Enter the Clockworld

by Jared Mandani

  A gang of youth passed them by, all of them wearing identical neon-green headbands. The teenagers carried two iron sledgehammers, and smashed big shop windows with them. CRASH-ZING-skip-ZING. Ben noticed the hooligans were quite picky about which windows to break and which to leave intact.

  “No, I meant, why… why all this?” Ben asked.

  “Because it’s the end of the world, they say,” Tranh told him without a trace of emotion. “This is what they say in China, that someday they will just use force to digitize the last of us alive, finish the job fast, and this world will be lost, a holy place only reserved for saints and kings and their servants. And our kingdom will be digital kingdom, where all of us will be replanted for them to watch and laugh. Because the world our digital copies shall inherit will be Hell, ever consumed by a war of nations, everyone always trying to stab the other in the back. These kings and saints will watch and learn from us, and our lot is but to move on, detach, and never hope for salvation, only for permanent erasure.”

  This new information was as hard to digest as Susan’s claim the Web was but a digital illusion, a tool invented by computers to enslave humanity. Everyone in this world seemed to have their own grand scheme of things, Ben thought.

  A lonely figure blocked their way, a hobo, unshaven and with eyes open so wide his irises seemed small.

  “WE WON’T GO AWAY!” He bellowed in their faces all of a sudden. “WE ARE HERE TO ST — ”

  Moving slowly and graciously, Tranh put a hand on his shoulder, then somehow wrapped himself around the hobo, and they both collapsed on the ground quite slowly, like two big pillows. Tranh stood up then, and the hobo didn’t.

  “Is he okay?” Ben asked as they walked further.

  “Ah yes,” Tranh replied, his voice muffled by the black scarf he wore. “It’s only four of his ribs are broken now, and he is paralyzed with pain and cannot breathe for the next thirty minutes. This is needed so he won’t follow us.”

  “Man.” Ben shook his head. “Tranh, seriously, it was just a bum.”

  The ninja looked at him shortly, a flash of two indifferent black eyes.

  “These days,” he said, “anyone could be anything. You never know.”

  Better safe than sorry, Ben finished for him, still not sure if all of this was really necessary. He seemed to be slowly becoming immune to this feeling of despair. He still didn’t believe in a revolution, but the mass uprising was now a fact, and things often got violent, or at least the Web news said so. Ben realized he believed in nothing anymore.

  “Where’s Spark?” he asked.

  “Who?” Tranh flashed him another look.

  “The nerdy fellow who was in the second capsule.”

  “Second capsule?” Tranh looked at him longer now. “No one was there. It was empty.”

  “He’s gone then,” Ben said. “They must have gotten him.”

  “Drones attacked the settlement above, many drones,” Tranh said. “So your friends had to hide in the elevator and get down into the crowd. Many people were arrested in this crowd then. But none were your friends.”

  “How do you know?” Ben asked him.

  “I can read it.”

  “You… But I mean it’s not on the news, is it?” Ben looked at him now.

  “It’s not,” Tranh said. “It’s access level B information.”

  “Wait.” Ben stopped in his step, suddenly overwhelmed. “You’re a hacker?”

  Tranh merely nodded.

  “But this…” Ben twirled his hand in the air. “I mean, you do know it’s against the law, right?”

  “Panay is big,” Tranh answered. “It’s against the law there too but they never look for us. Many of us grow up to be hackers.”

  “You must mean Pan Asia,” Ben said. “But you’re here now.”

  “They brought us here,” Tranh confirmed. “They asked us to do something very illegal, for lots and lots of your money. The client was anonymous but they paid us half upfront. We thought you were gentlemen, all of you, so we came here, me and Nguyen and Lee. And then they set us up; they arrested Lee, and now I’m left alone with Nguyen, and we cannot go back.”

  He nodded at the other ninja.

  “Did it have something to do with the Baron?” Ben asked.

  Tranh merely nodded again.

  “Did you kill him?”

  Tranh shook his head.

  “So how did they set you up?”

