Tevun-Krus #43 - ClockPunk

The Stroke of Noon - A Short Story by @ChristopherArmstron8

"It's time"

Dread washed over me as I heard the call sound from the streets. Everyone around me scrambled to drop whatever they were doing as they rushed to grab their earplugs. Curses sounded out from those who dropped one of the plugs and went to scrambling on the ground for it. While all this happened the boy who had called out continued his run through the streets oblivious if his warning was being heard or not.

This time his warning was a little to late for some as the deep booming of the clock tower striking noon brought death to all who were not ready. I had seen it before and today was no different. Two of the factory workers who had either poorly placed their ear plugs, or had still been in the process fell to the floor. Blood leaked from their ears, nose and eyes as their ruptured brain bleed out. It was an unsettling site, even after twenty years of living with the daily fear of the death the clock brought.

No one entirely knew where it cane from. Legend had it that the thing was made as an ordinary clock and that it had remained so for many years. Some mad man had developed through science technology and some say magic a modification to the clock. It was thought to be a form of science gone bad. All we know is that once the modification went in, the tolling of the stroke of noon spelled death.

At first people had tried to remove the modification, but whatever the man had done it was permanent. Nothing short of destroying the tower would work, and even then there was no true science or reasoning suggesting that the clock would not continue to spell doom. So rather than destroy it, we lived with the fear of its deadly voice ever day.

Everyone here in the factory had lost someone, for me it had been my father. Always it was the same, the runners would be a little to late, and if one did not hear the warning they die, as there was no time for a second one. My fathers unfortunate day had come when he had been in the depths of the factory, dealing with loud old machinery, which had drowned out every other noise, including the warning.

he had not gone to work that day expecting to die, no one did. Despite its daily noon tolling, the death that came with it was random. Its victims were all the same, yet weeks or months could pass by without one incident, and then there would be a flurry of deadly peals. None of us understood it and my father must have thought he would be safe with the noise from the machinery.

Such matters were not something one brought up in polite society, and as soon as the call was sounded, a group of men picked up the two fallen workers and carried them away. Outside the carts would be making their rounds, and the dead collected would be taken to be examined before being sent to their families.

Waiting until the men had been removed, I tentatively pulled out my thick felt plugs. All around me the machinery hummed as it enjoyed the true effects of the deadly pealing. While death was an effect of the noon stroke, the true effects was the energy it sent out in a wave. Everything that ran on energy of any kind ran three times faster for a few hours after the stroke. Nothing could be done to change it, and while it was working overtime, so were we.

Being the mechanic of the factory like my father I had tried and failed on numerous occasions to try and understand the cause of the increased output. I new it came from the noon stroke, but why or how was the real question. Nothing I could find, either in the machinery or in the numerous stacks of notes and diagrams or books could explain it to me. My father had been working on the same thing, but he had failed to find anything that I had not. It was not for lack of trying, as I had followed every possible lead. But it had lead me nowhere and I was finally coming to realize that the death that came from the clock tower and the energy it brought to the machines was something no man or text could explain.

Life has a funny way of throwing unexplainable phenomenons at the feet of man and expecting them to live with it. Live I was, and even if I was the last man alive I would never allow the clock to claim my life with its deadly ring at noon.

At the stroke of noon, rejoice for the great industry of the world will produce more in a year than even a hundred years of consumption can use up. — Inscription engraved in the clocktower