Clockwork Planet: Volume 1

by Yuu Kamiya

  “Uh, shouldn’t you worry about the two over there more than me...?” Naoto said as he slipped down from RyuZU’s arms.

  The halves of the car had continued to slide and crashed right into the guardrails. Their bodies were practically demolished, and their respective wheels faced the sky and clattered pitifully as they spun fruitlessly in the air.

  If they were caught up in that...

  Just as Naoto was thinking that, he noticed a white lump lying face-down on the ground right next to him—Marie. With her summer coat soiled, she stood up with a vengeance. It seemed that they had escaped just before the crash.

  “RyuZUUUUUUUUUU!! Are you trying to kill us?!” Marie shouted, her beautiful emerald eyes brimming with murderous intent.

  However, RyuZU tilted her head and looked puzzled. “You sure do say some odd things. Looking at things objectively: did I not just incidentally save your fleeting, precious life as I was protecting Master Naoto?—I would not mind if you bowed your head and offered me blessings of gratitude, you know?”

  “There were other ways to do it, weren’t there?!”

  Halter staggered toward Marie from her side. As one would expect, his clothes were dirtied as well. He threw a glance behind himself. Seeing that the road had been reduced to a crater, he groaned quietly.

  “...Hey Marie. The more important thing is that they fired a shell at us in a downtown area.”

  “Urghh, God! Is every last one of them totally insane?!”

  “It seems that Mistress Marie has a tendency towards emotional instability. Lack of composure is the sign of an infantile mind. Would it not be a good idea to become more of an adult and keep your childishness limited to your figure?”

  Marie lowered her head and looked down, her mouth flapping open and closed repeatedly. “I feel like I could smash even a military-use automaton into pieces right now with the hatred I’m feeling towards this unreasonable treatment.”

  “That so? Then without further delay, could you give it a try?” Halter jested. Marie looked up at Halter, intending to retort, but was left speechless when she followed his gaze with her own eyes. There was a red light shining in the center of the road about three hundred meters in front of them.

  —It was an eye. A single eye that belonged to a body towering imposingly over the road, blocking it and casting a giant shadow onto the ground.

  It had an enormous frame with a total height of roughly six meters and two legs with reverse joints. Its silhouette was akin to that of a hare standing halfway up or an ostrich with short legs, and its abdomen was armed with a 120mm cannon.

  Cold sweat gushed out of Marie.

  “How does it look, princess? Could you do something about this with that boasted punch of yours?”

  “You’re saying that while knowing full well what that is, aren’t you, Halter?! That’s a heavily armed automaton!”

  —A heavily armed automaton.

  It was an unmanned mobile weapon developed for subjugation through force. Equipped with a powerful cannon, durable alloy armor, and the ability to run, even on uneven surfaces. Because it was more maneuverable than a tank, it was undoubtedly one of the most powerful weapons in modern-day urban warfare.

  Furthermore, there was more than just one of them.

  Behind the first mobile suit she saw, Marie made out two, three... She was able to confirm sixteen of them in total just from what she could see by squinting her eyes.

  “...My, is this finally the end of the road for us? What a bummer. I still haven’t fulfilled my dream of hitting a jackpot in Vegas and hiring a blond model to wait on me.”

  “Discard that vulgar delusion of yours,” Marie muttered as she glared at Halter contemptuously. Despite the tangent, neither of them looked in the least bit relaxed.

  “Unmanned weapons... They’ve probably been set to automatically intercept anyone who tries to approach the core tower.”

  The reason the mobile suits weren’t shooting right now was because the distance at which they recognized a moving object like a car versus the distance at which they recognized a human who was standing still as a target to intercept were set to be different.

  “To think that they’d use a force almost on the scale of a battalion as disposable chips. What happened to their spirit of not wasting things?”

  “If they’re going to make things look like an accident that they didn’t know about beforehand, they’d need to suffer some losses too, wouldn’t they?”

  As the two exchanged persiflage, an air of despair began to drift between them.

