“Interesting,” Tranh replied. “Okay, you ready?”
We punched in the complex intertwining sequence for the Galvanic stretch of our trap course. It was so long I nearly drifted off while flipping the binary switch back and forth on his command, as far as it’s possible while already being asleep. I kept thinking about Susan and her silly headgear. And her words, about how we’re being watched by someone even now, as we lie in our sleeping nooks paralyzed by sonowaves, a mix of light and sound making us lucid-dream of whatever a computer tells us to.
What if it wasn’t just a computer though? What if someone — them — got hold of what the computer transmitted to us?
What if someone — them — had full access to my brain right now?
The thought was disturbing and probably pointless. I tried to concentrate on binary digits instead, and realized I could make a fatal mistake any second.
“Look,” I told Tranh. “Maybe you could enter the rest? I think I’m getting tired, and my hand is no longer all that reliable, you know.”
“Okay,” he said, and instantly kneeled beside my mechanical dog, snapping the handle with the precision of an automaton. It was really a wonder, watching him at work.
“So what do we have next?” Tranh asked me, still punching in the super-complex remainder of the Galvanic sequence. “Something mechanical, right?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “The final obstacle course.”
“So what’s the trick with it?”
It was nothing too complex, this part. It was a common ancient design going as far as perhaps Prince of Persia — a row of clasping and unclasping jaws of steel meant to snap you in two, after you’ve been burned, and corroded, and electrocuted, and still somehow alive and refusing to turn back. It wasn’t hard to disable the thing, either. The traps in this part of the course weren’t autonomous — they had to be extremely well coordinated so there was no way you could just run or waltz through all six of them without taking a scratch. All of these metal jaws were interconnected, a part of the same big mechanism hidden above the ceiling or under the floor. If one of them was to be blocked, the others would close the same instant.
“But what if there’s more than one intruder?” Tranh asked, an eyebrow cocked. “What if I was to block one of them, and you’d just squeeze through after they stop?”
“Well,” I told him. “A squishy human body won’t really block any of these things. If they snap you in two, they’ll just go on, bloodied perhaps, but that’s it.”
“So all we have to do is make your dog get busted by the first pair of jaws?”
“Nah, they thought of this too of course,” I said. “The cycle is arranged the way that if something blocks any pair of jaws except for the last one, the stretch will be impassable.”
“So what our dog has to do is…”
“Pass through the first five traps using its machine speed and calculated reactions.” I sighed. “Then sacrifice itself while going through the last pair, and become, technically speaking, a jack?”
“A jack?” Tranh looked at me, completely lost. “As in, a person?”
“As in, this device that was used to raise a car above the ground. Yeah?”
He still looked at me without any understanding. Cars were old news. Stone Age old.
“Well,” I said. “It’s easier shown than explained; see this thick long screw that serves as my doggie’s back?”
“Yeah,” he replied.
“Alright, so there are two clamps, basically two thick pieces of steel, able to spin up and down this screw. One of them behind the dog’s head, forming its shoulders. Another, well, in the back.”
“So when your dog is caught between this last pair of jaws…”
“It basically sheds all its remaining parts except for one last wound heavy spring, which we keep in reserve until then, and this long screw. And the two clamps of steel,” I said.
“And then it makes the clamps move outwards to open up the jaws that caught it?”
“Leaving the path open for the two of us squishy intruders,” I said.
Tranh sat by the crouching dog, which was now ready to dart forward on a twist of a handle, and examined it with a newfound admiration. I watched him, proud for my work and secretly terrified it could just go off the rails and break down at the first stretch of the booby-trapped corridor.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me enter the remaining piece.”
“No, no, no.” Tranh stopped me by raising a hand. “It shall be my pleasure.”
He quickly punched in the zeroes and ones that remained and cleared the way for me.
“You turn the handle,” he said. “Please. It’s yours.”
“Okay,” I said, crouching by the mechanical dog myself. “If you folks believe in any gods back in your place, it’s probably a nice time for a prayer.”
