Enter the Clockworld

by Jared Mandani

  The Moon? The Moon? I was sure I could see the thing right in front of me, and I tried to swim towards it, yet instead it felt like only my head was submerged, and the rest of my body was all pins and needles. I thrashed around some and was held back by a pair of steady hands which felt like hot iron on my skin.

  “Calm down, calm down… or you’ll smash my kitchenware,” I heard a familiar voice which sounded deeper and wiser now. Spark?

  I woke up completely then and realized there was some rubber apparatus attached to my face, with lenses through which I could see nothing but this amorphous shiny blotch above, which I mistook for the Moon. The device came off with a smooch, and I realized it was merely a surgical arc lamp. I was prostrated on a large slab of marble in some sort of an anatomy theatre lit up by lanterns filled with some unfamiliar purple gas. I sat up and found wrought-iron stairs right under my feet, a short portable staircase which led down to red carpet below, where a robed figure was waiting for me. The figure was holding a big buzzing electrode in its hands.

  “Spark?” I asked, not quite believing it.

  “The Necromancer,” the figure added, then flipped back the cowl, revealing the happy face of the electrician.

  Spark looked quite formidable on the Web. His robe was streaked with a pattern of glowing electrical runes, symbols, and letters beyond my comprehension. Spark seemed much taller and handsomer, not because his Web avatar was somehow different from his real form. It’s just here, in the Dreamweb, he seemed to make things around him crackle with energy, and I could swear he stared at that electrode and made it levitate through the air straight into its holder nearby.

  “How did you do it?” I asked.

  “Forbidden miracles of Galvanics.” He smiled at me, as big-toothed as ever. ”Also known as Necromancy. Forbidden in most of Clockworld, but not restricted, technically speaking. Pretty much like theft.”

  “What, bringing someone here with them being despawned…” I shook my head. “This has to be just, like, downright impossible. How did you do it?”

  Spark sighed like a professor of physics dealing with a dumb student — which, I suddenly realized, could have been close to the truth.

  “Some people affect the Web a little,” Spark the Necromancer said, “because they never venture forth, never seek loopholes, never take the backstreets, so to speak.”

  Feeling strangely empty, I stepped down to meet the Necromancer’s steadying hand. Then, an incredible thing happened: Spark moved his other hand through the air, leaving a faint trace of ozone and a crackle of electricity, and one of the sheets piled into a heap on the marble floor seemed to straighten up all by itself, then formed a complex dodecahedron, which then drifted towards me and dropped itself into my arms.

  “Put on this toga,” Spark said. “You’ve just seen a simple demonstration of the things one can do with electromagnetic fields alone in this reality. The Frankenstein monster trick I just pulled on your killers is hardly different, except with more electricity involved. Luckily, Teutons had all the technology, so all I had to do was find a way into this secret lab of theirs, underneath a top-secret ancient castle, and voila! Bringing the dead back to life for a good cause.”

  “Is there a bad cause?” I asked.

  “Well, in Teutonia, luckily, being a Necromancer is a good thing. In good old Albion though, I’d be called a Wych and burned at the stake. Twice.”

  “Why twice?” I asked, wrapping myself into the white sheet to my best sheet-wrapping ability.

  And this was when my girl entered, also wearing a toga, and this simple white sheet looked just divine on her. Daphne scanned the surroundings, the marble and dark looming masonry of the place, shivered, and looked back at me.

  “Ben, I don’t understand,” she said. “Where are we? What happened?”

  “You happen to be down in the ground, beneath the wine cellars of Castle Teutoburg, in the good old land of Teutonia, where no one sets fire to eldritch machinery and reanimated corpses, not to mention their re-animators, one of which I happen to be.”

  “He’s a Necromancer,” I explained. Then I ran my fingers down my chest. It was somewhat immobile, silent. I found a brazier and blew at its flame. It didn’t flicker. I said: “And I think we’re still dead, at least I am. Is that right?”

