Enter the Clockworld

by Jared Mandani

The street below was filled with crowds of people. No bullhorns this time, yet many of them were carrying signs, too small for Ben to discern from up here. He saw the drum, too: a huge DIY thing raised on a moving platform pushed by the protesters, someone half-naked pounding into it with relentless primal drive.

  Boom-boom-boom-boom, the drum went.

  WE’RE NOT HERE TO PLAY, the chorus of people all around it chanted. POLICE, GO AWAY!

  Police? Ben thought. No, it seemed they were chanting “DCs”. Or maybe “Dead Creeps”. Or maybe even “robots” — this part was also very hard to discern, because firecrackers and Christmas fireworks were going off above the crowd every few seconds, and chanting people seemed to disagree on the message as well, so a part of them was chanting one thing and some of them another, and most of them just seemed to enjoy screaming the simple rhyme, ignoring the uncertain piece completely. Clouds of steam rose like bluish smoke, as if the whole bunch of people outside was slowly smoldering, ready to blow up at any moment and become a blazing inferno.

  Ben closed the window and moved on to the kitchen without bothering to brush his teeth or read the headlines on the mirror. He knew by now they’d never tell him if something important was happening behind his window. Revolution, he thought, is something that doesn’t make the headlines. At least not while it’s happening.

  Boom-boom-boom-boom.

  WE DON’T WANT NO FIGHTS! PROTECT OUR RIGHTS!

  There was the popping sound of breaking glass, another window shattered in the name of uprising. Then a loud boom followed by a crackle — one more Christmas firework going off.

  His father was in the kitchen, drinking tea at the folding table as usual. The old Harry observed the crowd behind the window with mild interest, clearly unable to decide if he must grumble about it or praise the whole mass of drum-beating slogan-shouting rebels. He was the Chopper King, after all. He used to roll with anarchists and non-conformists all his life. And this whole chanting crowd — wasn’t Ben’s father secretly praying for it to come, every day for the last ten years or so?

  “It’s a mess, son,” the old Harry said finally. “I don’t know what’s happening, son, but I don’t like it. Don’t go out there. It’s a mess.”

  “I thought you wanted a revolution,” Ben said.

  His father sighed. “I wanted something romantic, I guess. Smart, strong men and women to rise and make those robots and computers obsolete again, to show everyone what we humans can build instead, as a society. This…”

  He pointed at the window.

  “This is neither smart nor strong, son. This is stupid and misguided. I doubt they even have leaders. Instigators, maybe. Someone who started all this, just to run away and watch from a distance. Those who remain, well, look at them. They don’t even know what they want. They forgot what they wanted; they forgot everything so long ago.”

  “Maybe this is because they have eve— wait, what does this mean?” Ben pointed at the new light smoldering under their ceiling. It used to be green, now it grew disturbingly orange, and then started blinking red.

  The next instant, back in Ben’s bedroom, something popped and shattered.

  “They broke our window,” the old Harry said, his face a mask of disbelief.

  “Nah.” Ben shook his head, getting up from the table. “How would they? We live on the twenty-fifth.”

  He took a step towards the corridor leading back to the bedrooms and froze, his hand raised halfway to his mouth.

  A big silver drone marked with police credentials was hanging by the kitchen’s door, buzzing above the floor at Ben’s shoulder height. It was AI-controlled — or at least it seemed to be, as it constantly moved around in small jerking motions, like a dragonfly would, its electronic eye rotating here and there, scanning the room and actualizing its floor plan for future navigation.

  “Hey you,” Ben said. “Did you just break our window, you stupid thing? And who’s gonna pay for it?”

  The glowing digital eye instantly locked on Ben, then changed color from ember to malignant red, same as the little light on their ceiling.

  “ATTENTION, CITIZEN,” the police drone said in an indifferent female voice, booming loud across their entire apartment. “YOU ARE BEING APPREHENDED FOR INSTIGATION OF MASS DISTURBANCES. PLEASE IMMEDIATELY CEASE YOUR ACTIVITIES, LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON, AND STAY WHERE YOU ARE UNTIL THE DETENTION TEAM ARRIVES. THANK YOU.”

