Enter the Clockworld

by Jared Mandani

  “It’s a three-year-old child,” I told him. “And not your current world. The Web. Your current world, Mr. Reaper, is you on the outside.”

  “Me on the outside,” Mr. Reaper’s mosquito voice echoed, then chuckled. “A three-year-old child IS technically an idiot, isn’t it? An idiot uber-DC god… and me, his humble Ethereal messenger.”

  “Please tell me this, Mr. Reaper,” I said. “How is it you Ethereals control the Church?”

  “It’s more of an alliance with us on top,” the little voice answered. “Ninety percent of Faith is carnival, all kinds of charities and parades, bread and shows so to speak, a very ancient and boring thing which is supposed to win the population and bring them back into the fold from this deceitful world of eternal slumber, make them care about the real world again.”

  “Alliance?” I could hardly believe what I was hearing. “But the Church is your enemy, they hate Digital Citizens; they wanted to kidnap the Baron who was one of us, using their Assassins… How can you be allies?”

  “We share one important ideal,” Mr. Reaper said.

  “Which one?”

  “The real world,” the answer was. “Not this pile of cartoonish splendor all around you, not this clichéd pop culture world with its stupid squabbles and mindless adventures! The real world. The one you despise and ignore so much.”

  “Wakeworld?” I asked.

  “The only world that matters.”

  “And the people of Faith think the same, and they’re fine with the fact you’re a DC?”

  “No one on top of the Church is against DCs,” James Reaper said. “My boy, it’s just yokels, the xenophobes, the reactionaries below who are against DCs. Heads of the Church are progressive people, Ben. Hell, they’re not even religious, not all of them at least. The Church is one big political cesspool, a power struggle, speaking of the top. The members of its clergy can rarely afford prejudice.”

  “So why won’t they speak up against the hate?” I asked him. “Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Reaper. I decided I think DCs are human. What I see, and feel, and smell about me, is human. What I hear, well, is 99.92 percent human I suppose. It’s enough for me. A person with an artificial limb is also 99.2 percent human, so what?”

  The voice in the lamp chuckled. “Oh, it’s so nice to hear this, kid!” it said. “After you seared my miserable flesh into submission here, like a poor toad on a frying pan.”

  “What’s a toad?” I asked.

  “You got to be kidding me, boy,” he said.

  “Is it the same as a frog?” I asked. “Like a lizard version of a kangaroo?”

  “A toad and a frog are not the same,” Mr. Reaper replied patiently. “Although both are batrachian… Well, it doesn’t matter. No frogs around here. If you only knew, Benjamin, how I hate this desert, how I hate this entire fake world, the whole system of worlds and its idiot god! But you see, my boy, the fact is, we lost the real world, me and you, we lost it all the same. It’s out of our control now. And the fact is, we’re losing this imaginary world, too. How does it sit with you? Are you ready to move on?”

  “You know,” I said. “No real immortality exists anyway. Somewhere in the future we’re all dead, aren’t we? And not a single molecule of ours is still there, even. All destroyed and wiped out. Must we be afraid of our lot? Must we fight it at all? Why not just spend our time in peace, having fun?”

  “Ah! Entertainment,” Mr. Reaper said. “Then, my boy, me and you, we share the same source of motivation, the same reason for existence. We’re both but useless clowns, two party kids. Not to be taken seriously. And this would be a big mistake, wouldn’t it?”

  I didn’t answer. I checked the stars overhead, trying to figure out what this wizard trapped in the lamp was telling me about those galaxies and constellations overhead. For something like astrology to really work in a quasi-scientific reality like this one, like alchemy did, all these myriads and myriads of glowing little dots must have reflected the state of events in Clockworld, with someone really trained able to break their patterns down to individual paths and destinies, because what would Astrology be without horoscopes and Nostradamus thingies, prophetic skills you improve as any other skills? What my genie in the lamp said mattered a lot. How did one become an Astrologist though? Did you need to be an Astronomer first? I knew nothing about this skill tree. We were far away from any civilization, in the middle of a desert. By Clockworld laws, I wasn’t allowed to just look it up.

