The second fake redcoat roared and jumped her, his blade poised gracefully for a deadly strike… and was brought down by an Elven arrow which suddenly grew out of his left eye and was thrumming there now, the dark-fletched shaft vibrating in the air like a tensely tuned string.
“Okay, so now,” Diego — sorry, I meant Joanna — said as the second dead goon collapsed to the floor. “The question is how do we get outta here?”
“Who’s this?” Daphne asked, clinging to my side.
“M-my employee,” I said. “Did you follow us two all the way here?”
“Well, I obviously couldn’t miss such an uberkewl thing,” the Elven girl said. “A prison break, are you kidding me?! Had to let go of my spells though. Which is a shame.”
“At least your ponytail now looks appropriate,” I told him. “In fact, it looks beautiful on you.”
“Well thanks!” Joanna tossed her hair to a side, regarding me coquettishly, which made me feel rather uneasy. “So, boss, how do we get out?”
“This won’t be too hard.” Daphne nodded at the dead redcoats.
“Uniforms!” I said. “Of course. We’ll pose as local guards. I don’t think anyone will ever suspect we’re something else.”
“And if they do…” Joanna smirked, twirling a new arrow in her long silver-manicured fingers. Then she sighed and said: “Let me change clothes on my own though. I don’t think I can handle this otherwise. I feel weird enough already, here in front of you.”
Daphne shrugged, I nodded, and we went on to loot the three dead redcoats for their uniforms.
***
Ben woke up woozy; his head full of the night’s adventures, dark stone passages and underground caves spinning and unfolding before his mental eye still, in an eerie twisted rollercoaster. There was so much to remember he couldn’t even recall it all at once. The complex puzzle with the trapped corridor, then Daphne, then Tranh’s betrayal and a tense close-quarter fight with… who were these people anyway? Now, as he woke up, Ben had to admit he had no idea.
He quickly applied all kinds of cleaning and refreshing pastes to his face and teeth, ignoring the fresh headlines popping up on the mirror. Ben could still remember the times when they tried to broadcast news straight into your head, but it turned out most people didn’t even want to concern themselves with the news delivered that way. The pleasant thing about the mirror screen was you could just ignore whatever you didn’t want to see. And today, Ben didn’t want to see anything. To be frank, he barely wanted to stay in the Wakeworld at all.
They barely made it to Daphne’s grotto hideout yesterday before his sleep timer ran out and Ben had to wake up. Now his girl was left in there alone, in a well-hidden place which could only be accessed after a good swim through underwater tunnels. Ben almost felt safe thinking about her. Almost. With Divine Kingdom on their tail, plus the mysterious them lurking about…
No, he thought. You need to forget about this until the evening. Or you’ll stumble through the day like one of these addicts who refuse to live in the Wakeworld, craving sleep and nothing else.
Still, it was all he could think about while taking the elevator down, and then waiting on the underground station for the next looptrain, and then on his way to work. Sleep. And dreams.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Ben thought as he made his way out of the underground and then through the maze of broken narrow streets amidst all the gargantuan residential towers. It was supposed to be a game. Entertainment. Fun, maybe a bit educational, profitable, that’s for sure. But not all-consuming. Not taking your mind away. Not bigger than life.
He thought of dropping by a social center where they helped people with Dreamweb addiction, but then thought against it. Ben remembered a few of his school friends from days long gone, who succumbed to the pleasures of the Web back when these pleasures were new and somehow brighter and more dangerous than today. They attended the meetings for Web addicts, some of them on their own, some forced by family intervention or a court decision. None of them were happy about it. There were group talks, they said. A lot of whining and complaining. Totally healthy-looking people moaning about how useless they were, how miserable their lives were outside of the Dreamweb. There was finger-painting, and yoga classes, and stupid board games or puzzle solving. A flimsy imitation of social life. Some stuff to occupy your brain and hands with, while you live your life in the Wakeworld, day by miserable day.