  Ben looked at his father, then back at the drone. “This is a mistake,” he said. “And I’m not holding any weapon.”

  “YOU ARE BEING APPREHENDED FOR INSTIGATION OF MASS DISTURBANCES,” the buzzing thing repeated, “PLEASE IMMEDIATELY CEASE YOUR ACTIVITIES, LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON, AND STAY WHERE YOU ARE UNTIL THE DETENTION TEAM ARRIVES. THANK YOU.”

  Then the flying thing’s glossy bottom popped open and a black rectangular muzzle slid out, with two shiny metal contacts protruding from it.

  “Step away from it, Ben,” the old Harry said.

  “I have no idea what’s happening,” Ben replied. “This thing is supposed to guard us, in case someone — ”

  ZZAP! The drone darted forward, then slid back, in a fraction of a second, just long enough to administer its paralyzing electric charge into Ben’s forearm. It sucked back its two electrodes and repeated:

  “PLEASE IMMEDIATELY CEASE YOUR ACTIVITIES, LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON, AND STAY WHERE YOU ARE UNTIL THE DETENTION TEAM ARRIVES. THANK YOU.”

  Ben remembered the flash of purple lightning from his dream, the magical bolt Mr. Reaper could cast, something restricted by the rules of Clockworld. The air in the kitchen smelled of ozone now, and Ben’s right arm felt numb down to the shoulder.

  “I don’t have a weapon,” Ben muttered, dumbstruck. The shock was so strong even his lips refused to move at first, and his jaw refused to close shut.

  “You, tin can, you stay away from my son!” his father roared. The old Harry grabbed the bread knife from the table and waved it at the hovering police drone, trying to cut off its spinning blades.

  The drone instantly turned to face him.

  Twang-twang-twang — its muzzle said, and three short metal darts grew out of Ben’s father neck. The old Harry swooned and grabbed a side of the folding table to stay upright. The bread knife fell out of his other hand and clattered, skittering across the floor.

  “Hey,” Ben said. “Hey, what the hell are you doing? He’s got a bad heart!”

  The police drone turned to face him. Ben’s right arm still refused to work.

  “YOU ARE BEING APPREHENDED — ”

  Without further ceremonies, Ben grabbed the only thing in the whole kitchen that could be used as a weapon — a big old skillet hanging above the microwave, a thing purely decorative in a world with not a single oven left. Ben swung the skillet in a wide arc and brought it down on the drone.

  Bzzzzzt! The police drone tottered and yawed, raining sparks on the floor, then tried to gain altitude, crashed into a wall, and fell down, silent and immobile. Ben dropped the skillet and quickly turned towards his father, who was panting hard, barely able to remain on his feet.

  “Come on, Dad!” Ben wrapped his working left arm around his old man and urged him towards the exit. “We must leave, now!”

  He could already hear another police drone buzzing around his bedroom, a backup summoned to the scene of the crime. Ben knew more and more drones would come, each wave of them better prepared and ready to bring him down with surgical efficiency, no matter how much fight he was ready to put up. There used to be no crime in the Wakeworld for a reason, and the reason was buzzing right there behind the wall, scanning the room and looking for a safe passage into the kitchen.

  They burst out into the gray concrete hallway without bothering to magnet-lock the apartment door. Ben’s father was nearly unconscious, and there were at least three police drones on their tail by then, so Ben didn’t bother with the magnet card and went straight for the elevators.

  Much to Be
n’s dismay, only one of the four big lifts was operational, and it creaked inside its shaft endlessly while the two of them were waiting in front of its old, dented metal doors.

  “Hold on, Dad,” Ben whispered, his face nervous. “We’ll get you somewhere. Get you to a doctor, a proper, human doctor.”

  The problem was he had no idea where one would find a doctor, not to mention a human one. Ben only knew a digitizing clinic not far away, and for this it was a bit too early — or at least Ben hoped so.

  The lift’s doors slid open with a heavy thud, and he got his father inside just in time to see a trio of sleek police drones fly out of their front door one after the other, buzzing hungrily and scanning the hallway with their laser eyes, looking for their designated victim. The next moment, the cabin doors banged shut, cutting them off.

