Enter the Clockworld

by Jared Mandani

  “Ummm,” Diego said. “This part is kinda problematic. You mean you’re going to write, like, with your hands?”

  “With what else, my butt?” Susan sneered at him.

  “What are you going to write with then?” Ben asked.

  Susan smirked again and pulled out an old battered set of cosmetic paints and brushes.

  “This part is not a problem,” she said. “Now paper, yes, I admit it’s not easy to procure these days. Don’t get me wrong though. I’m not using an electronic medium for this. I don’t want some metal dummy trumpeting at my door, and then some electronic judge presenting me with a piece of my code pulled from the gadget I used.”

  “But this is not a hack job,” Ben started.

  “A hack job or not, programming of any kind without a license is outlawed in the Wakey-Wakey.” Susan fixed her tinfoil cap. “Which means I draw it up for you, then you scan it, then we burn the paper, and you can explain to them how this piece of code materialized in your head all you want. They’ll never trace it back to me, and you’ll never prove I showed it to you. So. Where do we get paper? Any ideas?”

  “I’ve got a piece actually.” Ben pulled out the printed piece on the clockwork Animatron device and looked at it with doubt. “I’m not sure I can burn this one though. I need it.”

  “No deal then,” Susan said, putting her battered baseball cap back on over the tinfoil hat. “Either you find me a piece of real paper, something antique that burns well, or there’s nothing I can do for you.”

  “Wait.” Ben scratched his head. “I’d go over to this Archive place, ask them for another printer sheet, or maybe request some bit of info they’d print out for me, so we could use the other side… Except, I dunno. Last time I went, there were some people waiting for me.”

  “People?” Diego raised his eyebrows.

  “They looked like a gang,” Ben said.

  “What do you mean, a gang?” Diego asked. “Crime is even more antique than paper is. Where the hell does one find a gang these days? I’d join.”

  “Crime is antique,” Susan agreed. “Except when it’s sanctioned. How did these people look?”

  “Well,” Ben stalled. “Like punks, really. I mean, sort of like the Sex Pistols maybe, or some other ancient punk rock band. Mohawks and all. Except they wore matching long coats. And one of them, I think he had a knife.”

  “Ha!” Susan clapped her hands. “Told you so. Matching uniforms. It was them.”

  “Them who?” Diego asked her.

  “Just them.” She shrugged. “You start digging, they come for you. You do something they didn’t intend you to, they come for you. If they can’t just knock you out with sonotech, they pull some dirty trick on you. A knife? Unlikely. A shocker, maybe. Something to take you out so they can search you in peace, or take you somewhere and lock you up.”

  “Okay,” Ben said. “Look, I’m not really in the mood to be scared of someone unidentified, going by the name of ‘them’. I mean, my life is getting more interesting by the day. I sorta-kinda like it.”

  “Not just your life,” Susan said. “Big things are happening now, out of sight. Perhaps the time for big changes has finally come.”

  “You don’t look too happy about it though,” Diego noted.

  “I don’t,” she agreed. “Because I’ve lived in times boring and in times interesting. And the Chinese are right, as far as I can tell you.”

  “Chinese?” Diego looked puzzled.

  “May you live in interesting times,” Susan explained. “An old Chinese curse. Means something like ‘may your life become hell’.”

  “Oh,” Diego said. “Well, my today’s hell doesn’t look any different from my yesterday’s hell, and luckily, it’s not that bad. I mean, I listen to hard rock and heavy metal. I like hellish things. Demons and — ”

  “Your friend started to notice though,” she said, interrupting Diego and turning to Ben. “Didn’t you?”

  “I wish I’d never crossed paths with this…” Ben wanted to say “this Baron”, but this implied he wouldn’t have met Daphne in the first place, as she was supposed to spy on the fellow or something. So, in the end, Ben just waved the problem away. He said: “Alright then. You two, wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  The drizzle outside turned to some kind of a sizzle, the raindrops dense but so tiny they didn’t patter on the roofs and your head, but sort of boiled and steamed on top of everything: though the water was autumn-cold, the air was colder still. Ben cringed, then sneezed and took off. He quickly trotted across the road and hid under the broken overpass where lowlifes stood and sat huddled around their slowly pulsating weatherpods.