“I’m a Buddhist.” Tranh shook his head. “We don’t pray to gods.”
“I was just kidding,” I said. “No gods in here anyway, except for computers, eh?”
Then I remembered Susan talking about them and shuddered. What if I was wrong and there were gods in here, or at least humans disguised as gods? What if their influence went as far as the Wakeworld?
What if they were watching us right now?
I shook my head to make the pestering thoughts go away before I was going to need a tinfoil cap of my own.
“Get readyyy. Three, two, one… zero!” I said, and twisted the launch handle, even though the timing didn’t really matter.
The handle unblocked the spring, and my mechanical dog came to life.
“Move out of its way!” I shouted the late words of warning. “Don’t block it; don’t slow it down, Tranh! You'll mess up the programming!”
My panic was unneeded of course, and it had zero effect on Tranh, who slid out of the dog’s way with the grace of a samurai. My super-intricate device sprung to its feet, emitted a buzzing sound for a while (which was expected), and then darted off, clinking and clanking along the dark corridor (which was also expected).
“It’s working!” Tranh turned to me, his face a mask of wonder. “Ben, it’s working!”
“Sure is!” I muttered, also blushing, my cheeks hot. “I can’t believe it, but it does work, yo!”
I wasn’t even joking when I said this. Those fights in the Pit were nothing compared to this. Watching my doggie trundle along the corridor was exhilarating all by itself, me being a proud magician on stage, and the anticipation, and the ever-present slight paranoia. What if we missed a single digit in the sequence?! What happens then?
And then the gas lamps on the walls, those peacefully smoldering dragon skulls made of copper, suddenly revealed their secret identity, becoming a row of Inferno Traps, all breathing green fire, in pairs and one by one, interchanging in checkered patterns — Puff! Puff! Puff! The heat and the smell of burning gas slapped us in the face as we followed the dog — and then they dissolved in arctic cold! My doggie released the timed blue clouds of liquid nitrogen — Puff! Puff! Puff! — each one of them to shut up one of the traps right as it prepared to unleash its fury upon the mechanical intruder.
Every movement of my dog was very precise and direct — you could tell it was driven by an intricately programmed clockwork brain. We fell behind it, walking between two rows of frozen Inferno Traps in amazement, watching glossy condensate drip from the disabled dragon skulls.
“Man.” Tranh shook his head. “This is just incredible.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Good thing the laws of physics are so simple here. And chemistry. This liquid nitrogen, I think it’s called Frost Essence, or something like that.”
“All I’m worried about is that this Frost Essence defrosts before we pass them by,” Tranh said, casting a nervous glance at one of the frozen Inferno Traps as we walked past it.
“Nah.” I patted him on the shoulder. “It’s all simplified, as I said. A cloud of liquid nitrogen neutrali
zes all the fuel in one trap. These babies will have to be refueled now. Manually, by the guards.”
“I hope we won’t meet any of them.” Tranh shook his head again.
“Me too. I think we won’t. This passage is meant to be this way. Obscure and unguarded, nothing but traps. Let’s go.”
And so we went, listening to our mechanical dog clatter on somewhere ahead of us in the dark. Now, as the gas lamps on the walls revealed their true purpose and were disabled, the corridor was nearly pitch-black. We carefully made our way forward until we were stopped by the eerie greenish glow of the bubbling goo underfoot.
“These are the acid pools, five of them still bubbling away,” I said. “The dog did its job here as well.”
“How do we cross them though?” Tranh asked.
“Wait a second,” I said, unclasping the extra flagons of milk I brought with me on my belt. “Bombs away!”
I emptied my first flagon into the pool of acid, and a noxious cloud of greenish vapors instantly condensed above it. It wasn’t Poisonous though, this I had checked. But oh my, did it stink! Soon, the greenish goo in the first pool was gone, replaced by a murky fluid which smelled bad yet was fully Neutral, which meant safe to be treaded upon.