  As the lift cabin ground its way down, Ben’s head was overrun by assorted memories and images with nothing to hold them together, to make them form a whole. He saw Daphne and Joanna again, clinging to the giant copper counterweight and going up as the virtual cage slid down, full of happily chatting Elite Guardsmen of Albion. He remembered the battle raging outside the Royal Keep, and the crowds in the streets and battlements below. He remembered Mr. Reaper dressed as a mage, wielding superpowers forbidden by the realistic laws of Clockworld. He remembered the Inferno traps. He recalled his own burning workshop and the fire response robot spiders scuttling around it. He remembered the crazed police drone he’d just knocked out with a skillet, a buzzing metallic gnat shooting sedative darts at his father.

  Something big was happening all around them, and Ben had no idea what it was or how to deal with it. A doctor, he thought, staring at the grating above his head, old neon lamps flickering behind it. Where do we find a doctor?

  “Dad?” Ben turned to the old Harry. “Dad, stay with me! We’re almost there!”

  “Mmh,” his father replied, barely conscious, his head lolling back and forth on his neck. Ben didn’t like the way he looked, not at all. The old Harry looked like he was ready to fall asleep and never wake up.

  And then their lift — clang! — reached its lower vertical limit and stopped, refusing to go horizontally, towards the underground loopstation or anywhere. It just hung in there in one place, its motors whirring softly, and then — clang! — these switched off as well, leaving Ben and his father in the dark, among dreadful silence.

  “What’s happening?” Ben whispered, staring at the ceiling, as if the neon lamps flickering behind their iron grating could provide him with an answer. The lights flickered once in a while, as if responding to his stare, then blinked super-bright once, like a nova star, and switched down to some energy conservation mode, down to barely smoldering ember orange.

  “Hold on, Dad!” Ben pressed his father to the lift cabin wall, trying to place him in a way the old Harry could grab the handrails firmly enough. He seemed to succeed; so then Ben jumped and popped open a maintenance lid above the sliding doors. Then he broke an ancient seal made of rusty wire and a piece of molten plastic with a logo of some defunct lift manufacturer. Ben tore the seal away. He’d never done this before, and it felt incredibly bold, and brave, somehow even sinful, blasphemous. He looked at the door mechanism one last time, found the handle he needed, then grabbed it and flipped it around, making the dented steel doors of the cabin squeal open with minimum protest. Ben grabbed his father then, and hurried into the horizontal elevator shaft.

  He and his father intruding here, where the ancient mechanisms of the building toiled, moving passengers from various floors down to the loopstation or back — it also seemed somehow blasphemous, and somehow unreal, less real than his life in Clockworld at least. Small clouds of powder dust marked each step they made, the dust grey and smelling like burnt plastic or plaster or perhaps acrylic paint. It felt like walking on the Moon might have felt, or like a part of a dream isolated from the Web, a monotonous poorly lit underground passage with no loot to find and no nooks to explore and not even graffiti tags to read. His own personal hell, featureless and pointless as life itself.

  Then a line of small iron stairs crossed their path, running away through a long, very long underground passage that went up and up and up endlessly, at a forty-five degree angle.

  “Ben, we need to do the procedure,” his father muttered all of a sudden. “We need to do the procedure now.”

  And then the old Harry went limp, and Ben had no way to wake him up from this sleep dart-induced toxic slumber, possibly lethal.

  So Ben simply grabbed his father the best he could and dragged him up, up past these endless layers of pseudoplastic tiles and concrete slabs and neon lights and pseudoplastic tiles again. For a while, it felt to him like they’d stayed in one place, never moving forward, trapped inside this weird human hamster wheel, a stretch of narrow cement stairs endlessly scrolling underfoot.

  Then, all of a sudden, this vicious cycle broke and Ben saw a door ahead; a door which popped open as soon as he approached it, and there was a huge chanting crowd behind that door, so he had to drag the old Harry right into it, headfirst into this maelstrom of revolution.

  “They knocked out an old man!” someone screamed in front of Ben. “An old man here, they killed him, he’s dying!”

  “Please don’t say so,” Ben replied, gritting his teeth. “Just, anyone, please help me with my father, okay?”

