The Clockwork Series

July 31, 2009 - Friday

Richard Prince stood in a room.

And it burst into flames.

The heat consumed him. It was like his skin was being ripped apart, flake by flake, cell by cell. On instinct, he bent down low to the ground, the wooden floor seemingly cooler than the inferno above. Then, shifting his body, he desperately searched for an exit.

The fire was spreading towards the centre of the room, the hardwood floor cracking into ashes in its wake. The walls had been barred by the pillars of fire, inevitably preventing escape. Richard’s feet began to burn, his flesh slowly fusing with the cloth fibres of his shoes. Pain shot up his legs.

“Help!” he shouted. But it was pointless. There was nobody there to help. He banged his fists on the ground, hoping someone would hear the sound. There was no escape now. Suddenly something came to mind: the floor was making a sound. It was hollow at that portion.

Richard stood. But even as he held his breath, he felt the noxious fumes rise up his nose. A shock of heat impacted his face. He closed his eyes and blindly stomped the floor. Again and again. The only response was a rattling sound.

His lungs were running out of oxygen now. Richard jumped. Nothing. He got low and took a breath – it was like he was breathing in nothing. It should suffice. He jumped again, and this time, the floor gave way.

He ended up on tiles. The room was dark. The only portion illuminated by the roaring flames above was where he lay. The room was slightly damp and cool, largely in contrast to the room above. He stood and tried to walk around. A drop of liquid fell on his arm. Then another. It was slightly viscous, and he couldn't make it out. But he found himself creeping back into the light with a hunch of what it was.

Blood.

Fear shot back into his body. What the hell is this place? Damn. He began looking around, eyes darting from side to side. Anything could be lurking in the darkness. Was there an exit? He gave up looking for those. Relax, Richard. Breathe slowly. He found sweat all over him, mixing with the blood. Whose blood was it? His blood? Or worse . . .

As he looked about, he moved backwards, step by step.

Then the fires above him suddenly ceased, and everything went dark. The noticeable roar of the flames disappeared, revealing the eerie dripping of blood. It wasn’t only coming from one direction. It was coming from everywhere.

Richard’s heart was about to jump out of his chest as he continued his journey backwards. Slowly and surely. The sound of his footsteps echoed across the room, and he was able to approximate its size by hearing them: around 20 square metres. And he was about to reach the end of the room. He was about to reach behind him to feel what was there.

But it was too late.

He bumped into something fleshy behind him. The lights suddenly flicked on. He turned around.

It was a naked woman, back facing him.

Dead.

It was his girlfriend. The tip of a blade emerged from her lower back, blood trickling down. He looked at his shoes. Covered in blood. His head began to spin out of control. He turned around, but he wasn’t able to walk. His vision blurred inexplicably.

Across the room stood a figure. He knew the person, and a few seconds later he figured out who it was – himself. But an older version somehow. He managed to squeeze out the words, “Who . . . are you?”

Richard was collapsing. He fell onto the ground, blood from above dripping on his forehead. He heard a voice. “Don’t Richard, don’t. Don’t do it. Consequences are dire . . . more blood lost than this . . . danger . . . world . . .”

The voice was getting softer. Richard didn’t know whether it was getting softer or he was going deaf. He was unable to open his eyes, and the voice speaking to him turned into an indiscernible whisper. But there was one word he made out, the last word he heard.

“End.”

***

Richard awoke violently at eight in the morning. Damn those dreams. Can’t they just leave me alone? Last week had been a blur for Richard; everything had been a blur, like he just managed to forget most of what had happened.

He stood and balanced himself on his slippers, heading to the bathroom. After washing his face, he looked into the mirror, just to see one more time if she was there – if she was peacefully sleeping like an angel and managed to escape his vision. She wasn’t.

As reality set in, he dried his face, dressed, and made toast. My reward for surviving the night. He set his plate on the glass dining table, and a white fluffy thing came bouncing by. Only under close examination can one find that it was in fact a dog. A white Pomeranian, to be specific.

“Here Joey!” Richard said. The dog never jumped up at him. It just sat beside him and looked at him, dot-like eyes wide open and tongue sticking out. Typical cute dog face. No emotions to convey but dumbness.

