Year of 365

August 24

No one understood. No one wondered. I was the only one. 

Every day, as I woke up from my sleep in the small hammock in the back room of my mechanics shop, the clock in the center of town would chime, signaling that another hour had passed. It had been like that forever. Everyone was used to it and would go about their every day life without a second thought. Visitors would wonder as they walked our rust colored streets, but they never stuck around long enough.

The clock tower was the oldest building in our city. A fine work of craftsmanship, created from springs and gears, designed to make sure that time flowed in an orderly manner. It was a fairly standard building when people saw it from afar, but as they approached its base, they saw the detail that had been put into every little copper or bronze plate. Some were simply small little decals made with gears that didn't function (they never had), others seemed to have been carved with an artisan's eye, depicting points in history that were recorded in the history books that were kept in the museum. The tower stretched high into the sky with designs and decals all the way up, until they got to the large clock at the top with bright blue pieces of glass, a stark contrast to the rest of our copper city. Large golden hands told the seconds, minutes, and hours as they passed, all connected by a series of golden hoops that swung around to move the hands as they needed to be placed. At the very top of the tower was a large spire so sharp that half the time I was worried that it would puncture the blimps that flew overhead. The entire building was only about twenty feet by twenty feet at its base, with no obvious way to enter the building, save a small hatch at the back that I had discovered. It was only a foot wide and half a foot tall though, so I could never fit into that. 

It was another day when I had finally had enough. My father and I were working in our shop in the square, right across from the grand clock. 

My father had inherited the shop from his father, who had inherited it from his mother, and so on and so forth. We had owned this shop for as long as anyone could remember, but the small wooden sign out front always read Gears and Bolts, The family that fixes anything. It was true. In a world that was made of ninety percent nuts and bolts, we could fix anything. Why, just last week, I had patched up a cyborg woman who had quite literally gotten her heart smashed by her ex. Fixing a half-glass heart was truly a pain, but I was able to get it done. 

My older brothers hadn't wanted to work in the shop. One of them, Radulphus had wanted to go and work abroad as a merchant, meaning that I rarely saw him. When I did, I would put everything down and listen to his tales of yonder, of places where there was no copper city and instead there was a lush green forest with rolling grassy hills, or where people had more flesh than they did mechanical parts. Truly wonderous. My other brother, Morgan, worked across the square from us where he and his girlfriend owned a small bakery. It was fairly successful, but on rough days, Father would still help him out financially. Sometimes I would work for them if they needed the extra help, not that I got paid for helping my big brother. 

And then there was me. Little old Verlaine (my brothers just called me V). I was the mechanical child, and I had been ever since I was a little girl. Father would always take me down to his shop, even when I was still toothless, and would teach me all there was to know about how bric-a-brac and bits-and-bobs fit together. It was all quite magical.

But, none of my curiosity could compare to the level of curiosity that I had when it came to the clock tower. I listened for every hour chime, every little tick of the hour hand as it drew closer to striking again. I had always wondered what made it tick. Father said that it was just bits and bobs, like what we worked with, but I knew that there was something more inside, waiting for me to find it.

So that's when I started researching it in the library beneath the old castle that stood on top of the hill. No one lived there any more. Instead, children just ran about it, pretending that they were princes and princesses, kings and queens, like there were in the olden days. Before the war. I did that as a child, though I didn't really have any friends. My father's robots were my friends. But anyways, while researching the tower, I came across something curious. There was no external power source that could be turned manually. There was nothing on the blueprints that said that there was any sort of power for the giant machine at all.