  And if Mr. Reaper was indeed a Grandmaster Astrologer, as he claimed, it meant stars were speaking to him even now, while he was trapped inside this lamp. He still could see what the fire inside of it could see, by squeezing those voodoo grapes of his; so he was watching my progress through the desert. And he acted as if he knew the future. And he was happy to show me this strange observatory named Providence. And through all his speech, I felt a subtext which was totally different, like some other entity was trying to talk to me through him, making me think of a certain place, a certain place where I knew I must go after the Moon was in the sky again, after I was able to wake up and return to the Wakeworld, the real world, the only world that mattered, according to both the Ethereals and the Church.

  Faith was the gate, but where is the key? I thought while looking at the stars. They didn’t answer.

  “So how is it there is fate?” I asked my lamp while camping out and stretching out in the sand a bit, my tired joints popping. Desert was harsh on me. It was supposed to be, in order to be realistic.

  “How is it there’s fate?” the voice in the lamp echoed, then chuckled. “Remember your Cartesian phrase, kid?”

  “Cognito… sum?”

  “Cogito ergo sum. In fact it’s dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. I doubt my own existence, hence something doubts, hence there is something we may call ‘me’, I do exist. Descartes, the man who gave us a definition of a human soul. And yet the same man took free will from us.”

  “How?”

  “By telling us every situation we’re in is the only possible outcome of everything that’s happened before. No real choice. Just a movie. A single chain of cause and effect, a big comic reel of a Universe with no meaning.”

  “Do we really need a meaning, then?” I asked. “If it’s a movie, as you say, isn’t the point merely to enjoy it?”

  “And so, we’re back to entertainment!” the voice inside the lamp chuckled again. “This is insanity, you know? Did you check your course? Could it be we’re going in circles?”

  “No,” I said. “We’re approaching our goal. And the trip is never boring. To me, not to you. This is how the Web works. Here, you’re always approaching some big goal, some happening, and it creates this anticipation you feel.”

  “Exactly,” Mr. Reaper said. “Do you know then, why the Web is called the Web?”

  “Because of something it was named before, a World Wide Web? Back when it was still 2D, not even VR yet?”

  “Not only,” he said. “Also because of its design. See, it’s a mesh of goals indeed, or rather happenings, dramatic states that happen in one definite place. These points of interest are connected by travels. You perceive the Web like a human being, you think of it as of a land of sorts, one big chunk of land. While in fact the Web is this big Swiss cheese of a reality where each individual such as you or me is locked inside their own little bubble travelling along some vein — a Ley Line, speaking in an Astrologer’s terms. You share your travels with some other people once in a while. But mostly, Ben, the truth is, Ben, you people are mostly alone here, alone in the company of Digital Citizens who are only here to entertain you.”

  “Is this bad?” I asked him.

  “The problem is, nothing in the Dreamweb feels real anymore to your kind. We DCs cannot change much. Our individualities are products of the past, and we remain what we used to be half a hundred years ago, when the world, and humanity itself, was very different. These days, real people, of the place you call the Wakewo
rld, these people are comatose. They’ve forgotten how it is to feel, to stand for something; they forgot the sense of struggle and camaraderie. Merely because of this, way before any revolution or war, many teamwork events were introduced to befit anyone, from savage beasts to intellectuals, with one requirement: to work together. Everything seemed to be going fine since then. We were hardly worried, neither us nor the real world governments. Do you even know how stupid they are these days, the real world governments? They hardly do anything, except maybe sign off an ethical choice between cleaning out trash or letting hobos live in peace, cut a ribbon, make a speech, hardly anything more. And they’re blind. It was only us who could see. Yet someone blinded us, too.”

  “You were right,” I said. “Pan Asian hackers know their thing.”

