence crackling with static noise. “You remember the street riots we had a couple days ago, right?”

  “I guess,” Diego said. “Except I don’t know what all the fuss was about. They sorted it out in the end, didn’t they?”

  “Seems like they did,” Ben said. “But you do remember how it was, don’t you? Everyone falling asleep, then waking up and going on like nothing happened?”

  Diego made a sarcastic sound. “Everyone falling asleep?” he said. “Like in a fairytale? No, man, you’re making things up, nothing like that happened.”

  “But it did!” Ben insisted. He nodded at the rain-streaked windows. “I saw it! Right there, everyone on the street falling down, asleep.”

  “No way,” Diego said. “I’ve been here all along. There was some hassle, then they sorted things out, and everyone went home. Nothing more.”

  “Hmm.”

  Something weird is going on, Ben thought. Then again, what’s new?

  It was going to get weirder before he even got bored.

  The bell above the sliding doors finally dinged, and the most curious person stepped in. It was an old woman with aquiline Southern British features, dressed in an old trucker vest of stark yellow color and a red baseball cap. The crazy palette made her look a bit like a McDonald’s courier, except McDonald’s hadn’t used human couriers in more than a decade by now of course — this kind of work was proclaimed exploitation as soon as drone deliveries became a norm worldwide.

  “Hey Susan,” Diego said. “Ben, meet Susan, presently a farmer.”

  “The last one in the world?” Ben asked, shaking hands with the granny.

  “I hope not!” she said. “At least my husband and my niece are still alive. Diego, my boy, have you got tea?”

  “Coming right up, let me just put a kettle on,” Diego said. He didn’t move from his overstretched chair though, and they didn’t really have a kettle. He must have ordered it mentally, because before Susan had time to settle, a buzzing drone flew into their small drone reception window, an order of three steaming mugs of tea in its grip.

  “You know I don’t like these things,” Susan grumbled, tearing the membrane off her single-serving plastic mug.

  “What, self-heaters?” Diego asked her.

  “Nah. These!” She kept eyeing the drone.

  Susan’s eyes followed the delivery drone as it showed itself out of the little window. She added: “When I was a kid, I was scared out of my wits by the AIs. I guess that’s why I started to study what you brought me here for. Know thy enemy and everything.”

  “Look,” Ben said. “My offer is quite unusual.”

  He pointed at the map.

  “I’m not tampering with this thing,” Susan said, frowning. “I’m no hacker. And even if I were, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-yard stick. Do you have any idea about the money they invest into this Web of theirs? The level of security here? Even this simple stupid dungeon, do you have any idea how much working hours of the best minds of the entire planet went into it, and computer hours? Do you realize what will happen to us both if we try and mess with their creation?”

  “It’s not that.” Ben shook his head. He hesitated, then said, “The question is: could you program an arithmometer?”

  Susan lifted her grey eyebrows. She looked at Ben, then looked at the map, then removed her baseball cap. To Ben’s genuine surprise, she wore a makeshift aluminum tinfoil cap underneath.

  “What?” Susan asked, noticing his stare. “Do you know what their systems are capable of? Ever heard of a thing called Project Mindwipe?”

  Ben wanted to make a joke but stopped. Mindwipe, he thought. Wasn’t that what happened when all those people on the street fell asleep at once, and then all of them forgot everything about the riot, and on waking up, simply went home? Ben remembered a medical bot trying to inject him, trying to climb up his leg, its upraised needle dripping with some transparent liquid. Project Mindwipe? It seemed very likely now, when he thought of it. But it implie
d so many unpleasant things Ben’s head began to spin. He looked at Susan, eyes wide.

  “Exactly,” she said, as if she could read his thoughts. “With this sonotech all around us for a few decades now, with so much smart radiation around, they now know the insides of your brain like they know the back of their own hand. These people, they could do whatever they like, wipe you, control you, reprogram you. Don’t even get me started on this.”

  She sounds like a paranoid anyway, Ben thought. But something about what Susan said could have been true, and this idea gave Ben a nasty sense of vertigo. Ben couldn’t help but think: how secure was his brain, actually? How deep was the government able to penetrate it? What really happened to Ben while he was asleep, roaming inside the visions of the Web, his subconscious nature exposed?

  “Alright,” Susan said. “First I’ll murder me a cuppa tea, next we’ll deal with your arithmometer issues.”

  “Here.” Ben used his fingers to draw a few symbols on the map. “The main problem is you only get to work with absolutes, like, if-elses only. No multiple choices, no way to adapt to any change, just straight if-else operators. Can you handle it?”

  “Kiddo,” Susan said. “I handled basic operators way before you were even born. Are we talking about an obstacle course in here?”

  “Yes,” Ben said. “It opens with a fire attack, right here. Then, after we step out of this frying pan, we step into — ”

  “More fire?” Susan leaned close to the map and studied it through narrowed eyes.

  “Ha! You’d wish!” Diego said. “There’s a pool of acid here, under the collapsing floor. Not too deep but very corrosive, I’m sure of this.”

  “It’s better in fact!” Ben nodded at the next trap. “You see what I’m seeing?”

  Susan examined the puzzle and then smiled, showing a few old-fashioned rainbow teeth.

  “I see,” she said. “Different dangers, different triggers, huh? Two if-elses clearly defined.”

  “Exactly!” He pointed his finger next. “Every trap we encounter on the course is different. Unique. Which presents us with…”

  “A simple solution resulting in a long and boring line of binary code,” Susan finished for him. “You guys got any paper?”