Article on Clockwork Beings
A ‘clockwork’, by the definition of OPAL (the Office for the Protection of Artificial Lifeforms, basically unofficial police force/repair shop for androids and gynoids) is any sentient mechanical being operating off and powered by non-electrical means- so no positronic brains, no servos, no nuclear power plants nor carbon-burning generators.
Legally this means that a sufficiently intelligent doll puppeted by a ghost counts, but as the name suggests they are usually of gears and springs. (And, of course, magic. Did you expect a difference engine to be enough for a sentient AI? Or a half-minute wind-up to be enough for two days’ movement?)
History
Reports of ‘clockwork maidens’ and the like first appeared in ~1890, which coincided with the retirement of the first generation of the great powers’ Mechanical Corps twenty years prior. Headstrong, brilliant and just a tad bit insane… they do sound like the types of people to spend years of their life polishing millions of gears and intertwining thousands of spells into beings no less human than anyone.
Around fifty-two clockworks were ever created- all within Western Europe, America, or Japan from the 1890s to the 1910s- of which thirty-six remain operational today. Most are one-of-a-kind productions made to resemble deceased loved ones or become perfect lovers, and great care was put into both design and maintenance. Some still didn’t make it, whether to external forces or sacrificing oneself for love or simply because of a freak accident. Some just flat out disappeared from history.
Most are, of course, female. The number of males within those fifty-two numbered seven.
Classification
You may have heard of clockwork ‘classes’, i.e. Vendémiaire-class, Alice-class etc. You see, despite most clockworks being one-of-a-kind creations by one person in one lifetime, at least three people opted to craft entire series of them- all as some kind of social experiment. Twenty clockworks were created by those people, one in Japan, one in France, one in America. Eight remain.
The Vendémiaire-class, for example, were a series of six sisters whose main identifying feature was their pair of wings- which made them look like angels. No one knows who built them, as interviews from the two known survivors state that their memories started from being put on a crossroad with the clothes on their backs, all in different nations- one as far as the mountains of California.
The remains of another is stored in OPAL’s archives, having passed in ~1921 and gone down generations through cities in Germany until being bought by an OPAL founder in 2000, still in remarkably good condition despite the times. Technicians and magicians have tried, for the past two decades, to reanimate her, so far without success. All we know is that most of said animating magic was probably stored in the head- and they have no want to mess with the two survivors to figure it out.
Maintenance
Now… oh boy, maintenance. I’m not even a technician, nor do I intend to be one, but Iasus it gives me phantom pains just thinking about it.
Did you think that ‘regular’ androids and gynoids, with their FOUR main architectures, countless homebrews and horrid design philosophies (the idiot who made it so that Alpha-Omega’s souls die after running out of power will rue the day I find them), was bad enough? Now introducing millions of gears and all the spells intertwined with them! With NO schematics whatsoever! Nor any way to store their consciousness somewhere else while their bodies are worked on, nor knowledge of what can and cannot be touched, nor knowledge of what is deliberate design and what is wear from a century’s constant operations…
In other words, imagine you are in Warhammer 40K. I’m surprised that no one’s gone mad and went to praise the Omnisiah or whatever. OPAL maintains a team of specialized engineers and magicians for these thirty-six people. Keep in mind that the global artificial lifeform population is half a billion.
Two of them still have their original blueprints, at least. These are respectively Allysa, C. (1904) and Chiharu, S. (1896)- from which we can gather that it’s near impossible to reverse engineer anyone else without taking them apart, because the amount of intricate spells taking hours to chant perfectly and gears the size of corn kernels are overly complicated for even the most powerful computers to imagine.
OPAL has managed to recreate them from said blueprints once or twice, mostly to test the skills of their Clockworks Maintenance Division. However, lessons learnt from them do not count as lessons towards anyone else- for example, no amount of working on them could prepare the engineers for the madman that powered everything on his daughter’s replacement with a demonic gem.
(How did he even find that?! Never mind that, why did he use such an obviously horrid thing in his experiments?! Right after completing the repairs- she was a decent young lass, but resigned herself to her little house since being around her for too long drives people insane- they had to burn the whole operating table and all their tools with heavenfire and put seals on the operating room’s door. What’s that? Replace that gem with something less malign or cast purifying spells on her? See above: they dared not touch anything. At all. Androids seemed to have better resistance to it, thankfully.)
Influence
Having been mostly active during the Golden Age of Adventures (1840-1955), several clockworks were known to have been adventurers or partners to them. One, Eveline, L. (1910), was ranked #31 by the last Adventurer Rankings in 1950. (My grandmother, #279, met her during the War Against The Conqueror (1950). Said that she was a nice person- quite polite, an optimist to the end, and could fight near-perfectly with dual pistols. Unlike most clockworks, she was apparently created specifically for the role- and could thus take far more beatings than most. A gunshot to the stomach would render most scrap immediately- this madwoman got chopped in half once and kept going.)
No clockworks have entered politics, as far as I know of. They look too obviously inhuman (not an insult, have you seen them? Porcelain and exposed mechanisms and actual human hide sometimes. Yes, one forsaken skinned his daughter’s remains and placed it on his creation- one she doesn’t really wish to mention. The thing was finally taken off in 2010 and replaced with synthskin, thank the Christ.) for the kind of job that requires constant public and media attention.
Most clockworks either lived on their creator’s inheritance (amazing how much you can keep if no one knows that you exist), as freak-show stars (usually dismissed as yet another stage trick, funnily enough) or just stayed dormant for extended periods of time.
(Why am I writing this? Why not?)
Fenglian Su., Member of the Supernatural Investigation Club, Chaoyang University, Estonteco.