Chapter Four: The Third Law

Mitch ran his fingers through his hair. The high speed, eratic ride in the back of the truck had not only blown it up and back through force of wind, but lodged a large amount of dust, leaves, and grass in it.

“I told you to keep your head down.”

“If I’m going to die, I want to see it coming, John.”

“A fair point, with one small flaw. We did not die.”

“We came close enough a few times.”

“Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and projectile vomiting.”

“Interesting that you should mention that-”

A door slammed and Dr. Vague looked back at the pickup bed with an expression of recently exhausted patience, combined with a look of rapidly rising anger.

“If you say one more word about my driving skill, I will personally tear out your heart, eat it, vomit it back up in your face, and then stab that same face thirty-three times with the sharpened end of a bone I will have taken from your leg.”

John sat up and turned to the angry driver. “This leg bone, will it be removed before or after the heart?”

“Before, of course.”

“Ah. Thanks. You didn’t specify earlier. So what are we doing in this part of town?”

Remembering his earlier vendetta took the wind out of the sails of his present one, and Dr. Vague pulled out his scribbled notes. “According to Thomas, this type of machine uses a very, VERY rare type of maglev hardware.”

“Maglev? Like Japanese bullet trains maglev?”

“The opposite. Something about the way magnets change air when they spin in a certain way. It’s fucking magick, it doesn’t have to make sense. So yeah, only like two guys ever used this, and one of them died ten or so years ago. No family, no apprentice.”

“And this is the home of the other one?”

“Don’t get ahead of me. The dead guy was Walter Schmidt. The other guy was named Linus King, and he is also dead without relatives. I kept running into his name while I was doing research, because it looks like somebody was still carrying on his work. Or just pawning his old stuff.”

“And this is the guy who lives here?”

“Maybe. I don’t know for sure. All I know is that this particular house was in King’s name and is still held in some kind of trust. SOMEBODY is keeping up with the paperwork.”

John nodded. “So the logical step would be to knock on the door. Or even better, on the window. Everyone comes through the door. He’ll be expecting that.”

“Right. I’ll go through the door anyway. Thomas stays out here for fire support.”

“Don’t you mean moral support?”

Thomas shrugged as he walked around the truck. “What can I say? I’m a scholar, not a fighter.”

“Whatever you say, Professor Plum! Might want to think about learning the motor skills of gunmanship if you ask me, but you didn’t. So pretend the last eight seconds did not occur and we discussed delicious frozen yogurt.”

“…what??”

***

John Reeso looked at the window of the house. It was of appropriate size and shape and style for a house of that size and shape and style. Not that he had any idea what style it was. Still, the shape and size were plenty to go on.

Mitch was still trying to figure out what John was looking at. “Trying to find a burglar alarm?”

“Ha ha! Your tomfoolery amuses me. No self-respecting denizen of the underground would have an electromechanical burglar alarm installed. Especially not a clockworker. His alarm would be silent, self-contained, and very pointy. Note also if you will that in this forest of a backyard, there are very few vantage points for neighbors to pry with their eyes. As long as nobody hears gunfire, nobody will call the police.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“The instant I break this window, we may have to contend with a very small, very dangerous gizmo of indeterminate manufacture. How well armed are you?”

Mitch reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a pair of brass knuckles. Knuckles that also seemed to have spikes welded on as an after-thought. John looked at them and grinned.

“I like your style, Mitch-Man. Load em up and lets rock.”

After taking off his own jacket, John lashed out with his boot in a high kick that took out most of the lower window, spraying glass and wood inside. The jacket was thrown over the windowsill itself, covering the remaining shards of glass. John grabbed the sill and hoisted himself headfirst into the house.

There was the sound of a body landing on shards of glass, then the sound of a body swearing loudly. Mitch carefully grabbed the sill and pulled himself up and in.

John was picking glass shards out of his skin while leaning against an oven. Mitch looked around some more and noticed that they seemed to be in the kitchen. All of the appliances looked to be fifties-era machines, with some odd metal patches and bolts sticking out of them.

“We’re in the kitchen. Is that where we want to be?”

John shrugged. “We could always find the den, or the workshop, or the master bedroom. Why does it matter?”

“It matters because clockworkers tend to tinker with machines. And there’s a whole lot of machines in a kitchen. Machines that slice and dice and toast and roast.”