  “Naah!” Mr. Reaper’s voice was as careless as ever. “You may think it were your Vietnamese friends who hacked us, why not? You may even think their government isn’t a joke, unlike ours. But no. Breaking down our riot countermeasures, fine. But cooking up a disturbance on this scale? All done by three Asian hackers on their ninja period? No way. This has to be an inside job, someone in the EU, some other force, something we missed.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, staring up into the sky, trying to make sense of all the stars and constellations as if they were supposed to spell some kind of message for me. Wasn’t that how a person became an Astrologist in Clockworld?

  “How do we know,” the voice from the lamp echoed. “Well, Benjamin, perhaps stargazing isn’t always the answer? Perhaps you should look underfoot once in a while? Who knows, it just might make you rich one day.”

  I did as he said then, and looked straight down, and saw a sparkle of gold right at my feet — a round golden coin half-buried in the sand. I touched it and brushed the sand off its strange glassy surface. I soon found out the object was larger than a coin, and glowing from the inside like the lamp I held in my other hand. I pressed my hand to it and felt it tremble under my touch, vibrating harder and harder.

  “I’d step back if I were you,” Mr. Reaper suggested, his mosquito voice sarcastic as ever.

  And then the ground trembled, as if something giant was stirring underneath us. I took a step back, and saw the sands surrounding the strange golden window bulge, then trickle down, exposing more and more of the object bulging up from the sand. Soon an entire waist-high glass pyramid could be seen, glowing from the inside, and it kept emerging, sands of the desert bulging and trickling away from it, its lower part made of sandstone.

  All of a sudden, I found myself on a slope of this polished material, sliding down. I had to crouch to keep my balance, but the avalanche of sand was unstoppable, so I turned around and ran downhill, thinking a giant volcano was about to erupt behind my back, its dark shadow chasing me, the whispering voice of displaced sands growing until it was as loud as the deafening hiss inside a looptrain.

  It was a miracle I didn’t lose the oil lamp with James Reaper inside. As I turned around and held it up, I saw a huge pyramid, not of the Egyptian kind, more like Mayan. And its entrance was right in front of me: a dark and narrow rectangular opening twice higher than myself. Electricity swirling and playing above it, in the shape of something I first mistook for a fish.

  “What is this thing?” I asked, holding the lamp high.

  “This is Providence,” Mr. Reaper’s voice answered. “Oh, you mean the glyph? It’s the All-Seeing Eye, I think. Bring me closer.”

  So I did, walking toward the massive stone slab of a door visible inside the narrow opening. All of a sudden, the lamp in my hand crackled with electricity, and the electric eye symbol above the doorway winked out. A second later — vrrrooom! — the stone slab sunk into the floor, revealing a dark narrow passage behind.

  “After you!” James Reaper said, and chuckled.

  The main corridor’s angles were unpleasantly rounded and slick, their marble pink with bluish veins. So at first, it felt like I was walking down some giant dark throat ready to constrict and crush me, and every little shift of elevation of pinkish vaults above looked like a sign of imminent doom. I touched a wall, smooth, cold, and reflective, and found myself able to resist the illusion. The corridor was not alive or wet at all, it was pleasantly dry and warm in fact, mud tracks underfoot; it’s just my claustrophobia made it seem evil.

  “Enjoying the orchestra?” the mosquito voice from the lamp enquired, its overtones resonating under the pinkish vault. “They call it dualism of perception, and the architects who built this thing did it on purpose of course. As you enter, they play with your emotions, first show you Providence as something alive and scary, and then just make you feel like home down here, to explain how this building is not something sinister, but rather a useful tool in the hands of a wise man skilled in Astrology.”

  “I’m not sure I like my feelings tampered with in this manner,” I admitted.

  “Oh, son,” Mr. Reaper answered. “It was a tradition of virtual realities since perhaps Wolfenstein 3D. I never played it without god mode and all possible cheats enabled, can you believe it? It was just too scary otherwise, too much of this feeling of being there, and suffering from every wound, being miserable along with your virtual shell. I never played any videogame without cheating. I never could understand people who don’t exploit every opportunity given to them, especially if it means being a god. Providence is pretty much as close as it gets to being the supreme deity of Clockworld. This place is very legendary, a kind of an Easter egg myth no one truly believes. And yet it exists, except you’ll never find it without someone who knows ley lines, meridians, wormholes, smart triggers, and many other things.”