  The hobo with VR glasses wasn’t there, and Ben decided to abstain from asking about him. He picked another homeless fellow instead, an old man smoking an ancient plastic vape pen with a pineapple-flavored liquid inside, sucking on it so hard the liquid gurgled and bubbled.

  “Hey,” Ben said. “Excuse me! Do you by any chance have some paper around here?”

  The man’s eyes were vacant, and he regarded Ben like an empty spot.

  “Cardboard, perhaps? I’ll pay,” Ben added quickly.

  The old man came alive instantly, and gave him a wide yellow-toothed smile.

  “Cabboad?” he offered. “’Cos we got cabboad. ‘Xpensive tho.”

  “No problem.” Ben shook his head. “Just name your price.”

  The man did, and they shook on the transaction. Then the pineapple-smelling hobo lifted his ample bottom and pulled a dirty piece of cardboard from underneath him.

  “’Ere,” the hobo said. “Good as new.”

  The piece wasn’t new at all, and it had a defunct shoe company logo printed across. Still, it felt to Ben like Lady Luck had finally smiled upon him.

  “Thank you!” He grabbed the piece and hid it carefully under his coat. “Thank you very much!”

  Back in the shop, Susan and Diego were drinking yet another drone-delivered cup of tea.

  “You’d best buy some tinfoil as well,” the granny told Ben, eyeing him over the cup.

  “I will,” he said and pulled out the cardboard. “Next time I will, I swear.”

  She nodded, then picked up a cosmetic pencil.

  “Okay, so,” Susan said. “First we have to deal with fire.”

  Chapter 7: Calculus

  First we had to deal with fire, of course. As a welcome measure, the Royal Dungeons — or rather, their secondary access, which lies underground — opens with a long stretch of a stony corridor equipped with blowtorch-like Inferno Traps, triggered by a single pressure plate in the beginning of the course, then switching on and off the way none shall pass forth, only back, and still get burned.

  It would be easier to just drown the entire corridor in burning tar of course, working pretty much like the thing I used to defeat that Teutonic projectile-hurling walker. Then again, tar has to be replaced manually as well, which takes very long, and it won’t really stop a watertight armored clockwork device without people in it, like, say, a mechanical dog I crafted this morning and brought with me here.

  “Switch pattern,” I commanded, bent over my wound-up creature, its arithmometer exposed and ready for programming. This involved flipping a single switch back and forth, in binary pattern, with a super-handy feature of pulling another level to reset the thing completely and start from scratch. All in all, the procedure resembled the preparation of a very complex magic trick, the tedious routine of stuffing hypothetical pigeons and silks in a seemingly infinite number of hidden chambers and locking them up in the correct order, or at least an order which was supposed to be correct, the actual thing still to be seen during the grand performance.

  “One-one-zero-one-one-zero-one-one,” Tranh said, and I flipped the three-position switch back and forth according to the numbers he gave me.

  Yes, I had to bring Tranh. No way would I have remembered all the numbers alone. I could hardly even re
member my own ID number to be honest — I have it on a card in my clockwork wallet, something I always have to check when someone wants to know my personal Clockworld ID.

  These Asians though, their memory for numbers is incredible. I really hoped he wasn’t a spy for Divine Kingdom though. On the other hand, even if he was, this little operation of ours was anti-Albion, so I guess it was okay for Tranh to come along.

  “One-zero-one-one-zero-zero-one-one-zero-zero-one-one,” he told me next.

  “One-zero-one-one?” I asked. “You mean there’s only one short window at this point? I don’t remember it from the map. You sure?”

  “One-zero-zero-one-one,” Tranh said patiently, and just on time, too, as I nearly broke the entire program by missing that one digit. This chore was hellish indeed. The only thing that really kept me going was a simple calculus: if the whole operation was so hard to carry out, chances were no one had bothered to take measures to prevent it or stop us once we were in.