  RyuZU quietly stepped forward and asked, “In short, the two of you are going to give up here... Are you fine with me construing things this way?”

  “Wellll——yeah,” Marie groaned with her eyes half-closed, looking agitated. “Breaking through that from the front is impossible. We have to somehow find a blind spot in the region they were set to guard and make an invasion route based on that—”

  “If you think we have the time for that, there would be a need for me to re-categorize you from small fry to less than small fry...” RyuZU spewed out a derisive line dripping with venom, after which she began to walk forward—

  Towards the throng of mobile suits that were like avatars of violence and murderous intent.

  “RyuZU? Just what are you planning to do?” Naoto asked worriedly, but the answer he received was succinct.

  “I’ll eliminate them,” RyuZU replied as she took half a step backwards. She scowled as if the obstacle she saw before her was something exceedingly displeasing to her eyes. “Of all things, those pieces of junk without even a shred of artistry and so miserable that I can barely stand to look at them fired a shell at Master Naoto. Given that that is the case, they are enemies that I should eliminate,” RyuZU declared gallantly.

  Marie yelled in a strained voice, “Wha, stop right there! Those are the latest military-use automata, you know?!”

  “What about it?”

  “‘What about it?’ You...!”

  “If you are trying to say that an antique made a thousand years ago cannot win against a state-of-the-art weapon...” A small, audacious smile surfaced on RyuZU’s face. Her golden eyes were focused only on what was in front of her. “Let me answer you like this—” She looked up at the skies. “Even after a thousand years, you humans still have not graduated from those brains of yours that are below those of mites, unable to create anything but toys that do not best even me—the weakest among us sisters.”

  A sound spilled out from RyuZU. It was not her usual light and melodic voice.

  In a mechanical, businesslike manner, RyuZU said—let me revise that—RyuZU proclaimed, “Definition Proclamation—the First of the Initial-Y Series, RyuZU YourSlave.”

  That’s right, she properly proclaimed.

  “Inherent ability—‘Dual Time’ ...Initiating start sequence.”

  It was a declaration of mutiny.

  This is what her statement expressed:

  Right now, from this moment onward—

  I shall break the laws of physics.

  Naoto’s eyes widened.

  He heard a faint sound from within RyuZU that would be absolutely impossible for an ordinary person to hear.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

  The sound of a clock’s second hand demarking time.

  Loosely, definitely, irregularly, irrationally—but also beautifully and naturally—the sound distorted. At the same time, the sound of gears clicking into place against each other rang out, and in a cascade like a chain of dominoes being knocked over, RyuZU’s black, formal dress transformed in shape and color. The naked, pale skin of her arms was laid bare, her face was covered by a fluttering veil, and her dainty torso was wrapped tightly in a pearl-white wedding dress.

  Her golden eyes flared into a brilliant, ruby-like red.

  “—Commencing shift from the first timepiece, ‘Real Time,’ to the second timepiece, ‘Imaginary Time.’”

  The shutter of the t
imepiece above RyuZU’s chest was lowered and, immediately after, a second timepiece revealed itself. The sound of a second hand ticking that Naoto couldn’t hear made his eardrums vibrate.

  There wasn’t a single alteration in this space, this time, or this universe, but the supernatural sound RyuZU was producing was refashioning the time she was in and her very existence according to aberrant laws of physics.

  It was incomprehensible.

  But Naoto’s perception chased the continual changes in the sound assiduously.

  “Initiating Chrono Hook—Jumping from normal operation to imaginary operation.”

  RyuZU suddenly turned around, surprising him. He swallowed his breath. On the surface of the pair of deep crimson eyes turned towards Naoto were complicated patterns that glowed brilliantly yet ephemerally.

  RyuZU whispered in a sing-song voice, “Master Naoto.”

  “—Y, Yes?”

