The Complete Alice Wonder Series - Insanity - Books 1 - 9

by Cameron Jace

  “My best landing yet,” the Pillar says. “The last one, everyone died but me.”

  30

  Outside Burang, Tibet Autonomous Region

  The beautiful monks welcome us in their orange and red robes as if they haven’t seen people outside their tribe in years.

  I trot in my new boots the Pillar gave me and feel the chill of cold, though I’m wearing a lot of layers of orange. A few steps closer, I realize the Pillar is still inside the plane.

  “Pillar? What’s keeping you behind?” I say, turning.

  It’s only seconds before he appears from behind the plane. He is wearing a lush orange robe and looks pretty much like a Tibetan monk now. Not just because of the robe, but because he’s shaved his head bald.

  “Seriously?” I grit my teeth.

  “I am an expert in communication and we need to blend in. Most monks here are bald, so I figured I should be too.”

  “Do you know how long it’ll take for your hair to grow back?”

  “They’ve got pills for that now,” he says. “I didn’t like to comb and wash my hair each day anyways. I always wanted to feel the drizzle of water on my bald head in the shower. It was on my bucket list.”

  A closer look, I realize it’s a wig. A bald wig.

  Behind us, Tibetans approach us. They speak in a language I don’t understand, but an old man, presumably their leader, smiles broadly and holds me gently by the shoulder.

  I bow my head with respect, not knowing what to say.

  “Alice of Wonderland!” the old man says in English.

  “You know me?”

  “Who doesn’t?” He pulls out a copy of Through the Looking Glass, this one with a red cover.

  “You’ve been reading about me?” I am flattered.

  “In Chinese!” He shows me that the copy is in their own language. Everything is read from top to bottom instead of left to right. “The monks are crazy about you here.”

  “Oh.” I am speechless, wondering if the monks dismiss their prayers to read a children’s book.

  The old man nears me, whispering, “The monks spend their time chasing rabbits in the snow, wishing they’d fall into a hole. It’s either prayers or rabbit holes around here. I’m Xian, like Xiangqi, named after the Chinese chess game.”

  “Nice to meet you, Xian,” I say. “You have your own chess here?”

  “The oldest in the world,” he says proudly. “They will tell you the one in Marostica is the oldest, but they don’t know squat.”

  “Squat?” I raise an eyebrow.

  “I learned English in Brooklyn, New York.” He laughs. “You know our chess game is said to contain the secret of the universe. The Nazis sent their expeditions to Tibet, wanting to find out about it.”

  “Nazis.” I frown. “And squat.”

  “Or crap.” He mirrors my eyebrows.

  “So I assume you know this man.” I switch my glance toward the Pillar, assuming he may recognize him as the Caterpillar from the books.

  The old man turns and faces the bald Pillar, and his smile broadens. “Of course I know him,” he says. “Who doesn’t know the famous Cao Pao Wong?”

  31

  “Cao Pao Wong?” I glare at the Pillar.

  “Better than Kung Fu Panda,” the Pillar remarks.

  “You were here before?”

  “It’s a long story.” The Pillar changes the subject and turns to Xian. “We need a favor.”

  “Shoot,” Xian says, and I can’t fathom his dialect or slang. Maybe he is some sort of a modern monk.

  “We have a puzzle that led us to you.” The Pillar shows him the note we found in the chess piece.

  “Sticky note!” Xian seems fascinated with it. He sticks it on his head. “Haven’t seen one of those in about…hmmm…forty years.”

  “I’ll send you a tank full of sticky notes later,” the Pillar says. “As you can see, it has the words Deep Blue written on one side.”

  “White Stones on the other,” Xian says.

  “Let’s stick to the part you know about,” the Pillar says.

  “You mean the machine?” Xian looks all serious and worried.

  The Pillar nods.

  “You remember what the machine looks like, right?”