  “I know you’ve seen the blueprint,” Tranh said. “And I know you’ve seen the — ”

  He said something else, seemingly in Japanese or some other language.

  “What?” Ben didn’t understand. “Oh wait. You mean Animatron. Yes, I saw the blueprint and I saw the thing itself. It was a bit different.”

  “Yes,” Tranh said. “Not made in the Kingdom, not by Asians.”

  “By whom, then?” Ben asked.

  “You’re a mechanic. You tell me.”

  They walked in silence for a while, bits of broken glass crunching underfoot. The cold winter wind lashed them with icy drizzle. It smelled of snow and something acrid, burnt.

  “So you didn’t kill the Baron,” Ben said, sniffling, then rubbing his nose. Even the drizzle today seemed wrong, he noticed. Somehow oily. Ben went on: “And your anonymous client, whoever he was, made it look like the Baron was assassinated. And he blamed it on the Kingdom by strapping this fake Animatron on the ragdoll. But, I mean, if you weren’t hired to perform an assassination, what did they hire you for?”

  “Kidnapping,” Tranh said, and this was it.

  They finally left behind the scary deserted blocks where gangs of hooligans roamed, and saw an outpost of the revolution for the first time: a makeshift low barricade of every old piece of metal and stone the revolutionaries were able to scavenge in the surroundings, all clumped together to form a waist-high wall. Two men were patrolling the area along the wall, the lower part of their faces hidden behind elastic red stockings, one of them armed with an old hockey stick, another with a plank of artificial wood. More ceremonial weapons than actual clubs.

  “Long live the Awaken!” one of them shouted at the ninjas.

  “DCs are not enemies!” another red scarf intervened.

  Tranh frowned behind his black mask, his step already changed to a balanced kung fu trot.

  “We are here to stay, fellows.” Ben took a step forward.

  “Yeah!” the hockey stick man shouted back.

  “We won’t go away, man!” the second red scarf agreed.

  They passed the barricade, then crossed another block and saw a field kitchen serving soup to a line of ragged and tired protesters. A big woman was chopping pieces of artificial wooden furniture and throwing them into the oven, feeding the actual open fire source.

  “Susan?” Ben asked, not quite believing.

  “Hey!” she said.

  Ben realized he was seeing her without the red baseball cap, and she wasn’t wearing the tinfoil cap either, for the first time.

  “You’re not wearing your…” he said, twirling his index finger above his head.

  “No,” Susan answered. She stopped, dropped her fire axe and wiped sweat off her reddish forehead. She nodded at Tranh and his companions and said: “Thanks to these heroes, they cannot pacify us anymore. The Big Sleeping Pill is down.”

  “You mean it was done by…” Ben looked at Tranh with awe. A hack job, another hack job, we’ve been hacked, so Mr. Reaper said, the Asians have very good hackers.

  “Too much talk,” Tranh said. “We have to go.”

  “Just one thing,” Susan said. “Did you see Spark?”

  Ben shook his head.

  “He didn’t make it, then?”

  “So it seems,” Ben said.

  The old lady sighed, then shrugged, and their trio moved on. They passed a few antique-legged tables with protesters eating behind them, and dove into a narrow alley between two colossal residential megal
iths of red brickwork and grey concrete. A few people were sleeping in the doorways here, some of them on pieces of automold foam, some on pillows made of their own overcoats. Quite a few times, Ben and his companions had to step over someone’s long legs or an entire prostrated body. It was still early, around four o’clock in the morning, yet the crackle and sizzle of fireworks somewhere in the background was incessant. A few protesters smelling of smoke and sulfur pushed past them, talking loudly, despite the people sleeping all around. The mood in the streets was elevated, rather festive, like a delayed celebration of New Year with something even bigger expected anytime soon.

  “They say they spotted another dragonfly westward from here,” one of the passers-by was saying, “and our boys already mastered the slingshot, can you believe, all you need is a pair of stockings from your wife, and find some stones for ammo.”

  “I’m telling you, man! This thing takes ‘em out like clockwork!”