  “The reason I stopped functioning for over 206 years was because of just a single gear, the one that you fixed for me. I am now going to initiate that gear, the ‘Imaginary Gear.’ It will only seem like a moment to you, but on my time axis, several hours will have passed.”

  —What are you saying? Naoto simply couldn’t seem to grasp the gist, and his face showed it.

  Regardless, RyuZU cast her eyes downward apologetically and continued, her voice dispassionate. “Once this function is initiated, it cannot be turned off until my spring is fully unwound. I shall definitely return, so when I do, please—take care of my spring.”

  “Y, Yeah.”

  “Well then, though it will only be from my perspective, please forgive me for leaving your side for as long as three hours.”

  With an elegant gesture, RyuZU made a curtsy and bowed deeply.

  She announced the name of the maneuver she was about to undertake: “—‘The Relative Maneuver, Mute Scream’—”

  And that instant, in Naoto’s consciousness, everything had come to an end.

  ●

  Naoto wouldn’t be able to say what had happened in order.

  As for why, it would be because with Naoto’s—No, to any human’s imperfect vision, everything would appear to have happened simultaneously.

  And that—that was, in fact, true.

  It was just like an illusion of a film flying past in five minutes in a theater. An unnatural sensation of seeing a transformation process that should be there, entirely omitted. An absurd reality in which everything was altered instantaneously.

  A wholly inexplicable, blasphemous phenomenon.

  If one were to try to describe what happened anyway—it would be like this:

  First, the sixteen heavily armed automata blocking Naoto’s way had all been pulverized all at once. Underneath their remnants were several hundred lightly armed automata whose necks and feet had, without a single exception, been severed from their torsos.

  The self-propelled artillery that had occupied a key position had been cleaved in two from front to back. The ten-odd silent helicopters that had dominated the skies, intimidating Naoto and his group from above, had had their rotors torn off and were helplessly plummeting downwards.

  That was the conclusion of things.

  The unmanned force about the size of a battalion that had been deployed to seal entry to the core tower had been, in a literal instant, wholly transformed into a gigantic heap of scrap iron.

  “W, What’s up with all this...?” Halter muttered, dumbfounded.

  “...RyuZU did all this by herself?” Naoto said as he noticed the pleasant sensation of something pressing down on his feet.

  Looking down, there was RyuZU, snuggling up to him with a face like a child sleeping in her parent’s arms.

  “T, That’s right. I’ve gotta wind her spring—” Recalling the task he had been entrusted with, Naoto turned RyuZU to her side in a hurry.

  Holding her slender, dainty waist under his arm, he parted her silver hair. He reached his hand towards RyuZU’s spring—whose teeny little grip lay slyly hidden a little above her neck—and began to wind her attentively.

  As he was doing so, Marie cried out, “Imaginary...? Did she say imaginary time—?!” Her eyes were overflowing with terror. “N, No way... Time control is a technology that we don’t even have a hypothesis for! How does she have such an ability?!”

  “Ah—sorry to bother you while you’re all excited, but can I ask for an explanation? I don’t understand what just happened.” A groan spilled from Halter’s mouth.

  While winding RyuZU’s spring, Naoto also looked at Marie as if deeply interested. Marie audibly gulped.

  “—Imaginary time. It’s like the time that passes in dreams... For example, you’ve had a dream long enough that it felt like several days had passed even though you had only dozed off for a few minutes before, right?”

  In dreams, time doesn’t simply flow. There, time has no continuity or regularity. The time observed in dreams can speed up or slow down or freely move between past and future. What that shows is that the concept known as time is actually relative, not absolute.

  The concept of time as absolute, flowing from the past to the future at a fixed rate is flawed—In reality, clocks, arguably the best symbols of that school of thought, do nothing but delineate what events happen at what point inside the continuous consciousness that humans possess.

  What exposes that truth is the axis of time whose existence can only be proven mathematically that lies perpendicular to the axis of real time.

  Delineated by imaginary numbers that don’t really exist.

  A fictitious time conjured by one’s imagination.

  Namely—imaginary time.