  “Of course,” the Pillar says. “A long, monolith-like black box. Inside it are all the wires and microchips that make it think.”

  “Good memory, Cao Pao Wong.”

  “I think the puzzle is a secret way to open it.”

  “No one has been able to open the machine ever before. I hope you remember that.”

  “I know; even the guys at IBM believed it was haunted when they couldn’t open it after the game with Kasparov. Just tell me where you keep it.”

  Xian rubs his chin. “This is going to be a bit of a problem.”

  “Why so?” I interrupt.

  “Like the Pillar said, it looks like a monolith—black, intimidating, and huge. You look at it and feel strange and conflicting emotions.”

  “So?” I ask.

  “Let me put it this way,” Xian says. “It looks like the monolith in that Space Odyssey movie by Stanley Kubrick.”

  I haven’t seen the movie, so the Pillar explains it’s about space exploration, where a mysterious monolith is found by astronauts. The monolith is shown in the movie to have taught the first man, apes precisely, how to hunt and make a weapon. In brief, it showed man how to make things, from a hunting weapon to a thinking computer in our modern-day.

  “I get it,” I tell Xian. “So the IBM machine looks like that monolith in the movie. What does this have to do with us seeing Deep Blue now?”

  Xian takes a moment and then says, “Well, my monks are now worshiping the machine in the middle of the snow.”

  32

  Xian walks us to where the Deep Blue machine sticks out of the snow. It’s about two meters high and slightly less than a meter wide. It also looks like it parts from the middle, only if you punch in a combination of secret numbers in the digital pad on top. A sixteen-number combination.

  “So the issue is to how to get the numbers?” the Pillar asks Xian.

  “I’d call it your secondary issue,” Xian says. “The first would be them.” He points at the monks in orange praying while facing the monolith. A few of them are already suspicious about us.

  “So they think Deep Blue is God?” I ask.

  “Todd,” Xian says.

  “Todd?” the Pillar asks.

  “Yes, Todd,” Xian says.

  “Who’s Todd?” I ask Xian.

  “God,” Xian says.

  “Todd is God?” the Pillar asks.

  “Or God is Todd,” I remark, loving the insanity.

  “How can God be Todd?” the Pillar asks.

  “A misspelling,” Xian says.

  “You Buddhists misspelled God’s name?” the Pillar says.

  “Not at all,” Xian says. “One day, I took my monks to New York. They asked a man whom New Yorkers pray to. A drunk man on a Sunday morning told them ‘God’ in a slurry tongue. They thought he said Todd. And since Deep Blue is a computer, and my monks believe computers are western inventions, they called it Todd.”

  “What about Deep Blue?” I ask.

  “You can’t worship something called Deep Blue,” Xian says.

  “Why even worship a machine?” I ask. “Are you sure you guys are Buddhists?”

  “First of all, not all of my monks worship Todd. Some of them don’t. Secondly, we’re not really Buddhists; we’re left out in the cold wearing those silly orange robes, and we don’t know why we do it. We were just born that way.”

  “And third?”

  “That part of my men worship Todd so they can get an American visa.”

  “What?” My voice pitches up.

  “They were told that if they worshiped a machine from California, and the machine liked them, they’d end up with an American visa.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “A green card, ma
ybe?” Xian scratches his head.

  “You’re being outrageously offensive right now,” I tell him, about to tell those poor monks the truth.

  “Work permit?” Xian asks. “They wouldn’t mind that. It’s really cold and lonely here.”

  “Stop it.” I hold my head to stop it from internally exploding. “Who the hell told these poor monks they could get a visa by worshiping a machine?”

  Xian shrugs, looking sideways.

  “Who?” I get his attention by grabbing his robe.

  “Him.” He points at the Pillar.

  I turn and find the Pillar is already praying with the monks, avoiding me. When I near him, he is talking a woman into marrying him and giving her British citizenship, which is way cooler than American.