John looked up from his glass-picking with an expression of sudden, dawning comprehension.

***

Mitch peered back into the kitchen. Everything seemed perfectly fine. Maybe the clockworker just decided to make the oven more ovenish, the fridge more frigid. Maybe they broke and he repaired them the only way he knew how.

But you could do a lot of damage with an oven that could try to bite with its door, or spit fire, or whatever. It never hurt to be cautious.

“Got all that glass out yet?”

“Nope. There’s still some fragments in my back, feels like.”

“Need any help?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely NOT. I should have mentioned this on the ride over.”

“Too much wind. What is it you’re talking about?”

“Look, we’ve already covered that magick is about logically reasoning that the universe is wrong about something, more or less. Yes?”

“Uh huh.”

“And there’s an underlying premise to the magick?”

“Also uh huh.”

“Well, just as there are actions that prove or reinforce or build on the premise, there are also actions that refute it.”

“That makes sense.”

“So there’s stuff that you can’t do when you’re a mage. Or at least you can’t do it and keep your powers.”

“…kryptonite?”

“What was that?”

“Like kryptonite. Superman’s one weakness.”

“No, too general. You know of the Green Lantern, yes?”

“I know a little.”

“Well, originally, the Lantern Corps rings wouldn’t work on anything yellow. Magick is like that. One part of normal life that you can’t be involved in, or you might as well be some normal shmuck and not a mage.”

“But for everything else in life, there’s magick.”

“Yeah. For boozehounds it’s sobering up, and for bodybags, I think it’s backing down.”

“What about clockworkers?”

“Not a clue.”

“Perhaps we should have asked Doubting Thomas earlier.”

“Maybe. Anyway, the no-magick-land for us is letting anyone else modify our bodies. It undermines the whole focus on control of the flesh. If you’re gonna turn it over to somebody else, what’s the point?”

“…when you say modify-”

“No dentists, no doctors, no tattoo artists, no manicurists, no surgeons, no barbers, no friends helping pick the glass out of your skin, and if you want to rock the Casbah with some hot chick you met at the bar then she better not be the kind that scratches and/or bites.”

Mitch looked away from the kitchen and back at John, who shrugged.

“This is about the time when most people trying to learn magick say ‘fuck that’ and give up, right?”

“Not as many as you’d think. If you get this far in the Occult Underground, you probably already don’t care about living a normal life. The casual seekers, the dabblers, they stop around that candles-and-incense stage. Having second thoughts?”

“…naw. I’ve come this far. Might as well see it to the end.”

“That would be more inspiring if you hadn’t taken only four steps on a journey of six hundred miles. And there’s more. We’ve established that magick is like an equation earlier in the restaurant. Well, there are always variables that you either solidify into constants, or mutate into other variables. You ultimately end up using the maximum number of interchangeable points of reality that your mind can handle and still link to the concensus reality you want to change.”

“With you so far.”

“Now, you’ve been around the underground for a while, right? Have you ever wondered why there’s only adept magicians who can cast certain types of spells about certain ideas? Book mages and randomness mages and small furry animal mages? Why wouldn’t they try to do more than that? Gain all the power they could?”

Mitch scratched his chin. “I can think of two possible reasons, and you’re probably going to tell me that both of them are wrong. The first is they don’t want to, they can’t get excited about any other magick than the one they already have. The second is they can’t. Some sort of mental block.”

“You’re either right for all the wrong reasons, or wrong for all the right ones. When you mix two different magick systems together, you get twice the number of variables you can handle. If your magick uses, say, the three variables of past present and future, you now have to deal with six. Two pasts, two presents, two futures, all mixed up. Now, I’m sure there are computers, or systems in calculus, that can let you solve problems with up to six variables. But those are static matters of numbers that stay put while you solve them. If you tried to do that in your head to a constantly changing environment, you would drop the ball. No way around it. You’d end up defining each variable in terms of other variables. Shades of infinity with only the most tenuous links to concensus reality.”

Mitch turned this over in his head a few times. “Catatonia? Coma?”

“Close. Try ‘stark raving oh my god there is cheese on my atlantic ocean motorcycle handlebars pretty please with sugar on the side that faces the wind’ insane.”

“…oh.”