Thus we dealt with all of the remaining acid and moved on, past the burned-out Galvanic Traps chock-full of tinfoil. I’d been hearing the rhythmical thumping sound for a while now, or even feeling it, deep inside — and now the source of it finally became visible! A pair of clanging monstrosities of steel blocked and then unblocked the dark corridor up ahead, two grey slabs decorated with sharp triangular spikes, slamming into each other, then letting go and retracting. I swear there was even dried blood on the spikes, except I’m not sure if it was real or merely some painted-on texture meant to make the trap look deadlier.
My doggie was nowhere in sight, which meant our program so far had worked, well, like clockwork, and the mechanical thing had already started its series of jumps through the clamping steel jaws. As we approached the first pair, the two spiked slabs thumped into each other for one last time, then came to a full stop wide open, with a screech.
“Good dog,” I said, feeling a kind of sadness you’re supposed to feel after your intricate machine sacrifices itself and becomes a simple mechanical jack, stripped of every other detail.
We helped each other through the first pair of giant clamps and found the second pair stopped as well, just as expected. All six of them turned out to be open almost to the maximum, except the last one was propped apart by my trusty dog, stripped down to a thick steel corkscrew, two slabs of metal, a heavy spring… and the arithmometer still attached, its gleaming case visible underneath the spring.
“Weird,” I said. “Didn’t you program this thing to let go? It was the last IF operator, to be triggered when the thing was locked in place.”
“What for?” Tranh said. “This part seemed completely redundant to me. There is no harm in this arithmometer still being attached.”
“Umm, okay,” I replied. “Well, let’s go free my girlfriend then.”
The row of the lower cells was right ahead — and I knew upfront only one of them, the farthest one, would contain a prisoner, and this prisoner was going to be my Daphne.
I ran straight towards this heavy iron door, pulling out my set of lockpicks as I went. The locks of Clockworld weren’t as easy to open as police handcuffs in New York; there was an actual game of poking probes into the keyhole and finding a way to make the mechanism click a few times. But for my newly obtained Journeyman Mechanic skills, this crude iron device on her door was no match.
“Who is that?” I heard her voice as I struggled with the lock. “Ben? Is that you?”
“Yes,” I muttered. “Yes, it’s me!”
And then the door swung open, and Daphne was in my arms, and we hugged real tight, and kissed.
“Took you a while, eh?” she whispered in my ear.
“Sorry,” I said. “This whole thing wasn’t easy, you know.”
“Well, I’m glad it’s over,” Daphne said, holding my face in her hands.
“It is not,” Tranh’s voice, suspiciously changed, sounded behind me.
I turned around and saw he was not alone. On both sides of my fellow mechanic, two guards wearing Albion redcoat uniform were standing, and Tranh himself was now dressed as a guard. The other two men’s faces were impenetrable, and their eyes suspiciously Oriental.
“So you were a Pan Asian spy,” I said. “Now this is just incredible.”
Clang! Something heavy fell down in the corridor leading back the way we came.
“What was that?” Daphne asked me.
“There goes your dog, which I programmed to fold back after a while, trapping you here,” Tranh said. “Now your only way out is with our escort. As prisoners. I’m sure there are manacles within your cell, is that right? We’ll use them.”
He nodded to me and Daphne, and his two silent companions made a step towards us, making us retreat into her prison cell.
Her cell was small and damp, the light seeping through the only small barred window near the ceiling, one iron bar broken off. The only furniture was a straw cot found in a corner. Manacles and chains were in great abundance here, serving more like décor than something functional, yet functional they were. The two guardsmen proceeded to pry a couple of them off the damp masonry while Tranh stood watching us, a short Asian sword at his hand.
“I need to take a seat,” Daphne said, obviously dizzy from everything happening so fast.
