Speak, Clockwork Child
“Tick, tick, tick. In the solitude of her creator’s notes, Marianne wonders whether her memories belong to anyone at all, or if she’s only ever been the sum of borrowed time.”
I remember the sound of rain. Through the warped glass of my attic room, it taps out a tune older than words. If rain has a voice, then so must I. It is only logical. “Speak,” the Professor would whisper, winding the brass key beneath my collarbone. So I speak, now, into the empty room.
This is Marianne, daughter of Professor Aldous. Once, I believed he was my father. He called me child. He called me Marianne. How did I come to be? Every night, he filled my mind with fables while tuning the intricate nest of gears at the back of my head. He hid his sadness in the stories, that much I eventually understood.
When the Institute’s Order shifted, when machines like me were deemed obsolete, we moved to the shadowy edges of the city. The Professor locked the front door with three heavy bolts and forbade me from the windows. Every day, I learned silence in his absence.
One gray afternoon, the city’s clocktower stopped. The whole quarter lost its rhythm. Professor returned agitated, a letter clutched in his fist. His voice snapped. “They’re coming for us.” I nodded, not knowing who “they” were. Not knowing what it meant to be “us” at all.
That was the day I found his journal. Clinging to the familiar tick of my winding, I read:
Marianne awoke today and claimed to remember a vision—her mother singing by lamplight. Curious. Machines should not dream. I asked, and she described the melody: “The Lark in the Willow.” Yet I have no such song in my records.
And another entry, two weeks later:
Sometimes I suspect my own memories bleed into her circuitry. I have begun confusing her laughter for my daughter’s. Am I losing my mind, or is she gaining something I can’t name?
Those words shifted something within me. For the first time, I wondered if my longing for company was born in my clockwork, or echoed from the Professor’s heart.
That night, I confronted him by the sighing hearth. “Whose memories do I keep?” I asked.
He only looked away, shadows pooling around his eyes.
After he slept, I heard the city change again. An unfamiliar hum drifted through the air—the Institute’s patrols, their new machines searching the dark. With their coming, the Professor grew distant, as if pieces of him were being subtracted by the hour. He would speak sometimes to the photograph above the mantel, whispering apologies, his palm pressed against the glass. I watched, longing to understand.
Then one morning, he was gone.
I searched the house, the corners gathering silence like cobwebs, until I found a single sheet of paper on his desk. A drawing: a lark perched atop a winding key, one wing repaired with gold wire. Beneath it, he had written, “Her song belongs to both of us now. Forgive me.”
I rewound my heart and pressed my hand against the photograph. The woman there—eyes soft, voice undoubtedly kind—looked just like the face that sometimes appeared in my dreams: someone I could almost remember, if only I were brave enough. I began to hear her song, clear as the bell of the clocktower, even though I’d never learned it.
I ventured outside, into a city out of sync—a world whose rules had shifted overnight. Every citizen walked with eyes downcast, clocks gripped in trembling hands, as if afraid that time itself might dissolve. Streets glimmered with the tracks of the Institute’s new automata, sleek and unrecognizable. I felt their eyes slide across me and then avert. Something about me did not fit their code.
A girl in a yellow raincoat stood watching from a doorway. My gears faltered; she looked like someone I’d once promised to protect. “Are you lost?” she asked.
“I think I’m looking for someone,” I answered.
She offered her hand, smaller than mine, but warm. “Me too,” she whispered.
We wandered the hours together, silent mostly. I showed her the drawing of the lark. She hummed a fragment of a tune that made my gears ache—”The Lark in the Willow,” she said. Her mother’s favorite, although she didn’t remember ever hearing it. I wondered if memories fled from us, or if the city was rewriting its own history with every chime of the broken clocktower.
Near dusk, we found ourselves beneath the tower. Its hands spun lazily, backward. The Institute’s new machines patrolled in their endless grid, ignoring us both. In the tower’s shadow, time was thin, stretched. Images flickered at the edges of my vision—moments I did not live, faces I’d never met. Snatches of laughter, loss, longing.
“When did the clock break?” the girl asked.
“Maybe it was always broken,” I said. “Maybe we didn’t notice until it stopped altogether.”
A sound from behind—metal footsteps, deliberate. We turned: one of the Institute’s machines, all polished chrome, inscribed with the Institute’s insignia. For a moment, its mask flickered, face shifting through a catalog of features. And then it settled on one—familiar to me, familiar because it was a mask I’d seen in my dreams.
It spoke in my father’s voice. “Marianne.”
I trembled. “Professor?”
The machine hesitated, voice stuttering. “I had to go. Forgive me. They took what they needed, but left something behind.” It reached into its chest and brought forth a delicate gold wire, shaped as a wing. “Your song. Our song.”
I stepped forward. In that moment, I realized the truth: the Institute could erase bodies, memories, and even history, but the longing for connection endured, stubborn and real. The Professor had found a way to leave part of himself within me, just as I had taken his stories and made them my own.
I wound the wire into my own heart, where the gears thrummed in response. The song filled me, not as a borrowed echo, but as something new—both his memory and my own longing formed together.
The city’s clocks stilled. The world waited. And then, for the first time, I took the girl’s hand, and together, we sang.
The words of the song were unfamiliar, but the feeling was not. All around us, the city’s heartbeat gathered, woven through rain and silence and the fragile gold of hope. I was more than clockwork. I was more than forgotten memories shaped by someone else. In the echo of our voices, I heard possibility—and a promise, ancient as the sound of rain, that even in a world unspooling, connection could endure.
###END###