  So basically this other entrance to the dungeons greeted its visitors with a number of fire traps mounted along the corridor, not dispensing burning tar but rather emitting jets of burning green gas in patterns designed so that after you’re on fire, you’ll want to run back rather than plunge on. The traps themselves used the same principle as ordinary gas lanterns found on the streets of Queenstanding — in fact, they were made to look like gas lanterns, two rows of copper dragon skulls on both corridor walls ready to spit fire at an unsuspecting visitor. In Clockworld, everything’s honest. The fire won’t only make you itch here. It burns you almost the way it hurts, and then, after a while, it despawns you.

  Unless you’re a mechanical dog. And even then, your gears and metallic parts expand slightly, which screws up the mechanics, which meant the dog had to be protected from fire.

  This involved some Alchemy of course. In Clockworld, you not only learn basic Newtonian physics and such; you also learn simplified chemistry presented to you as Alchemy. For instance, the folks mixing up that green flammable gas or preparing sticky tar for the anti-siege canisters had to be Alchemists. Luckily, you don’t have to be one to find a single substance that cools things down and helps you fight the heat, which is the local liquid nitrogen. We all had it on hand, shiny metal retorts full of it available to every Journeyman working on defensive systems of new Knightwalker armors to be assembled. So yes, all I had to do was nick some liquid nitrogen from my new workshop, along with a few other items.

  Except, of course, such a small and weak mechanical creature, a clockwork dog, cannot carry a lot of this coolant; it must be dispensed carefully, the influx synchronous to the waves of heat. This is why the only retort of liquid nitrogen I mounted on the back of my mechanical dog had this binary valve controlled by the dog’s arithmometer brain. And now all we had to do was let the brain know how to react to the row of Inferno Traps playing out as it ran through them.

  “One-zero-zero-one-zero-zero-one-zero-one,” Tranh said, watching me flip the programming switch carefully according to his words. “Okay, this seems to be all with the fire. What’s next?”

  “Acid,” I said.

  Here I must note that Clockworld’s basic chemistry, known as Alchemy, was pretty vague about acids. Same as liquid nitrogen wasn’t really called liquid nitrogen (I didn’t bother to look up its alchemic name, bet it’s called Liquid Frost or something), so an acid was just an acid, merely green and bubbling goo eating up flesh and metal alike. Acid dealt a lot of corrosive damage to things and creatures.

  “The way it works is there’s a few strings crossing the corridor,” I said. “And they’re placed the way you simply cannot get across every single one of them. At least one of them will be touched, and it makes the floor tiles collapse underneath, and the green goo comes pouring in.”

  Tranh let out a whistle. “Sounds bad.”

  “What’s good,” I said. “Is that it isn’t poured into a single long pool, but rather fills a number of square consecutive pools, namely five. A big pool of acid, we can do nothing about. One pool of acid though, one-fifth of the entire volume…”

  “So you’ll want to what, neutralize it?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Besides a vial of liquid nitrogen, my doggie carries half a barrel of… guess what.”

  “Dunno.” Tranh shook his head. “I’m not a chemist, you know. Something alkaline?”

  “Milk.”

  “What do you mean, milk?”

  “Just regular milk,” I told him. “From a cow.”

  “Does that neutralize acid?” Tranh asked me, eyebrows raised.

  “Here in Clockworld, it does, apparently,” I said.

  I found it earlier while browsing through materials — no, not even in Alchemy, but, surprisingly, in Galvanism. See, every substance in Clockworld comes with a little card explaining its properties. Most of these substance cards have tags on them: Acidic, Metallic, Saline, and so on. So of course Acid, the green bubbling corrosive goo, was Acidic, no big surprise. The point is, a glass of Lemon Juice is also Acidic but it’s not Acid, see? You cannot use it to corrode armor. You can use it to build a Galvanic battery though.

  Next I looked up Basic Alchemy. To my great joy, any Alkaline substance, when mixed with any Acidic substance, formed a Neutral substance. Yes, it was that simple. So the next thing I did was look up an Alkaline substance which would be widely available and easy for me to obtain without arousing much suspicion. I didn’t expect Milk to turn up, this I confess, and yet I ran into it straight off. And yes, Milk could be used to neutralize Acid — to the dismay and disapproval of your regular Wakeworld chemists, I’m sure. Good thing no real chemists were left in the Wakeworld by now.