  33

  It’s hard to do something about the Pillar’s atrocious behavior right now. I don’t even know when he was here in the past or what he’s done. All I get from his wink is that he is distracting the monks so I can solve the machine’s puzzle.

  “Come with me, Xian,” I tell the old man, walking back to Deep Blue.

  “So you know how the numbers go to the machine?” he asks.

  “Hardly,” I say, looking at the note again. “All I know is that the other side of the note should be the way to do it.”

  “White stones?” Xian asks.

  “Do you have any idea what it means?”

  “I am trying to think.”

  “If Lewis—or Fabiola, or whoever designed this global puzzle—meant the ‘white stones’ to help us open the machine, then it should point at something nearby.”

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere. There is nothing nearby.”

  He is right. My eyes dart back to the machine itself. I notice the back of the machine is divided into small squares, carved with a sharp tool. Many, but not all, of the squares, have circles inside them.

  “What is this, Xian?”

  “We’ve never known exactly. It came with the machine.”

  “Looks like a calendar to me. The squares.” I rub my hands on its surface. “Look at the top of each set—you can see those small writings. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on.”

  “One of our monks suggested that, but what use could it be?”

  “I agree. It seems useless, but why write a calendar on the back of the machine?”

  “You tell me, Alice of Wonderland. Maybe you can autograph my robe?”

  “Autograph?” I roll my eyes. “What would you tell others? That the girl from the book autographed it? Stick with the puzzle, please.”

  “As you say, Alice of Wonderland,” he says, and pulls out a pair of slippers from under his robe. They’re made to look like two rabbits. “Can’t think of a better occasion for wearing them. Brought them from—”

  “New York, I know. You should stop being obsessed with American products.”

  “But the slippers aren’t American,” he argued. “They’re made in Wonderland, the beautiful salesman told me.”

  I roll my eyes again, wondering just how many more foolish and stupid people I’ll be running into. Then I grab one of the slippers and check the label on the back. “It’s made in China, Xian,” I say. “So you technically let some sneaky salesman sell you an American product, claiming it was from Wonderland when probably one of these monks manufactured it.”

  Xian looks shocked. “You mean I could’ve already obtained the American visa with those rabbit slippers?”

  I leave him be and take another look at the calendar. Some of the squares are marked. Some with a white circle. Some with black. The scene reminds me of the War between the Inklings and Black Chess, and the black and white chessboard of life.

  “I found you a white stone.” Xian shows up again. He hands me a snowball. “You said it had to do with something nearby. A snowball looks like a stone and is white.”

  Though I dismiss his suggestion, I realize it gave me a clue. The white circles in the calendar could be the white stones. But how are they related to discovering the numbers that open the machine?

  “Pillar?” I shout against the sudden wind looming nearby.

  He doesn’t answer me, still having fun with the monks and promising them visas and better lives.

  “Cao Pao Wong?”

  “Yes, dear,” he says with a nose smudged in snow.

  “What do white stones and calendars have in common?”

  And there he suddenly looks interested. “Why did you mention calendars now?”

  “There is a calendar drawn on the back with white circles.”

  “So this is it.” He clicks his fingers and approaches.

  “Is what?”

  “The clue.” He stands next to me and Xian. “Nice slippers, Xian,” he comments. “I know a guy in the States who has the originals from Wonderland.”

  Xian looks double shocked.

  “What do you mean this is the clue?” I ask the Pillar.

  “Lewis Carroll had a fascination with marking days on calendars,” the Pillar says. “And he always marked the happy days in his life with white stones.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I never lie on Tuesdays,”

  “It’s Wednesday,” I say.

  “Then I never lie on Wednesdays.” He winks and stares at the calendar. “Now tell me you figured out the numbers already.”

  “I can’t seem to get the connection.” But then I regret speaking so fast because one more glance helps me figure it out. Each white stone marks a particular number in each month. Starting from the third day, ninth, eleventh, and so on. There are sixteen numbers in all.