  “Not found among the living!” Spark said. “Two corpses of known saboteurs hijacked from a mortuary in Queenstanding, shipped all the way to Teutonia, stripped of features, then brought back to life galvanically and alchemically. You’re supposed to be ugly, rotting and such, but we cheated the system a bit here and tweaked your Charisma on revival, this way you actually may look prettier than you were in life, if somewhat paler and perhaps a bit more fragile.”

  I touched Daphne’s face. My girl was cold like an icicle.

  “But this is good,” Spark the Necromancer reassured us. “See, none of the people in this hall will leave the place alive. Far too much defenses, all trained on body heat signature, which you two don’t have. You’ll slip right out into the night, and I hope you’ll find the way out of Teutoburg into the desert, and there, you shall seek a Shrine of Full Rejuvenation. By the silly natural law of this place, the shrine will make you fully alive again.”

  “So this is the loophole,” I said. “Get respawned a week earlier, without them knowing.”

  “Let’s just say there’s a price.” Spark gave us a smile.

  Then a bullhorn hidden inside some hunting trophy on the wall right in front of us came alive, and blared something in German.

  “What did it say?” I asked, and that was when the big wooden doors of the laboratory burst open and two machines entered — spindly and twitchy things, sort of like two walking grasshoppers made of bronze, each one pointing around a big metal tube.

  “Go,” Spark the Necromancer said. “Wherever you were going, it was the right way. Keep it up starting from here, the two of you!”

  Then one of the grasshoppers turned its mindless klaxon-shaped head towards Spark and pointed the big metal tube at him.

  “Ben!” Daphne pulled me aside. “Ben, step back!”

  A loud WHOOSH! — and the next moment, the Necromancer was gone, dissolved right at the spot by a torrent of walnut-sized violet globules, some highly corrosive Teutonic anti-personnel stuff.

  “Relax,” I told Daphne. “I bet these things won’t kill what’s already dead.”

  The bronze upright grasshoppers couldn’t even see us, this was pretty obvious. They clattered back and forth across the lab, then went back and stood on both sides of the doors like honor guards.

  “So what now?” my girl asked me. “We go out this way?”

  “I don’t see any other way.”

  And so we went through these huge doors, two pale figures dressed in white sheets walking between two giant clockwork sentinels, a picture straight out of some twisted fairytale involving straightjackets.

  Behind the doors of the lab, there was a small dressing room, meant for a mad Teutonic genius to put on his lab coat before going in to revive the dead. We found no lab coat, but there was an army locker and a sealed drainage hatch, neither of which I could open without a Lockpick, or at least a piece of Steel Wire. There was another pair of massive wooden doors, and yet again, they were locked shut from the other side.

  “Think, think! A nail! A pin! A piece of wire!” I smacked myself on the brow, looking around the place, which was stripped of anything remotely resembling a Lockpick.

  After a moment, I stopped and looked at Daphne, who looked back at me.

  “I’m afraid it’s the only way,” I said.

  “Tampering with one of these things?” She nodded back at the silent grasshopper sentinels. “Come on, there has to be something else. They’ll spot you. Or you’ll trigger an alarm or something. In any case, these things are dangerous. Did you see what they did to our Necromancer?”

  “We’re dead,” I reminded her. “We cannot die.”
/>
  And so I moved on to examine one of the bronze grasshoppers.

  My idea was pretty simple. These sentry robots, clockwork or not, all had to have some weak spot, an Achilles’ heel. So if you managed to sneak up on them, which I could do easily, and if you were a mechanic, which I was, then you must have been able to disable the thing somehow, or even make it work for you, if you knew how it was done. I had no idea. I only needed to scavenge some wire out of it.

  Being a corpse invisible to both sentries, I approached the one to the right like no big deal, and peeked underneath one of its many armor plates, a smooth curved hexagonal piece of metal mounted on a swivel, same as every other plate the creature had. This upright grasshopper’s armor was built fragmented and mobile, meant to quickly reassemble itself wherever it was needed and not encumber the creature. These sentinels were designed with many interesting ideas put into them, and effort as well — big sturdy things combined with tiny elegant clockwork in a way no Albion mind could ever conceive. I’d give anything for a chance to disassemble this thing and study it. The creature’s eyes alone deserved a few hours of study!