  “No more spying on us, bastards, that’s what I shout at them.”

  “Same here, man, same here. Except they can’t hear me because I shoot them down first.”

  “Alpha, man. It’s not sigma this time, it’s alpha, I’m telling you.”

  Despite the chaos and an unpleasant thought of marauding gangs and police drones alike, Ben felt this festive spirit, and could see many positive changes as well. For the first time in his life, adult people were camping out and eating together like one big family, risking catching pneumonia at the cost of this incredible fraternity, found anew. Their goals and visions still differed greatly from one person to another, and the purpose of their mass uprising remained unclear to most of them, and yet the people woke up finally. And found out they had a lot of things to discuss face-to-face, like in the old times.

  The Wakeworld people, once sleepy and grey, were daydreaming no longer. They were all practicing this new-fashioned form of meditation, a “common sleep,” sleeping right there on the streets in any way possible, on camping rolls they never used for years prior to now.

  The people were self-aware and united once more, and whoever held the power in the Wakeworld, they didn’t seem to like it very much. Still, they could do nothing to stop this massive slumber party, not even stop it from spreading across the metropolis like a stain, swallowing one block after another; progressing like a disease. First crowds in the streets, then tables and field kitchens, then lots of street chanting, fireworks, self-made pipes and kettledrums, dancing around fires, singing and holding hands, then the morning filled with sleepers in the doorways.

  Ben saw more and more tables and sleeping cots as they entered another big street, then dove back into the concrete-and-brick canyon of an alley, fire escape ladders and laundry lines crisscrossed overhead. Finally, Tranh pressed his hand to a lock built into the brick wall to their left, and it opened some door. Their trio went inside, and soon Ben found himself standing in a big kitchen of something that must have been an expensive restaurant where food was still prepared by real human cooks.

  “No robot and not even a DC-controlled bot may enter here,” Tranh said, following Ben’s stare. “All security is analog, disconnected from the Web, can only be hacked by an insider. Also, diplomatically, this is equal to Panay territory, do you understand?”

  Ben could definitely see the cooks bent over their sizzling woks and milkshake dispensers were all Asian, but not same as Tranh, more like Chinese, and the food was also Chinese, and very simple too, mostly the same noodles and chicken wings fried in a hundred different sauces. The milkshaker was of a compact kind, which meant powdered milk and tap water.

  The food all looked much worse than that you could order via a drone, and probably cost ten times more just because it was humans who cooked it. And the place was somehow bought out by Pan Asia, so they could work under their own laws here, and their own laws said human exploitation was quite okay unless little kids were involved.

  Ben knew of these places; it was an entire cult of sorts, its certain aspects endorsed by Faith, even: the cult of humans serving humans even at the cost of quality. Forgive us, as we’re only human, all these boring noodles and chicken wings said. Yet the sauces we come with, this is truly a human art. Robot food tastes great, but it’s always the same precise recipe based on the most recurrent tastes, truly the food for the masses and not for an individual. If you knew you were an individual and you could afford the real food, you came to such a restaurant.

  “This place is called Dim Sum,” Ben observed. “Isn’t a dim sum a Chinese dish or something?”

  “I don’t know,” Tranh said. “I’m not Chinese. Here, please.”

  They went through a door with a pair of Chinese hieroglyphs which the Web said meant “Employees Only,” then a sheet of transparent glass moved out of their way and disappeared inside a wall, and they entered a dressing room, every wall of which was segmented — a row of old-fashioned DNA-encoded employee lockers, a bench made of a long bent piece of artificial redwood, and this was it.

  “Listen here.” Tranh turned to Ben all of a sudden. He went on in hoarse whisper: “We think whoever set us up did it because of Faith. We think it’s because we’re Mahayana Buddhists that these people hated us and attacked us, also because they stole our secret of replanting DCs... Well, it doesn’t matter. The thing is we think people of Academia have a mole among them, an enemy agent, of the Church.