Richard stared at Joey in deep thought. “Hmm . . . so what are you thinking? Alright. What are you looking at?” No answer. “Is there something on my face?” No answer. Richard scratched his head. The dog had not moved, tongue sticking out, dot-like eyes wide open. Then Joey started licking himself. “Do you have a fetish for me or something?”

Madonna’s voice suddenly blurted out from nowhere, causing Joey to scurry away, popping into his doghouse. Richard answered his cell phone, and the voice disappeared.

“Hello?”

“Hey Rich!” It was Carl. He worked with Richard at NACT, the National Authority in Covert Technology. “Concert this evening.”

Richard let out a long breath. “You know what . . . I . . . really don’t feel like going there.”

Carl didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “I’m sorry but . . . is this about her? Because this will definitely cheer you up, dude—”

“I’ve got work at NACT to do.”

“Oh come on. I’m sure you don’t. Be a slacker once in a while. You need some rest too, you know. I promise. It’ll be fun.” Richard thought for a moment and knew Carl was right. He did need some rest after all that had happened. He wasn’t a fan of classical music, though. It was like listening to nonsense elevator music composed by dead guys for three hours. Three hours of sleep . . . why not?

“Sure I’ll go.”

“Knew you would. See you at eight?”

“No problem. I’ll get there from NACT.”

“Sure. Why didn’t you want to come anyway?” Carl chuckled. “Thought the building would catch fire?” Richard cut the line. Last night’s fear returned. That’s exactly what I thought.

***

At 5 pm, Richard was done with his daily routine in NACT, basically building things for the government. Yet the truth was, NACT was not a government institution and in fact a private one, owned by an unnamed individual from within the government. NACT is the government’s lifeline for technology.

But even in this non-government group there were hierarchies and prejudices. Richard entered his private lab and office three blocks away, the lab where AJ, Anne Janice Wood, was killed. Richard remembered the story as if it was yesterday, partly because it happened only three days ago.

A week ago, news spread all around the world that a meteor the size of the state of Alaska was on a collision course with Earth. NACT was responsible for creating a method to stop the asteroid before it's too late. The main team worked on a project that Richard thought was doomed to fail, so he began work on something else, an extemely powerful bomb that would reduce the meteor to harmless fragments.

Five days ago, he presented his project to the superiors in NACT. They said they'd think about it. Two days later, the government raided his lab and killed everyone inside, including AJ. What a way to reject my ideas. Those idiots. Now they realise how foolish they were and launch a dangerous mission to stop the meteor. I mean, going to the past? That's most probably gonna fail, and now they won't ask for my help. Hopeless.

Meteor impact was within three weeks. The world's gonna end.

Richard pushed a steel tile on the floor with his foot. The tile depressed into the floor. He twisted it ninety degrees to the right, forty-five degrees to the left and 180 degrees to the right. A laser beam shot out of a wall opposite to Richard and scanned his eye. "Confirmed," said an electronic voice. He stepped once more on the tile and descended to the floor below.

Before him, pinned into a large corkboard was a blueprint - that could pulverise the United States of America. To his right stood a machine around as tall as he was. And it was sinister, extremely sinister. That left Richard with an interesting thought.

What the hell am I going to do with it now?

***

By 7:30 Richard was standing in front of the Woodville Theatre, an outstanding piece of architecture in the shape of a distorted cube lit by thousands of LED bulbs revealing an undulating spectacle.

Carl arrived 10 minutes later. "You’re late," said Richard.

"I can't help it," said Carl, smiling. "I said meet at eight."

We entered through the immense glass facade of the building. Numerous paintings adorned the vast antechamber. Richard flashed back to his dream.

"I have a bad feeling about this," he said. “Sumo bad.”

“In terms of size?” inquired Carl. “There’s nothing to be worried about. Nooooothing.”