  For now though, I only needed to find me a good piece of wire.

  “Buff,” I called, carefully moving the piece of armor on a swivel — it let me — and examining the creature’s ‘shoulder joint’, namely the strings it used to pull its limbs up and aim its death tube around.

  “Yes?” Daphne was by my side at once, my perfect companion.

  “I need you to make a rope out of one of those sheets on the floor.”

  She understood me at once, and wove me a nice piece of rope in no time. I pushed it through the gap between one of the smaller metallic tendons of the creature, then pulled.

  “Nothing,” Daphne commented, observing my work.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Let’s pull together. Grab here. You know a mechanic’s saying? If something stupid doesn’t work…”

  Zzzing! The string came loose on one side.

  “… then you gotta double the effort,” I finished.

  It must have been something important after all, because the tall creature slacked visibly, its tube arm nearly touching the floor. The good news: it had zero effect on the sentinels or the surroundings. No sudden movements. No alarm. Both clockwork grasshoppers stood by each side of the door as immobile as before.

  I took my time to break off a piece of the string, then bent it quickly using my teeth. It had a strong tang of tarnished copper.

  “Alright then,” I told Daphne. “Now to deal with that locker… No, wait.”

  Acting on a hunch, I decided to open the drainage hatch first, just so we had an escape route for once. I quickly popped its simple mechanical ‘seal’ open using the same piece of copper wire, then lifted the heavy cast iron grate and moved it aside. The vent behind it didn’t look very inviting — it was mossy and slimy — and I really hoped we wouldn’t have to leave this way.

  Fat chance.

  The military locker wasn’t that hard to crack, not as silly as NYPD handcuffs of course — I actually had to count some clicks and noises inside the lock to make it work. But then it popped open, and we saw the locker’s dusty insides.

  “It’s a few Teutonic uniforms.” Daphne wrinkled her pale nose. “Just rags. Not a single weapon.”

  “Well, it’s a locker,” I said. “At least now we can pretend we’re a couple Teutonic soldiers.”

  “Yeah, until someone checks our body temperature.”

  “Or hears us conversing in an enemy language,” I said, quickly changing into the uniform, which smelled of dust and mold, but I didn’t mind, myself being dead.

  “Many people from all around the world here.” Daphne pushed her head through the collar and put on the peaked helmet. “I’m with La Republique. You think I speak French in there?”

  “Hush!”

  We froze as one of the sentinels at the door made a sound. It turned around and walked into the room, probably switched back to its patrol route. This was the upright bronze grasshopper I hadn’t tinkered with.

  The other sentinel was the problem. As soon as the new program kicked in, it tried to follow the first grasshopper, and nearly succeeded, but then crashed into it, and crashed into a pillar, and crashed down on the floor, its armor plates dispersing and reassembling in order to ward off a danger that never was, and all of it against the stone floor, with terrible screech and clamor that must have rung through the entire Castle Teutoburg.

  Soon we heard a klaxon quacking from somewhere inside the castle and we knew the entire place was on alert.

  I sighed and walked straight towards the drainage vent. “After you,” I said.

  The climb inside the slimy stony guts of Castle Teutoburg was as unpleasant and tiresome as you can imagine, given the fact they did send some little scuttling clockwork machine after us, which we had to avoid until we left it somewhere behind as well. From snippets we overheard while crawling past a few Teutonic guards — some of them were indeed in German, but most were in the omnipresent mutated English of the twenty-second century — the castle was often being invaded and infiltrated these days, Albion spies suspected to be hiding in its every shadow.

  “Albion?” I whispered to Daphne. “Why Albion? We’re not even supposed to be at war with Teutonia.”

  Then I remembered the grey walking tank I busted with my tinfoil ruse. It was definitely Teutonic, I had no doubt about it, but I kept thinking it was scavenged, stolen, and rearmed somehow. This practice was normal among mercenaries, so I naturally assumed it was a few desert bounty hunters I fried in that tank. We weren’t at war with Teutonia. This would be real bad, if we were.