  “So how do we proceed?” Tranh asked me. No raised eyebrows, no loud expressions of disdain towards the simplified chemistry. Gotta love these Asians.

  “This wasn’t easy to prearrange in fact,” I said. “We employ six fuses for this part. They all burn out one after another, each one exposing the next, and each one attached to a certain IF trigger of this little thing’s copper brain.”

  By now, you should see why I needed a programmer. Even explaining these things could give you a headache, not to mention composing this tangled symphony of zeroes and ones which will make a correct fuse burn and pop just at the right time, and trigger another binary IF just when you need it.

  “So we actually use the last three of them to navigate the dog around after the Inferno Corridor ends. This will make it jump the first three basins of acid without any exposure. The fourth basin will get it only slightly, maybe corroding the tips of its limbs a bit, which is something we keep in mind as we calculate our further movement pattern…”

  “And the final fuse will detonate just as the last corrosive trap opens up beneath the dog.” Tranh clapped his hands, understanding. “Which releases the milk.”

  “Which releases the milk,” I echoed. “And, in a moment, the corrosive goo becomes… well, I have no idea what, some new liquid which is Neutral, and this is all that matters, really.”

  “Wow,” Tranh said. “How did you people even come up with all this?”

  “I had some assistance for math,” I admitted. “So I only had to solve the mechanical part.”

  So we punched in some more zeroes and ones, Tranh quoting the sequence from memory and me flipping the switch back and forth. And we never had to pull the reset lever, not once, I swear it. Tranh spat out those digits like a machine himself, and my confidence in our successful break-in grew with each click of the binary switch.

  “What’s next?” was all he asked, once we were done with the acid segment.

  “Electricity,” I said. “Now, the thing is, my doggie is immune to electricity. I mean, it’s conductive, copper and iron and all, but it doesn’t employ any electric or even magnetic details, so, immune. I have a tag card to prove it, right here.”

  “But?”

  “But we need to disable this line of traps as well, f
or us to follow safely right after. We are not immune to it, as far as I know.”

  Tranh took a moment to digest the information, then asked: “How do you do it then?”

  I smirked, unable to hold back. “Tinfoil,” I said.

  “Tinfoil?”

  “Yes! Ribbons of tinfoil to short-circuit the hell out of these babies.”

  It had to be launched quite precisely though. The problem was, you can only pack so much tinfoil into your mechanical dog before the construction grows bulky, and if you try to launch a big enough piece of tinfoil through the air, it will just flutter back down without travelling much.

  So my solution was based on this throwing weapon thingy called bola — Australian perhaps? I didn’t bother to look up the origin. The idea was every piece of tinfoil we launch was sort of like this long triangle, like an ancient toy called a kite, with small copper weights attached to its every corner. The weight on the sharpest tip of the triangle is the heaviest; it’s the part of our tinfoil kite that actually has all the momentum on launch, and its mission is to pull the entire thing forward as far as needed. Then, as the tinfoil catches on something, it’ll send the weights spinning and wrapping all around it, making my metallic kite tangle with whatever device it runs into. Given the construction of those lightning traps, there’s hardly a chance any of them will escape my tinfoil wrappers. We doubled their numbers just in case, and we would have tripled them if the weight limitations would have allowed us to.

  “Okay, so it means you release every corner of every triangle in turns, right? And one of them goes with maximum acceleration, and the other two are only meant to follow, right?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Well, I had someone to work all the math stuff out for us. All we have to do is punch in the correct zeroes and ones.”

  “Wow.” Tranh furrowed his brow, recalling the digits. “I wonder how he even managed to solve all this.”

  “Some stuff called parallel Turing machines,” I said. “I wouldn’t touch it with a yard-long stick if I were you. Or you risk going crazy, and we’ll need to salvage one piece of these to make you a tinfoil hat. And it was a she, not a he.”