Table of Contents
Chapter 1: A Kid from the Future
Chapter 2: Sequence Interrupted
Chapter 3: The Heat
Chapter 4: Crowd Control
Chapter 5: All In
Chapter 6: Tinfoil
Chapter 7: Calculus
Chapter 8: Infiltrators
Chapter 9: Necromancy
Chapter 10: Order Violated
Chapter 11: No Escape
Chapter 12: Providence
ENTER THE CLOCKWORLD
Dreamweb: Book 1
By Jared Mandani
Enter the Clockworld is © 2018 by Jared Mandani
This book is a work of fiction, and any similarity to persons, institutions, or places living, dead, or otherwise still shambling is entirely coincidental.
Thanks for purchasing this book. Happy reading!
Chapter 1: A Kid from the Future
This story begins on Sunday night, November 22, 2099, the night everything went down the drain. That night, I had a dream date—my second one—with the most beautiful girl I’d ever met.
I always wake up to the Moon. Maybe it has something to do with the sonolight on the inside of my sleeping nook, the thing that shines into my eyes to send me headfirst into the land of dreams. It looks like a milky white lamp. And you know how these sonotransmitters work; they knock you out so fast you fall asleep like a little kid — fall straight down through your mattress and into cool, engulfing depths. That’s when I usually see the Moon, as if from underwater, and that’s how I know I’m awake once more.
In the future, we don’t really sleep. Our dreams are lucid and consistent, and we live through them as if they were a different life, one deemed so much more desirable by most of the people I know. In the future, we don’t live much. We mostly dream.
When I saw the familiar blotch in front of me, the distorted silver coin of the Moon as seen from under a layer of turquoise waters of some kind of ocean, I did what I instinctively do by now. I swam for the Moon, the salty water bubbling through my nostrils, the pleasant chill enveloping my entire body, giving me goose bumps, making my entrance almost ecstatic.
I’ve heard of people for whom it’s a mundane feeling, waking up here. It’s like someone switches off the lights for them — click! — and then nothing. Then — click! — the lights are on again, and you’re in a different world. To me, it always begins with this water sequence, and the Moon.
I broke the surface in just a couple seconds, found the sandy ocean floor, and rode the tide until I could walk. A stripe of yellow sand stretched on through the darkness in front of me, lit by the orange sodium lights of a parking lot at a distance.
It had to be a city beach somewhere in… America or Canada, no doubt about this part. I looked around, at the dark skyline of towering prisms and spires, a breathtaking vista of skyscrapers gleaming in the night. The ocean breeze was rustling a newspaper trapped in the sand. I checked the headline. A bank robbery, several gang shootouts. I must have been somewhere in New York.
The year was 1990. This girl I was about to meet, Daphne, she knew how to surprise me. She warned me our second date was going to be retro, so I was preparing for something medieval, maybe even a fantasy place — what to expect from a girl, right? I wasn’t prepared for NYC circa 1990s — a hundred years back. Well, it had to count as retro, I suppose.
My feet sinking in cool sand, I started walking towards a big striped umbrella I noticed up ahead. A lone candle in a small glass jar was burning in the sand in front of it, its little flame sputtering and dancing in the wind. My things turned out to be packed into a big drab duffel, military-style. The robots, they must have expected me to hunt here, not date.
In the future, we don’t have to do anything. Everything is prepared by computers and done by robots. Real life, virtual life, doesn’t matter — there’s always a computer brain toiling in the background, and all kinds of bots, mostly simple, sleek, and non-intrusive, to arrange the scene before your grand entrance and to mop up the place after you leave. It feels passive-aggressive sometimes, this robot care. Like they want us erased and gone. Most of the people I know hate robots. Especially my father. He was born in the world where people tied their laces for themselves, and no one complained.
I picked up a soft and fragrant towel from the drab olive duffel, rubbed my body and hair dry, then checked out the attire prepared for me. A pair of old jeans. A pair of heavy leather boots. A coat, also studded leather. Goth stuff. Underneath the rags, a brand-new Uzi, all black and slick, and a couple of magazines for it, wrapped in oily paper.
Then, there was also an early cellular phone, truly ancient and horrible. It would be enough to say such a thing wasn’t called “cellular” because you swallowed it and it updated your brainware with full-presence calls, but for some other reason unknown to me. It wasn’t even electronic from what I could tell; more like electric, without as much as a proper 2D screen. And I had to look up Daphne’s number and actually memorize it so I could punch it in.
We folks from the future are not good with memorizing numbers. Or names. Or facts. Or adding them up to find out something new. We don’t recall things in the future; we look things up on the Web by thinking about them, and then forget once more.
In New York, back in 1990, this mental reference guide didn’t work of course, so I had to punch in the phone number, cringing as I tried to recall all the seven digits of it — insane!
“Hello?” Daphne’s voice sounded against a backdrop of deafening static. “Hey Ben, is it you?”
“Hey Buff. Is it me? Hope so. Unless you’re to date someone else tonight. Where —”
“Stay put, I’m gonna pick you up, I see your location marker.”
“Oh, you’re with radar?” I said. “Perfect. By the way.”
“What?” she asked.