  “Seems like everything is changing fast,” Daphne whispered back. “We must warn La Republique, you see it now, eh? Before everyone is at each other’s throats.”

  “Isn’t that already the case?” I asked. Still, Mr. Reaper tried to stop us, and we fooled him, this was something. I was sure now this fellow was up to no good, and, stripped of his magical aura, he seemed to me just a hired griefer working for the powers that wanted us to fail.

  What were these powers though?

  Watching Daphne scale another stretch of stone innards of the castle, I thought I had a glimpse all of a sudden. It was Spark versus Mr. Reaper, both dressed as mages, both exploiting and binding the local simplified electric laws to do their magic. One of them was human, while the other…

  “Buff,” I called.

  She turned around.

  “Tell me and be honest,” I said. “Are there some DCs bent on, well, ruling the world? Not just this one, but all worlds? The Wakeworld as well, maybe?”

  Daphne didn’t answer at first, and yet she didn’t move, so I waited.

  “There are rumors,” she said. “You know how it is. There’s always something. Someone who secretly rules the world. So of course there are rumors of such an order, made up completely of Digital Citizens, some of them maybe politicians or generals in former lives, people in love with power and domination games. They’re said to call themselves Ethereals.”

  “Ethereals, huh.”

  “Yes. Doesn’t it sound a bit cheesy? A bit overly dramatic for your taste?”

  It sounded even crazier if one of them was James Reaper, the cyborg, who told me his only driving force was my entertainment. A sinister order of virtual beings striving to rule humanity, employing incredible Web techniques, infiltrating politics and society, and all for the sake of our own entertainment?

  Gotta love the year 2099.

  “Well,” I said. “It certainly puts some face on them. And it matches everything I’ve seen so far, except for the Baron’s murder. Why would DCs kill a DC?”

  We were hacked, that’s what I told them, the other people — I remembered Mr. Reaper’s words.

  Daphne merely sighed.

  “Will it help if I say the Baron was one of the Ethereals, presumably? A prominent figure?”

/>   “Hmmmmm,” I said, and then we climbed further.

  So it was a message. We can get you. Now, who were we? Divine Kingdom and its ninjas? The Crescent and its Assassins? None of it made sense; it was all games and more games, stupid artificial dreams, a smokescreen… for something important, yes. But what?

  Finally, the slimy masonry on all sides was replaced by slippery rock, and soon we got out, to our big surprise, through a crack in the rocks and straight into open air. A great stormy sea spread all around us like this immense grey blanket, the twilight sky crowning it, the screams of seagulls echoing above our heads like something surreal.

  “Uh oh,” Daphne said. “Big movement. Look.”

  At first, I couldn’t understand where she was pointing. And then, I saw.

  They were coming from underwater in ranks, by twos and by threes. Small three-man craft, large hunters, huge dreadnoughts. Grey torpedo-shaped things which were sort of like U-boats, except they were meant for ground assault and support. And each one of them, when surfaced, became a real floating fortress, and then a tank. The famous Teutonic fleet.

  “Seems like they’re leaving for Albion,” I said as we started our hard descent down the crumbling face of the rock. “And when this flotilla reaches the Islands, there’s going to be bloodshed.”

  “This…” Daphne, moving in front of me and already a bit lower, shook her head. “This is madness, it must be stopped. We must tell them how they’re being played, dragged into this…”

  “Virtual World War One?” I suggested.

  “We have to get to… where are we going again?” she asked me.

  “To La Republique? Your home?”

  “No,” she said. Daphne examined the armada in front of her, likely photographing it with some spy gadget, then turned to me and asked: “Right now. Where are we going right now?”

  “We’re going to get outta these rocks, then find us a place to sleep,” I said. “Because, you know, I’ll have to leave, and we can save our progress in that tavern room. Then we’ll have to travel all the way to the desert rim. I have no idea how far it is from here, but there we must seek this Shrine of Rejuvenation he mentioned. This is a loophole: we’ll become fully alive, see, but still listed among the dead, for the entire week we remain officially banned from the Web.”