  “Umm, sorry, but I don’t speak French.”

  “Every word and sentence I said was proper Japanese!” Marie huffed and puffed after yelling with all her might.

  Beside her, Halter spoke up, sounding perplexed. “...Even if you say that, does something like that really exist? Sorry, but I didn’t understand any of what you said, either. I would think that as a Geselle I’d be able to understand... though I may not look the part at times.”

  “...It doesn’t. Rather, even if it did, it would be impossible to observe.”

  Observing imaginary time would require an object that existed in imaginary time, something that is only possible in mathematical models. As long as human consciousness remains something that only flows continually in one direction, humans can never observe it, let alone understand it.

  However—

  “Hmm?” Naoto tilted his head.

  Stopping his hand that was winding RyuZU’s spring, Naoto gestured toward the automaton and pointed out, “Isn’t there someone right here that fits the bill?”

  “I’m telling you that that’s impossible!!” Marie raised her voice.

  Halter summed things up for Marie to pacify her. “In other words, this young lady used her control of this so-called ‘imaginary time’ to move on a different axis of time from ours, and by doing so, she was able to create this terrible spectacle, right?”

  “No—that’s impossible.” Shaking her head, Marie firmly rejected Halter’s understanding of things. “It’s impossible. Taking in positive energy and outputting negative energy... Unless something that exhibits that kind of impossible behavior exists, it can’t be explained. I’m sure that ‘imaginary time’ is just a moniker and that whatever RyuZU did just now works on a different princi—”

  “C, Could that have been it?” Naoto spoke up suddenly as if he had just recalled something.

  Marie looked at him suspiciously, “What, do you have a clue of some sort?”

  “RyuZU mentioned something earlier, didn’t she? About the malfunctioning gear that caused her to stop running.”

  “Ahh, now that you mention it...”

  “RyuZU was broken because of just that one single gear,” Naoto announced, “that outputs counterclockwise rotational energy even though it turns clockwise.”

  “....................................
...............................Haah?”

  After an ample silence, Marie furrowed her eyebrows sharply and stared at Naoto. “W, What did you just say?”

  “I mean, just like I said, there was a gear like that. It was the only one that wasn’t tur—”

  “How did you fix something like that?!”

  “Eh? I mean—is it that strange?”

  As if she was about to bite him, Marie exclaimed, “Of course it’s strange! Rather, it’s impossible! Do you have loose screws in your head?!”

  “Uh, err...?”

  “Use some common sense!! Are they teaching you nothing at school?!”

  “Ah—well... I’m always sleeping, except for during practical exams. Tee hee~” Embarrassed, Naoto stuck his tongue out to one side while Marie stared on in silence.

  Sensing a sign of danger in her eyes, Naoto hurriedly followed up, “Ah—I mean, you couldn’t fix it because you assumed it turned counterclockwise.”

  With an icy cold gaze and tone, Marie asked, “Do you think it’s possible for a ball thrown forward to fly backwards?”

  Naoto tilted his head and looked puzzled. “...Ahh, now that you mention it, it’s strange, maybe?”

  “Right? So—”

  Marie let out a sigh of relief. You finally get it, huh.

  “But if that’s how it is, what can we do but accept it?”

  “Stop messing with me! —————————Argh!!” Marie screamed, throwing her head forward so hard that her hair flew everywhere. Trembling all over, she uttered, “For the Breguet family’s thirteen-hundred-year lineage to lose to a, a loose-screwed, perverted jackass like this... Just what kind of joke is this...?! God damn it!”

  Marie clenched her teeth.

  The idiot in front of her was literally and truly absurd.

  If you’re saying that someone wouldn’t have been able to fix this automaton without that irrationality bordering on madness of yours... I see, if that’s the reason every single clocksmith born to the Breguet family has failed, I can accept that.

  I can accept it, but—

  “...I don’t want to acknowledge it. What’s with this absurdity that violates all reason...?!” Marie groaned in agony.