“They start screaming, or laughing, or both at once, casting spells that either have nothing to do with what’s going on for the rest of us, or spells that destroy all the plastic in a square mile. Or burn the hair off of anybody whose name has ‘E’ as the second letter. Unless they totally lock up, like you said, in catatonia, then you have to kill them. The sooner the better. And even if they do lock up, you never know what they’ll be thinking when they come out of it, except that it won’t be even remotely what we would think.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Actually, much worse. But despite my extensive vocabulary, I just don’t have the words, grammar, and syntax to convey to you precisely how fucked up it is. Just be sure not to get too nosy into how somebody else does their thing. Or go ahead, but do it BEFORE you figure out how I do my thing. It takes all kinds, except for the kind that babble constantly and shoot demonic lightning out their nose.”

***

Dr. Vague was lounging in a high-backed chair in the den when John and Mitch found him. His legs were up on a coffee table.

“Somebody’s made himself at home.”

“I just got out of jail. I can be excused a few indulgences.”

“You know where the workshop is?”

“I already checked the attic. There’s a lot of old parts and wrecked machinery, but no tools or anything. That can’t be the workshop. The only other place I can think of is the basement.”

John scratched his chin. “Did you bring a flashlight?”

“No. You?”

“Didn’t know I was going to be fumbling in the dark today when I left the apartment. Also no.”

A small dot of bright light was directed towards the wall, and then at Dr. Vague. He blinked and swore. John looked towards Mitch and saw a Mini-Maglite flashlight in his hand.”

“I thought I was. Your apartment building’s exterior does not inspire confidence, Sensai.”

“This much is true. Alright, it’s time to venture into the underworld.”

***

“Well.”

“Well what?”

“Not exactly what you’d expect, huh?”

“Nope. I mean, yeah. Or… never mind.”

John looked up at the rows of flickering flourescent lights suspended from the ceiling, perhaps looking for ceiling-mounted attack machines. Mitch walked over to a large, humming plastic tube with a metal framework around it. If there was such a thing as a steam-powered cryogenic suspended animation tank, the machine would have looked exactly like it.

Carefully, Mitch reached out and touched the tube with the spiked tips of his brass knuckles, then felt the tips of the spikes with his other hand. Not too cold. Using part of his sleeve, he wiped some of the frost from the outside of the machine.

And jumped back.

“Holy hell!”

“What? What holy? Which hell? Oh,” said John as he ran over and noticed the eyes inside the machine. Using his own sleeve, he wiped off the rest of the frost until he could see the whole face of the person inside. It was an old man, looking rather bored. Assuming he was actually looking at anything. John snapped his fingers and made a come-hither gesture at Dr. Vague.

“Does this look like the guy?”

Dr. Vague peered inside and shook his head. “Too old. And the eyes are normal.”

“Maybe if we thaw him out, he can tell us something.”

Dr. Vague shrugged. “If you know how to operate this thing, be my guest.”

“You make a good point. Maybe there’s some notes or instructions in here on how to operate this thing. Come on Mitch.”

Mitch, still staring at the man’s eyes and trying to slow down his heart rate, looked around the basement again. The first time he had been entirely focussed on the tube, and now he saw that there were stacks of gears, racks of specialized tools, and jars full of nuts and bolts. There was also, strangely enough, a combination safe wedged underneath one of the workbenches.

“If there’s anything vitally important about this guy, it might be in there.”

Dr. Vague walked over, crouched down, and stared at the safe for a bit. Standing up, he grabbed a jar full of flathead screws, emptied them out on the workbench, and held the jar against the safe’s door. With his ear up against the jar, he started slowly turning the dial.

“Do you know anything about safecracking?”

“No, but I’ve seen it done in movies. Besides, it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

***

The door to the safe was ajar, and Dr. Vague was looking at the papers he held in one hand, rubbing the other fingers together. A trap he had not anticipated flipped out from under the safe and severed his fingers when he hit the wrong number. John had re-attached them so well that they felt almost normal.

Except for the strange sensation of the fingers trying to jump back off the hand. John had said that was purely psychological though.

“I’m seeing a pattern here.”

Mitch and John looked up from their own reading material. Dr. Vague turned around the papers and pointed at the dates in each corner. “Whoever is handling this place is not going out at regular intervals.”

“How does THAT make a pattern?”