“There’s an Uzi in my pack — are we going hunting?”
Daphne guffawed. “No! No, that’s not my concept of romance, no!”
“Okay.” I scratched the back of my head. “I’ll leave it here then. It’s too heavy to carry around anyway.”
“What happened to the men, huh? Hey look, light something up for me, alright, Ben? It’s so dark I cannot see, and this thing has no night vision — not even a searchlight, can you imagine?”
“Which thing?”
“You’ll see! It’s a surprise. Light something up around your place, and I’ll be there in a few minutes. Or five. Or ten. Over.”
“Over,” I said, feeling stupid. Was this a voice command for the phone to shut up? Was this a tradition of 1990s? Were you supposed to end your talks like this, instead of “see you,” or “sigma,” as we say in 2099? I had no idea. I could have looked it up during the next day, but, as I told you, we folks of the future are bad at memorizing things, so I would forget.
“A signal, a signal,” I kept muttering to myself as I pulled the pair of jeans, the t-shirt, the jacket, and the boots on, jumping in one place to look around the beach, all the while. It was too dark. All I could see was the white surf as it whispered and closed in, then retracted and left a strip of reflective wet sand behind. The Moon still shone above it, full and glorious, yet not bright enough to see past your nose.
I picked up the candle in its glass, which was, as it was supposed to be, scalding hot — through the sense dampeners it felt like holding a piece of hot summer sunlight in my hand.
My heavy leather boots sinking in the sand, I held the candle up and looked through my things once more. Duffel, oily paper, Uzi, and extra mags. Nothing else.
I thought of grabbing the submachine gun for a moment, of using it to signal Daphne, but then it could have attracted local gan
gs looking to protect their turf, and there would be a mess. Not a good way to start a date. So I left the gun where it was. I’m not good at shooting anyway. My world is free from crime, watched by drones, computers, and robots. People still die in the future, but they die of old age, of disease, and of self-neglect.
So I went on until the sand grew more packed and solid underfoot, and then was finally replaced by the cracked black asphalt of a vast parking lot, the wind playing with another newspaper stuck to the windshield of an expensive open car, the only car parked anywhere around here. A Porsche? A Ferrari? I had no idea. I only know motorbikes because my father used to own the last motorcycle workshop in the world. He taught me what I know. Now I own it, but that’s a story for another day.
The car was locked; no keys in vicinity, its hull most likely rigged with an alarm as well.
I shrugged and smashed the glass with the candle inside against the plush interior of the car. It popped up like a little Molotov cocktail. The little flame quickly gave birth to a couple more little flames. They hissed, growing ever stronger. Soon they were too bright to look at, and the black smoke was billowing straight into my face. All the heat made me just a bit too sweaty — on your second date with an elegant girl like Daphne, you wouldn’t want to be sweating like a pig. Daphne was French. Or German. I wasn’t sure what the difference was.
So then a huge fountain of burning fuel shot up from the back of the car, and smaller geysers of flame followed it from under the car’s wheels, and the hood, from everywhere at once, and then…
KABLAM! The cool sports cabriolet exploded into a huge fireball, its burning debris raining down all around me, a tire engulfed in flames nearly hitting me in the face as I rose up and flew back a bit, pushed by the shockwave, my skin sizzling and crawling under summer heat. Blue flames danced all over the left side and the front of my jacket, and the left leg of my jeans was also ablaze.
My clothes, luckily, were only flammable for special FX purposes, so the little flames withered and died in the next second or two. The roaring echo of the explosion still resounded and rolled towards distant skyscrapers, and the whole patch of asphalt around me was now peppered with big and small fires.
Before the echo died out, I heard a thonk-thonk-thonking sound from up high, and quite soon I saw a cross made up of a few lights — red and blue, and white, and more white — drifting above the New York City skyline and floating towards me. Soon the helicopter was right overhead. It lowered itself on the parking lot away from the fires, so I ran towards it, my clothes still smoking but the wind from the helicopter blades quickly dissipating the smells.
“Wow, you know how to party, boy!” Daphne said, throwing the helicopter cabin door aside so I could climb in. As I sat down into the deep plush bucket seat and closed the door, she pushed the throttle and we went up, then higher and higher still until my flame beacon became a shimmering spot down below and the towering prisms of glass seemed as close to us as the beach now was.
“You want a tour around the place?” Daphne asked. “Could be the last truly twentieth century New York place left, ever!”
“I heard they wanted to shut it down, this entire attraction,” I shouted over the thumping rotors. “Too much crime. Violence. Remember that maniac who hunted people in here? You know they don’t want us to bring something like that into our world.”
Daphne looked at me, all goth and grey-haired, dressed in a witchy hat and something Victorian; could have been a widow’s garb. She knew how to look properly vamp.
“Infect our world with what, crime and violence? Like it’s a plague from our past?” she shouted back. We hovered closer and closer to the towers now and suddenly found ourselves dodging their mirrored surfaces. She killed the throttle a bit, and our bird lowered down, the level of noise in the cabin diminishing. Holding the yoke firmly in her gloved hands, Daphne continued: “But oh, that’s what people come here for, isn’t it? It’s not really about learning history. It’s about learning crime! Learning weapons! Learning night life!”