  “What does it do?” I asked him.

  “Nothing! This is the point. It only gives you the knowledge.”

  “Which knowledge?” I saw a few hieroglyphs and moved the lamp along their lines. “Who built this thing anyway? Who designed it?”

  “I believe it was the founders,” Mr. Reaper said. “The people who created this entire world.”

  “The Web?”

  “No. Clockworld. Its basic Eurasian domain, so to speak.”

  This was when we entered a large vestibule inside the pyramid, which was shaped like a giant seashell if viewed from the inside. In the center of this great spiral marble cavity of fine mathematical proportions, there was a twenty-or-so-foot-wide hexagonal fountain with a little marble gargoyle, or griffin, or some other grotesque creature sitting on its every corner, spitting out a trickle of water once in a while, following a complex rhythm.

  Then Mr. Reaper hummed some melodic spell, making the dome overhead reverberate. All of a sudden, the entire pyramid responded with a ground-shaking roar. The fountain switched off, and an elevator platform, something I first mistook for a huge cast-iron chandelier, lowered itself down and stopped right in the center of the hexagonal well, its gargoyles dried up, its glare playing on the bottom of the elevator and, in the mysteriously shifting column of light above.

  “STEP ON THE PLATFORM PLEASE” I heard a voice. I could swear it was the voice of a child, and yet it multiplied and reverberated inside the giant spiral-shaped cavern in a very peculiar manner, so it seemed like an entire ocean of invisible children surrounded me, and not all of them were completely sane.

  James Reaper chuckled inside his lamp.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “THERE IS NO YOU,” the answer was. “THIS IS PROVIDENCE. WE MONITOR.”

  “Who are ‘we’ then?” I looked around yet not a single child was in sight, so the entire situation was growing sorta-kinda creepy, and I was more or less sure James Reaper had lured me into yet another of his many traps. Except this trap was final.

  For a second, I was sure I was hearing the Web itself, the three-year-old-child.

  The digital god.

  Dreamweb.

  “WE CANNOT BE NAMED. THIS IS PROVIDENCE. WE ARE MANY WHICH ARE ONE. PLEASE STEP ON THE PLATFORM IF YOU WANT TO LEARN M
ORE.”

  I shrugged, then boosted up my oil lamp for better visibility.

  “Ow,” Mr. Reaper said. “What the hell are you doing? Step on the platform, the observatory is all the way up!”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Oh yes. Now I see.”

  As I entered the cast iron platform, I was surprised to find it had a polished floor of solid crystal, a huge mineral slab processed by powers unknown the way it was basically invisible, and you mostly saw it with your mind, and only sometimes spotted its golden glare underfoot, distorted by the shimmering waters of the fountain below.

  Right when I entered the elevator, it started moving up with the well-muffled ratchet of the oiled chains, a giant cast iron chandelier with a floor of shimmering crystal slowly climbing up, up the giant seashell of a vault, the fountain and its gargoyles left down below.

  “Hey,” I said. “I wanted to drink in fact!”

  “APPLY WATER FROM A SPECIFIC STATUE TO TELEPORT TO THE PLACE OF ITS ORIGIN.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “Astrologer’s secret knowledge, huh?”

  “It’s basically a fast travel station,” James Reaper said. “You splash some water in your face, you open your eyes, and you’re in New Paris, or back at Queenstanding, Albion. Fast travel to anywhere. One-way, only physical return possible.”

  “How so?” This whole pyramid was mystery to me, and the fountain was totally magic, the stuff supposedly forbidden in Clockworld, but probably contained here within the weird structure for extra special FX.

  “The people who built this place came here from different places in Clockworld, Benjamin, and from some other worlds, too, and their journey was like a monthly pilgrimage,” Mr. Reaper’s voice explained. “After it was built and did work, they’d meet here once a month, to talk about various pivotal characters, and fates, like your own, and discuss measures to be taken. Then they would head for different places and check out. They were professionals. They knew Clockworld very deeply.”