The air under the crumbling overpass was reeking of acrid smoke and burnt insulation, so hard the weatherpods of local lowlifes were powerless to dissipate it. In fact, the hobos themselves were gone, or rather crowded a bit further, watching something on the other side of the street.
Only when Ben approached them and elbowed through the crowd of unshaven men, muddy children, and a bunch of idling lookie-loos, did he see his workshop was on fire.
The flames were crimson-red, their heat reaching the crowd of onlookers and making them visibly uncomfortable; the smoke billowed out the smashed display windows in two black columns, so dense and thick no one in the crowd dared to take a step further, no matter how their curiosity urged them to. The smell of burning polymers at this distance was all-engulfing and all-permeating, hardly bearable at all.
“Let me through please,” Ben muttered, trying to get as close to his shop as possible. He still couldn’t believe it was all happening for real. “It’s my… it’s mine. Let me through!”
Not one of the onlookers bothered to look at him. People were silent, and still his words could hardly be heard above the roaring flames.
“Hey Ben! Ben!” He heard Diego’s voice somewhere near. “Hey, move, man! I need to get to this fellow here.”
The fire brigade drones were scurrying all around, the white bulky spiders resistant to flames but not the high temperature of the interior. They advanced, sprinkling some foamy compound on the burning façade, then fell back when the flames bloomed again, reclaiming the lost ground.
No liquid nitrogen will work there, Ben thought, dumbfounded.
“Hey Ben! Boss! Hey boss!” Diego was near now and was shaking him by the shoulder.
“Y-yes?” Ben asked, slowly coming out from the depths of his stupor. “W-what’s going on, Diego?”
“We got torched, what else?” he said. “Right as I walked inside, it happened. They set up a firebomb of some kind! Broke in and then… Can you believe it?!”
“They?” Ben felt a stab of paranoia, familiar to him by now. “Who’s they?”
“Well, you ain’t gonna believe this but… ninjas!”
“Ninjas?” Ben let out a stupid mad laugh, feeling sweet sickness spread through his stomach. “You can’t mean…”
“Real ninjas! Like in old movies, right? I looked ‘em up. Yes, they were ninjas. Can you believe it?” Diego shouted in his ear, looking wild, more excited than terrified.
“What makes you think they were ninjas and not, I don’t know? Some…”
“Alright, so first of all, they were all dressed in black, right?” Diego said, then waved a hand in front of his excited red face. “Second of all, their faces were, like, wrapped in black rags, yes? Only eyes visible. Right?”
“So, what were they doing in our shop, those ‘ninjas’?” Ben asked, feeling a sudden urge to sit down, despite the absence of seats around him.
“Well, no idea,” Diego replied. “It’s just I came in, and they were right there, the three of them, all wearing black. Huddled around this thing.”
“Thing?”
“A firebomb!” Diego was jumping in one place now, waving his hands about as far as the crowd allowed him to. “They were arming this firebomb! Well I didn’t know about it at first of course; it looked kinda like a coffeemaker to me, you know, in the process of making coffee, some red light blinking on its side. Then they saw me and ran away, like, straight through the drone window and up the air vent and such, like these big black cockroaches or something, can you believ
e it? They actually climbed walls and such. So I took another step forward, and then this coffeemaker thing beeped and was like, WHOOSH, and then there was fire all over the place, on the walls and on the bikes and so on. I was lucky it didn’t hit me as well, yeah? So then I ran out.”
He made a painful grimace and shrugged. “The rest, well. You see here in front of you.” Diego stopped his flopping around and stood motionless, watching the flames.
“So, what now?” Ben asked, feeling stupid.
“Well, perhaps we’re both unemployed now I guess, right?” Diego let out a silly chuckle and Ben had to force down his own mad laugh. Diego said: “Well, I mean, you got the place insured, yes?”
“I do,” Ben said slowly. “But this. This is a crime, right?”
“Oh, I know, right? Monstrous. Totally not supposed to happen. I mean, just look at all this.”