“Stay where you are,” Tranh commanded, but she didn’t hear. She reeled and slid down on the cot… and then sprung to her feet, pulling an entire gossamer sheet from underneath the straw, a cape made of thin weightless fabric glittering like silver. In one masterful sweep, she wrapped it around herself and produced a sharp piece of broken window bar, her equivalent of a French rapier.
“En garde!” Daphne said, her voice a shriek ringing with metal. “Or better yet, give up!”
Tranh shook his head in disbelief.
“Stop it,” he said. “This is pointless. This is unneeded.”
“Where did you get this thing?” I asked, staring at her gossamer cloak. My girl has always been a bag of surprises.
“Crafted it from cobwebs,” she whispered to me. Then she turned to face the Asians. “Lay down your weapons, or I swear, you’ll be despawned in a minute.”
I could hear doubt in her voice, and Tranh heard it as well. “You give up,” he said. “I told you, this is pointless. You only have this little prod. Your man is a good mechanic, but he is no fighter. Your only way out is as our prisoners.”
She and I, we looked at each other then. We couldn’t help but acknowledge he was right. The Asians posing as Her Majesty’s redcoats did look dangerous — not like some low-level mercenaries but like those well-versed in martial arts. One of them even had a scar running across half the face, which meant he was also a brawler in the Wakeworld, or had done something really bad in there to earn it here. The Web computers didn’t dispense facial details like this one too generously.
And there was no way I could change my specialty and become an Expert Melee Fighter out of a Journeyman Mechanic; none of my fighting skills, which weren’t so good to begin with, would compensate for the mismatched class. There were three of them — and basically just one of us, Daphne the Musketeer with a broken prison bar for a rapier.
Whizz! Something ripped through the air between us and buried itself deep into Tranh’s virtual throat. It was a dark-fletched arrow, of a kind I’ve never seen in Clockworld before.
“There were three of you, and now there’s two of you,” I heard a mocking feminine voice, unknown to me but eerily familiar.
She stepped out of the dark as Tranh slid down to the floor, groaning and clutching at his throat — already despawned, no longer a human character but a ragdoll playing a scenic death animation as fit the circumstances. His compan
ions stood paralyzed; they clearly had no idea and no instructions on how to act in case of their leader’s sudden death.
Then she stepped into the light, a tall lady archer with pointed ears and a long dark ponytail, her dark eyes full of mischief.
“Magic doesn’t work,” she said. “But arrows still do, yeah.”
“Diego?” I finally managed to ask, as dumbfounded as everyone in the cell if not more.
“Joanna,” the answer was. “The Elven Infiltrator of the Enchanted Woods.”
“EN GARDE!” Daphne shouted to the Asian redcoat goons, and all hell broke loose around me right the next moment. My girl could only feint at first, this I saw — her makeshift weapon was far too short for proper fencing. Diego, I mean Joanna, nocked another dark-fletched Elven arrow and was tracking us, looking for a clear line of fire.
The false redcoats turned out to be incredibly good in close combat. As soon as the element of surprise was gone, before Daphne even let out her battle cry, they crouched like two tigers, or maybe spiders, and kept circling us back and forth, their motions fluid and gracious, looking for an opportunity to strike with cold precision matching that of my girl’s. Short blades were gleaming in their hands now, blades which had nothing to do with Albion, same as Tranh’s weapon lying at my feet. I considered picking it up, then stepped away as one of the goons started following me with his slanted Oriental eyes.
Then another goon jumped at my girl, and it was over in less than a second. Daphne swirled around, and her gossamer cloak hid her from the attacker the way his short blade met the thin fabric instead of her gracious body. As the false redcoat hacked and slashed through her cloak with his blade, twirling it around quite professionally but a bit too slowly, Daphne hurled herself at him in an acrobatic stunt or perhaps a dancing move of some kind, and then jumped back. The next thing I heard was her opponent’s blade clanking as it hit the stone floor. And the next thing I saw was the goon taking a clumsy step back, trying to pull out the short makeshift spike now buried deep in his ribs.
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