  “Genius puzzle,” the Pillar says.

  I punch the digits in while the Pillar distracts the monks, and hurray, the door clicks open. Xian helps me pull it back. It’s a bit heavy, and inside there is nothing but wires and…

  Wait. There it is. Another chess piece.

  34

  World Chess Championship, Moscow, Russia

  “Where are Alice and the Pillar?” the Chessmaster asked, just after making four consecutive moves with four different presidents. He seemed to have a certain love for white knights in the game. He used them a lot, leaving world leaders in total awe of his brilliant moves.

  “Untraceable so far,” one of his men told him.

  “How is that possible? If they’ve found the white queen chess piece, they must have been told of the next clue. And if so, I assume they will need transportation. The pieces are scattered all over the world.”

  The Chessmaster’s assistant said nothing, afraid to upset him.

  “Why do you need this Carroll’s Knight so much?” uttered one of the world leaders. His name was Samson, declared dictator and sultan of Madderstan, a neighboring country to Looneystan.

  “What did you just ask me?” The Chessmaster rose and rubbed the right side of his mustache.

  “You heard me.” Samson seemed full of himself, unlike most world leaders.

  “You think you can just ask me questions because your country is a terrorism-spreading little land?” The Chessmaster knew Samson pretty well. The dictator ruled a small, but oil-rich, country in Africa, and his small tribe of soldiers endorsed terrorism everywhere, just for the fun of it.

  “Guilty as charged.” Samson raised his hands in the air. “I am such a bully. I love hurting other people and enforcing my ideologies on them by the sound of the gun. But how different are you?”

  The Chessmaster rubbed the left side of his mustache and approached Samson. He could see the man had already made six moves, one move away from a checkmate, one move away from drinking the seventh cup and getting poisoned.

  “You think I am just a lowlife like you?” the Chessmaster said.

  Samson laughed. “What else are you? Just another madman, thinking the world is not enough of a price for his ego.”

  The Chessmaster reached for the knight on the chessboard and made the move. It was an easy one in his book, though not expected by any of his spectators.

>   Samson didn’t bother. He reached for his poisoned drink. “My men will slice you to pieces after I die, Chessmaster.”

  Before he gulped, the Chessmaster gripped his wrist. “You have no idea who I am. You have no idea why I am doing this. All you are is a cockroach of a human being; a parasite, spreading chaos in the world and making it a terrible place.”

  “And again, how different can you be?” Samson asked.

  “I am the world’s salvation,” the Chessmaster said and forced the drink down the dictator’s throat.

  The dictator dropped next to his table in an instant. The world broadcasting the scene, showing him wriggling and writhing before his death.

  The Chessmaster turned and faced the camera. “I just killed another world leader. Don’t think I won’t go killing more. And let me tell you this: every one of you is responsible for finding Alice and the Pillar now. Find them and bring them back to me, or your world leaders will not be saved.”

  The words echoed the right way in the Chessmaster’s head. He demonstrated people’s worst fears and knew they would cooperate immediately. His message should have had the desired effect, but then his assistant pointed at the news on TV talking about what just happened.

  To the Chessmaster’s surprise, people were leaving their houses searching for Alice and the Pillar. But not because they feared him. On the contrary—they had just declared their respect for the Chessmaster killing one of the world’s cruelest dictators.

  It all left the Chessmaster bewildered. He sensed that warmth in his heart, the kind of warmth that had left him years ago. People suddenly believed he was their savior. He’d killed the world leader that most of them wanted dead already. Not all of them, of course, but enough people to help him catch Alice and the Pillar.

  But the Chessmaster, being the dark being he was, also wasn’t fond of people’s love. He didn’t like to feel empathy or being admired. He’d transcended such weak emotions long ago. He needed to breathe anger and talk in vengeful syllables, or he’d weaken before completing his mission. The one he’d been planning since the fourteenth of January, 1898.