Ben looked. The fire response droids suddenly fell back en masse, and right the next moment, the front of his workshop let out a fireball of green flames — WHOOSH! — and started burning with triple brightness. The crowd gasped and pressed on them, rearing from the fire.
Diego let out a stupid chuckle again.
“Well, here goes our stash of fuel. Yes?” he said.
All of this was incomprehensible and impossible to believe, Ben thought. As he said, it was a crime. Crimes hadn’t happened for decades now, officially. In the Dreamweb, yes, there were even special crime-oriented realities like that New York of the nineties, a playground for wannabe car thieves, mass murderers, bank robbers, and arsonists for that matter. On the Web, this scene would look totally normal, an everyday thing. In the Wakeworld, however…
Ben shook his head. “So, are you sure these ninjas, or whoever they were, planted this bomb?”
“I dunno.” Diego shrugged. “They were in there, so I guess. Does it even matter? Someone did.”
“That’s right,” Ben said slowly. “Someone did.”
The crowd milled around them, its commotion followed by the short shriek of a siren. Ben and Diego looked at each other in amazement. A fire siren? None of them had heard this sound since early childhood. Fire response bots didn’t need a siren to clear the way for themselves. They were quite mobile and could easily access any fire source without roaring at the bystanders.
The siren whined once more, and now Ben could see its source, which was even more amazing than any kind of fire alarm. It was a battered police vehicle of ancient make, an early hovercar barely able to raise itself above the ground; a number of blue and red lights twirling on its roof.
A Black Maria, no less, Ben thought. These were curious times indeed.
Its outmoded jets pumping wild, the vehicle made its way through the parting crowd of onlookers and stopped next to Ben and Diego. Its door popped upwards, and from the dark interior, a bulky figure emerged, looking as derelict as the police car itself.
“Detective Heart,” Ben said, then nodded at the vehicle. “Inspector Braggs is driving, I presume?”
“It’s a wonder he still can,” the burly Detective said, looking around. “The cursed thing has no autopilot, can you imagine?”
“Who’s this?” Diego asked.
“Who’s this is no business of yours, kid,” Detective Heart said. “We’ve only got orders to retrieve your friend here. Benjamin, son, would you be so kind to get into the vehicle before another riot begins?”
Ben looked at his employee, now former, then shrugged and followed the Detective into the dark leather-smelling interior of the police hovercar. The door closed, the car’s matte window blocking most of the view outside, only the bright flames still visible as a reddish dancing blotch.
The hovercar took off with a shudder, and Ben sunk into an old-fashioned leather seat, which had no automold function but somehow felt pleasant because of it.
“Did you see what happened to my workshop?” Ben asked the bulky Detective with whom he shared the back seat. The prisoner compartment in the back was empty, as far as he could tell.
“It’s not an isolated case,” Detective Heart muttered, regarding the blurry surroundings, or what could be seen of them, through the tinted window. “There was a series of arsons around here. Same as the rest of the world. Looks coordinated if you ask me. Except it’s not my job to tell of course. Those cyberbrains are supposed to do the calculus. Our job remains what it was; to gather information, and bring it to them, little else.”
“Series of arsons?” Ben could hardly believe his ears. “Where?”
The Detective looked at him from under his grizzled eyebrows. “Among the places you may know, kid,” he said. “Certain Archives which you paid a visit to recently, I think?”
“What?” Ben kept staring at him, eyes wide open. “Archives! No way. I mean, did anyone get hurt?”
“Luckily, no,” Detective Heart said. “All of the attacks happened within a pretty tight interval, four to eight in the morning, so no one got hurt.”
“I — I don’t know anything about it!” Ben said, trying hard not to swallow, which could be seen as him trembling from guilt in the face of impending doom.
“I don’t suppose you know.” The Detective waved his hand, brushing his fears away. “It didn’t happen just here either. Back in my country, certain spots were hit as well. Mostly governmental property. Some of them places related to the disappearance of an Edward Plunkett, DC, remember him? Some of them just governmental structures, lots of information destroyed, mostly old stuff, paper, ancient hard drives, and so on.”