Richard sighed. He looked back at his dream, at AJ. The dream he had looked nothing like this building, but he was disturbed anyway. He involuntarily began flashing back to past memories, mostly of AJ. It was lonely living without the only person who could understand him, talk to him. Everyone called him a loser, a geek, a weirdo. He was down most of the time, depressed, always in the lab pouring over academic works and building meaningless machines. AJ changed that. She helped him put himself back together. Richard remembered the first time they went out for coffee. It wasn’t such a big deal. It was just . . . peaceful and secure, knowing that there is someone in the world who gives a damn about his life and what he does and who he is. She was the only one who he could love. She was his only friend, aside from slightly strange Carl.

And now she was gone.

Richard was going to cry there and then.

They were allowing the audience to enter the auditorium now, and an orderly deluge of bodies made its way into the antechamber. Richard and Carl were one of the first to enter the chamber, and they took their seats at the centre of the auditorium. They settled onto their seats and Richard got ready for three hours of nap time.

Yet the place still haunted him. It was watching him: all the cameras, the chairs, the curtains, the very essence of the space was discomforting. Carl turned in his direction and said, “Don’t tell me you’re—” he paused and made quotation marks in the air with his fingers “—‘Having a bad feeling about this’.”

“Damn it, I am,” Richard said, agitated. He slammed his back onto the backrest and looked up at the ceiling. He felt it was watching him too.

The concert began. The curtains slid open and the orchestra was behind it. The conductor emerged from one of the wings on the stage and took a bow to the audience as he reached his platform at the centre. With two swings of his baton, the orchestra began to play.

Richard didn’t remember the name of the piece, and vaguely remembered the composer’s name. It was Bathopen or something. Interesting things popped up in his mind as he thought of an open bath. Right after the first movement, the hurricane of sleep knocked him out.

***

In the darkness, Richard heard sounds he could barely recognise. There were no visuals. Just sounds, from slithery whispers to droning mumbles. He couldn’t place them. They came from all around him now, and soon, meaningless mumbles filled his ears. His brain gave up trying to understand it.

Then another voice came, and it overpowered the rest of them. Fear pervaded his body as he recognised the voice. It was the voice from his dream.

“Stop it! You must stop yourself! Stop! Stop! Stop! Don’t do anything with it! Destroy it! Destroy it!” The voice repeated the same line over and over. At first, it was a loud whisper, then the whispers became louder, faster. They became so loud that Richard felt as if his brain was being cut in half inside his skull. Then again, there were no pain receptors there.

Richard’s eyes opened. The concert was still going on, but he couldn’t hear the music. All he heard was the single cutting voice that was splitting him apart. He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists, trying to suppress the pain. “Stop,” he whispered to himself. “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.”

He couldn’t take the pain any longer. He slowly stood and, hands on face, ran across the aisle and out into the antechamber, with Carl following closely behind. “Stop it,” he said louder. “Stop. Stop! STOP IT NOW!”

The pain wouldn’t cease, and Richard ran out of the antechamber. His body twisted in the excruciating pain he was experiencing. He flung his arms. He looked frantically around for a place to release what he felt inside him. He ran blindly towards a wooden bench.

He rammed his arms down onto the bench, cracking it, screaming at the top of his lungs, “GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!!”

There was a silence, both outside and inside Richard’s head. It was followed by a deafening blast.

Everything was blurred from then. There was a rumbling from the ground, and then the sound of glass shattering. There were muffled screams and cries for help. Rubble and glass fell all around Richard and Carl. They ran and took cover behind a fountain, not bothering to look back to see what had happened. Finally, at the sound of the last crash, dust swept through the air. It was silent.

Then the sound of a blazing inferno.

***

Ten minutes later, the dust had settled, and before Richard and Carl was a fire that surpassed the greatness of the building that once stood there. Richard heard police and ambulance sirens from the distance.

“What just happened?” asked Carl. He was breathing heavily, eyes red.

“No idea,” Richard said said. He was even more exhausted than Carl was. They still stared at the immense wreckage before them.

“So you had a bad feeling.”

“No fucking kidding.”

“How did you know?”

“I never knew anything.”

“Then where did the feeling come from?”

Richard told him about the dream, and about everything that had happened. “I don’t know who or what is doing this to me,” he said. “But I can’t wait for answers from this guy who’s talking to me in my sleep. Something’s up, maybe with the meteor impact, maybe something else, but whatever’s happening, I’m going to find out.”