“They rather want us to practice our survival skills in some cute pastoral place, I guess,” I said. “Free from sin. Government folks are a bit like people of Faith.”
Faith, or the Church of the New Faith and… Awakening I guess — these are our Luddites, people who hate the digital world and want to go back to analog, and this means no computers and no robots. The problem is, they’re also a union of three monotheistic churches of old, who, by the end of the twenty-first century seemed to finally agree they have the same Adversary: computers and bots, their cold digital minds taking over the world. These people believe the only thing standing between them and the ultimate doom is their Faith. The people of Faith supposedly remain completely offline.
“Many people have to choose Faith because they have nothing else left,” Daphne told me then, holding the yoke and flying our bird through the maze of shiny glass towers, the red beacons on top of them winking at us.
I nodded. “My father almost sympathizes with them,” I said. “He likes the Luddite part of the deal. He won’t use computers either, can you believe it?”
“I know.” It was her turn to nod. “He doesn’t like people of the Church because they reject immortality and forbid it to anyone they can even remotely control. And he’s old, huh?”
“Oh, my father is against being digitized as well. Sometimes.” I sighed. The fact was, the old man was changeable. One day he would tell me how no man must live even as long as he lived, not to mention forever. The next day he would moan about his pension money and tell me how he wished to be digitized sooner, before he got a few years older and feebler than now.
Yes. We’ve conquered death in the future. Sorta-kinda.
I told my father, “Like I have enough money to pay for the procedure anyway.”
With how business is going, he will be lucky if he gets a decent cremation. And real medicine, it’s for the rich. Too many people in the future, not that many doctors or that much medicine left, and the robots cannot save you from getting old. Or maybe they just don’t care. People are a cheap commodity these days.
“You know, Buff, I’d rather not talk about it during a date night,” I said.
I sighed and turned away to look outside the helicopter cabin.
When your body dies in the future, you still die. But if you’re rich enough, your relatives get a virtual copy of you, one that can go on living in the Dreamweb and even call you on the phone. Digital Citizens, also known as Dead Creeps, have been proven by many complex AI-invented tests to correlate with the deceased individual they represent at 99.92 percent. It was this 0.08 percent that caused all the ruckus among the people of Faith. The Church often arranged all kinds of performances, both real and virtual, demanding the governments ban the procedure, or worse, unplug the Digital Citizens and permanently erase their abominable, soulless personalities. People of the Church always shout. Their protest signs are identical, full of deep Faith wisdoms like 8% is Soul.
As I told you, we all have problems with math in the future, and those of us who refuse the help of computers suffer the worst. Then again, at least these Faith freaks want something. Do something. The Wakeworld is no longer the home of things like motivation and initiative. For many people, it’s the place where you must spend all your dregs of energy just to stay alive and awake for a while — do your time in everyday reality. This part of the future, the mundane Samsara, no one seems to want anymore.
“You also don’t like it?” Daphne asked.
“Don’t like what?” I turned away from the window.
“Uncomfortable silences.”
“Umm,” I said. “I’m sorry. What?”
We were sailing between two big towers of glass, then above a big highway full of cars, both of its directions packed tight yet moving incessantly, a river of yellow, a river of red.
“It’s a quote from one of the movies this place is related to,” Daphne said. “Sorry. It’
s for my educational points. Whenever I use a quote that fits — boy, I hope I got it right! — they pay me a little bit of money, and I swear I’ll hit the golden level one day and buy me a mansion somewhere around here.”
Yes, this is what our education is like now. Games. Small earnings. Nothing too hard. Something to occupy yourself with while you taste hedonistic pleasures, to keep you out of drowsy oblivion, away from the abyss of black melancholia, which is the number one cause of death in our wonderful world of the future — the world without conflict, without crime, without real work, a bland and tasteless everyday world devoid of meaning, purpose, and destiny.
No mansions in the future. No houses, even. Housing is a major problem. Even rich people live in huge robot-constructed project buildings of grey concrete. It’s all about practicality first, comfort second.
I checked my golden watch. We still had four hours together. Four hours in New York of the 1990s, amongst criminals and lowlifes and all the shady types of the era in one boiling cauldron of a metropolis.
And we had a helicopter. And we were flying straight towards the docks.
“So, why do you come here?” I asked. “It’s not what I’d call a traditional dating place, I mean.”
“You and I happen to like the same places, remember?” she said, and then nodded at the magnificent panorama. “The city that never sleeps. Isn’t it a perfect metaphor? I miss the place. I’d visit the real thing if I could.”
I knew what she meant. I’ve never been past my project cluster, literally. In the future, we rarely go further than down a couple blocks to where your nearest food dispenser is. If you’re totally modern, you order pizza and never leave home. Pizza is delivered by drones that enter through your window; there’s a special drone hatch that opens automatically. Groceries also. Anything, in fact, except it costs money of course, and we don’t have a lot of money where I come from.
Physical travels cost beyond any reasonable price; only a few thousand or so chosen people still travel the world these days. Especially now, since they stopped making gasoline. So I’ve never been to NYC of course.
Enter the Clockworld Page 1