“But how can all this happen?” Ben was genuinely confused. “I mean, it’s the Wakeworld. There’s no crime here.”
“I’m not authorized to discuss these things, kid,” Detective Heart said. “What the hell though, I can tell you off the record. Seems like someone wants to start a revolution.”
“A revolution?” This sounded even more insane to Ben than a sudden crime wave. “I mean, against what? What’s there to revolt against?”
“Hell if I know.” The Detective shrugged. “Computers, robots involved in government processes and law enforcement. Real people who still have power.”
“DCs?”
The Detective let out a loud sigh. “Again, off the record, kid. It seems to me those DCs of yours merely found themselves between a rock and a hard place.”
“What do you mean?” Ben asked, now completely lost.
“That’s an ancient idiom,” Detective Heart said. “Forget about it.”
And they sat through the rest of the drive in silence.
The police station was as poorly lit and dusty as before, but there were enough chairs now (no automold again), and they had an ancient coffeemaker running, which dispensed tolerable coffee with a potent kick. Ben had one paper cup and decided it was equal to about five self-heating cups of the modern coffee.
“So.” Inspector Braggs placed his long and bony figure across Ben’s chair, next to Detective Heart, already seated. “I take it my colleague already told you much more than he was supposed to. I think it’s an American questioning technique, and I can’t say I approve of it. Then again, it seems to me your workshop was purposefully set on fire this morning? Care to elaborate?”
“Well, you know what, yes.” Ben shifted around in his uncomfortable old chair, which creaked in loud protest. “My employee, well, my former employee I mean, since of course he can’t work for me anymore — as his job was supposed to become a form of human exploitation starting next year, which I find ridiculous — well, my former employee came in earlier, and he says it was a bomb, like, a device with a red light blinking on its side. Can you believe it? A real firebomb!”
“You don’t say,” Detective Heart replied, not very impressed. “And who, or rather, who do you think might have planted this bomb? Do you have any personal enemies? Your father’s enemies? Business competition?”
“Ninjas!” Ben blurted out. “Diego, my former employee, he said it was ninjas. Three of t
hem!”
“Ninjas,” the red-faced Detective muttered to himself, then exhaled loudly through his lips, pressed together. He looked at Inspector Braggs.
“Alright then, ninjas aside,” the Inspector said, fumbling around his pocket, fishing for an imaginary pen which wasn’t there. He caught himself in the act and stopped, then went on: “Ninjas aside, could you name any person with a possible motive? Anyone who threatened you — or perhaps your father — about your business? Someone who wanted to buy it, perhaps? A — how is it called? An acquisitioner? An acquisitor?”
He looked at Detective Heart.
“No idea,” the burly Detective said. “I’m not even wired up yet. All of this rushing around, got no time to set up the Web access.”
“Look, just remind me to drop you off by any clinic,” Inspector Braggs said. “You with your brain alone, no Web access, is no good.”
“Dunno,” Detective Heart replied, examining his pair of hands on top of his bulging stomach. “I kinda like it. The quietness of it. Self-reliability.”
“Look, Heart, this could undermine the investigation,” the Inspector hissed at him, then turned to Ben. “So, to cut the matter short, you are presently one of our most important assets. That’s why we requested a court order allowing us to scan your memories from the day the Baron disappeared and further on, ‘til the present date.”
Ben could hardly believe his own ears. “W-what? Memories?”
A million pictures rushed through his brain at the same moment: the most recent prison break, his visit to the Archives, even the scooter he stole while looking for Daphne in NYC Gangworld. He suddenly felt very criminal, about as criminal as the people who torched his workshop, if not more.
“Y-you can’t,” he told the policemen. “You have no right.”
“It happens we have,” Inspector Braggs reassured him. “Don’t worry, the procedure is completely comfortable, non-intrusive, and very selective. None of your personal memories involved. No trips to the toilet. Alright?”
“So where… when…” Ben started.
Enter the Clockworld Page 18