“The pattern is there is no pattern. Enough random events, when taken as a whole, start showing some sort of order. This does not.”

“How would you know? Do you have a degree in chaos theory?”

“No, I dropped out before I got enough credit-hours to qualify for the degree.”

“Huh.”

“My POINT is that whoever is handling this stuff is not human. A human, if he wanted to do something randomly, will still make a pattern somehow. And let’s be honest, since we’re in a clockworker’s basement. A machine made to look like a man would be exactly like clockwork. A pattern that screams right in your face when you see it.”

Mitch slid a small book of scribbled ranting into his pocket and reached for another book. “Wait a minute. Everything has a pattern, you said. Right? Well, what about encryption?”

“…yeah? What ABOUT encryption?”

“There’s this thing, the RSA standard. A means of encrypting data so well that one machine can’t break the system before the end of the universe. They finally did beat it using hundreds of computers working in tandem.”

“I’m waiting for some sort of point.”

“Here it is then. Maybe some guy used his clockwork computer to find a way to make a pattern that was so complicated and large that one man, at a glance, could not see it. It would look random.”

John stood up from the safe. “I think you’re both missing something else. WHY would somebody go to all this trouble, or any trouble at all, to make this paperwork look random?”

Dr. Vague waved a hand in a dismissive way. “Because investigators look for patterns. So-and-so withdrew so much money from one account, and whats-her-face made a deposit of the same amount. Guy A makes a call at three in the morning. Guy B receives a call at the same time. Either you know what they did and this tells you how they did it, or you already know how something was done and this tells you who actually did the deed.”

“…that’s a lot of words that start with ‘D’ right there.”

“Alright then, smart guy. How did whoever it was pull this off? This highly random, hard to trace thing to cover the tracks of ownership?”

“Do I look like the guy?”

“Not as such.”

“Then I wouldn’t know. I said he probably used his machines to do it. There might be a better explaination in here. We should keep reading.”

***

“Okay, whoever designed this thing was either a genius or a total mindfucker. Or both.”

“What’d ya find, Doc?”

“A list of machines and instructions. Looks like a timeline with dates he made them and materials used. That guy chilling out over there is actually just another machine. Built to go out and maintain the house and the paper trail.”

“Well, that’s one mystery solved. On to the mystery of why this clockwork man is a clocksicle.”

“I’m almost certain that’s not a real word.”

“I am a mage. I write my own rules. With a very shiny ballpoint pen. I call him Sir Reginald.”

“Really? Think all that cutting has left too little blood in your body to keep the brain running.”

“Brains don’t run. Legs and noses run. Learn some anatomy, man!”

Mitch coughed. “I hate to interupt this hilarious exchange, but if that’s a complete list of the guy’s gear, then the freezer-tube should be in there too. I’m guessing later on.”

Dr. Vague skipped a page ahead. “What do you know. Here it is. Looks like some sort of support machine for the clockwork man inside. Prevents rust, tests the moving parts… rewinds the spring inside, it says here.”

“Why is the machinery kept cold? Wouldn’t that make the metal change shape?”

“Looks like it’s more to protect the outer shell that looks like a normal person. Maybe its made of metal that doesn’t change that much.”

“So the man keeps the house legally owned and tidied up, and the tube keeps the man running properly? Why?”

Dr. Vague threw the list on the workbench with more force than needed. “To keep the building ready until he gets back, of COURSE! Why didn’t I see that?!”

“What? See what?”

“This is just a safe house! Legally it’s just owned by a reclusive old man who shows up now and then to handle the lawyers, but this guy, whoever it was that keeps working with the original clockworker’s stuff, he doesn’t have to be here. He could be ANYWHERE!”

Shaking with rage, Dr. Vague stomped over to one of the pegboards and swung with both arms, sending racks of tools crashing to the floor.

“Whoa! WHOA! Hold it!” John ran over to Dr. Vague and tried to stop the raging man without actually touching him. “Just because you lost the trail doesn’t mean you start kick the dirt and thrashing the trees! You do that and we’ll never find where the trail picks up again!”

Mitch, in what he would later think of as a flash of precognition, looked towards the frozen tube. Parts of it started humming and venting what could be steam, smoke, or maybe some sort of gas. There was a faint smell of ammonia that grew stronger.

“Guys? I think we woke him up.”