  The Church! Something was so obvious in here. As he was explaining it all in his broken language, the full picture seemed to become clear to Ben. The Church hired these Pan Asian hackers to kidnap the Baron, a very important DC, be he a member of the Ethereals or not. The hackers were introduced to wise people of Academia who were meant to help them kidnap the Baron.

  Ben suddenly remembered Mr. Reaper. He definitely knew the Ethereals and the Church were ancient enemies. The Ethereals wanted DCs to rule the Wakeworld by exploiting the Web. Academia helped the Pan Asian hackers, even knowing they were spies sent to destabilize our police countermeasures.

  Then the Church set the hackers up using a piece of fake Divine Kingdom technology and, very likely, their militant allies among the Assassins of the Crescent. Once the hackers were taken out, the mole within Academia transferred the Baron to the Church.

  “So this is the place where poor Mr. Plunkett is held now,” Ben muttered. “The Church of the New Faith and Whatever.”

  “You will speak to the man who commanded our mission now,” Tranh told him then. “He is still in charge, as far as my handler tells me, so I treat him with reverence, as my master. I cannot afford to see what he really is for the sake of our camouflage which was spared by the winds of luck for now.”

  “So your cover is still not blown, but you want me to make sure this Academia man that waits for me here is not the mole sent by the Church?”

  “On the contrary,” Tranh said. “I’m sure he is a mole but I can do nothing. I need you to disprove it if you want us to work on with this man.”

  Ben looked at him then. “Wait, what…” he said. “Are you…”

  “Disprove it.” Tranh looked at him with eyes of steel.

  They left Nguyen at the door and walked down the corridor, and then into a meeting room with a battered old snooker table in the middle surrounded by a trio of dusty non-automold recliners. Francis Kowalski himself was reclining on one of them, a cup of green tea in his scientist’s fingers, long and probing.

  “Oh, Benjamin!” Kowalski smiled, his long druidic beard parting in the middle. “It’s so good to see you. If only you witnessed how vicious their attack was! It was like a dark cloud, this blanket of drones they sent to capture us. Nothing we didn’t expect in the worst case scenario of course. But we did barely make it.”

  “We pulled him out while he was with this DC you wanted, another Eth, the REAPR entity.” Tranh told Kowalski, his small frame towering about the prostrated scientist. “You said the kid and I will both want what you have to offer once I bring him to you.”r />
  “One important thing!” Francis Kowalski sipped his tea, his voice friendly and warm, and yet as indifferent as possible. “You cannot have REAPR, neither you nor Nguyen. I know your kind, you will exploit him, use him against our country. What you did already, damping down our crowd control system, disabling our law enforcement to the point they act erratically… Don’t get me wrong, Ben, I’m not happy we have to work with these people; for they are enemies of England, enemies of European Union, and twice enemies of anything Western. Many of them still think in old ways, like Marxism, or capitalism, or a thousand strange beliefs born in their farming terraces! These people came here to sow dissent, to harm our society, and I will never approve of their presence here.”

  “And yet you helped them to kidnap the Baron.”

  “It was an incredible concept,” Kowalski admitted. “And honestly, I merely wanted to befriend this fellow, get to know him, learn more about the Ethereals, their goals and such. I wanted a tête-à-tête. These bastards from the Church, they sold us out to the government, I’m sure. Then they blew up our only generator so we could either lay low and stop being a nuisance, or seek a specialist. So we found you, someone who by then was designated a hero of the revolution.”

  “I know nothing of the revolution!” Ben said.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Kowalski sipped his tea. “The story of you — and your father — is an urban legend now. I’m sorry he didn’t make it.”

  “Anybody else?” Ben swallowed. “Did we lose anybody else?”

  “Spark.” Francis Kowalski put his tea down, then suddenly crossed himself. “Spark, our electrician, poor soul. They must have stuffed him so full of this sedative his heart also gave up. It’s just terrible, Ben. These things happening here, right in our neighborhood, in the year of 2099 — oh, sorry, 2100 — is just unimaginable.”

  “No more Necromancer, then,” Ben said. “It’s not good. I think I’m dead in there. On the Web. D-Daphne too.”