  No one seemed to notice him though. Even the person who shouted about an old man dying — this person wore a checkered bandanna over their face, and a black hat — seemed to look at Ben thinking about something. But then, a wave of sickness rolled through the crowd, followed by a wave of depersonalization and confusion and vertigo, like all of them were lifted by some invisible hand and all at once thrown into a sweet nauseous drowse — lifted and put back down after a second.

  “You see?” the bandanna fellow screamed at no one in particular. “They wanted to knock us out again, but it isn’t working no more! They overused it on us! We’re immune!”

  Ben realized the man was right; it was the same wave that knocked out the crowd last time there was a riot, this part he felt was true. Overused? This is unlikely, he thought, pulling the old Harry on through the crowd with no assistance from anyone. It was more like the wave was much weaker this time, its effects suppressed if not disabled altogether. Someone must have sabotaged the crowd control wave.

  Someone hacked us, he remembered Mr. Reaper’s voice. We’re being tampered with. This is what I told them.

  Seems like someone wants to start a revolution, he remembered the words of Detective Heart.

  And then there was a blare of a truck horn, another sound of old, something these streets hadn’t heard for a couple decades now. Ben saw a black monstrosity, towering and roaring — a heavy-duty hovertruck, no less! — hopping through the parting crowd on a thick pillow of compressed air, going straight at him, full-speed, its orange signals rotating about. Then the monstrosity’s brakes squealed; the truck glided past him in a final narrow parabola and stopped, its engines still roaring and a cloud of electrified dust forming around it quickly.

  “You!” Ben heard another familiar voice. “Stop, stay with him right there, I’ll help you get him up.”

  Then the door opened and she jumped down — a trucker granny wearing a red baseball cap, a truck driver turned rogue computer programmer, Susan herself.

  “How on earth did you find us?” Ben shouted in her ear as Susan helped him stuff his father into a sleeping nook behind the truck cabin. “Were you watching us? Is everyone always watching us? Did you scan my brain too?”

  “Relax, kid,” Susan said. “Could be I’m the only friend you’ve got left in the Wakey-Wakey by now.”

  They got into the huge elevated truck cabin, and Susan lowered its airtight doors.

  “Sorry, the air conditioning’s poor in here,” she said. “The heater works though. What happened to your old man?”

  “Attacked by a crazy police
drone,” Ben said. “What do you mean, only friend? What happened to Diego?”

  Susan removed the braking anchor and kicked the truck into its first lazy gear.

  “He was arrested,” she said. “Once you really get on their nerves, kid…”

  She clucked her tongue.

  “Arrested? For what?” Ben couldn’t believe any of this.

  “Instigation of mass disturbances, what else?” Susan replied. “Congratulations, son. You’re a hero of the revolution now. An instigator. You better invent some ideology before someone from the Web news asks you what you’re fighting for.”

  “But…” Ben said in an unfamiliar weak voice. “But I’m no one, I did nothing.”

  “Just like any hero of revolution at the very start, perhaps?”

  She chuckled, fixed her baseball cap with the tinfoil hat she wore underneath, and turned to steer the massive hovertruck out of the boundless black crowd.

  They rolled for a long time in silence, listening to the endless crowd chant and firecrackers go off behind the window. To Ben’s surprise, the many-ton truck didn’t stay close to the ground, it kept gaining altitude. It seemed like the city was full of unmarked, invisible sky roads this vehicle, controlled by both Susan and her AI assistant, could take. Soon they were climbing along the lower roofs of certain outcroppings of taller towers, then started jumping along one of the concrete towers itself, the scaffolding arranged in a smart way just to support their ascent. Then they landed on a large loading platform, and it creaked, climbing up along this huge industrial tower’s side.

  Through the tall building’s windows, partly smashed, partly still mirrored glass, Ben could peek at its insides, or rather the absence of them. The huge tower was empty, its floors long collapsed, some green crawling vine filling the interior, able to sustain itself on the constant rain seeping through the roof and windows — a totally decommissioned and unsafe derelict of an office tower, too expensive to remove and thus left here to rot. And yet there was supposed to be something on top of it. The rising platform was taking them somewhere.