'She was known as Princess to the men on tower 181, although she was really Alice. She was thirteen, could run a line for hours on end without needing help, and later on would have an interesting career which…' Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
The story of Alice Schandenkind began when she was thirteen, the year she saw the ghostly message of the long-dead John Dearhart coming down the endless line of clacks towers.
At the time, she had considered herself old. After all, she had been on the tower since she was eleven, and she had been working away from home since was eight. It wasn't unusual for the poor peasant families of Überwald to send superfluous children into the towns to find a job - it was by all means better than the old tradition of leaving them in the forest to be dealt with by vampires and werewolves. Especially if they weren't real children – real children had two parents who were married, and they were named after their father. But Alice only had a mother, and since nobody knew what her father was called, the villagefolk gave her an ugly name and spat at her mother when they saw her in the street.
So little Alice packed her little bag and walked into the slightly menacing little town of Bonk. She worked in shops and in pubs and in households, all sorts of odd jobs, sweeping the floor and doing the laundry and running errands. She didn't even realise how little she liked that life until she first saw Bonk from afar and above, from the heights of Tower 181 which swayed on the foothills of the nearby range of snow-covered mountains. She wheedled and she begged and she pleaded, and when that didn't work, she hung around and made herself useful until she became a permanent resident of the tower. As far as the paperwork was concerned, she didn't exist, and she got no money for her work either. The others, who worked there for real, got so little pay it was a wonder they could support themselves, especially since Reacher Gilt's reforms piled double the work on them for a fraction of the money. But still they kept her around and fed her from their own dry bread and sweet tea, because she worked without pause or complaint, because she learned fast and never needed to be told anything twice, because her small stature was handy with repairs. Since she was an unpaid rookie, she almost always ended up on debirding duty. She soon learned that there was something in the movement of the tower's movements that hypnotised birds so they ended up circling, circling and then flying into the lanterns to fry, if they hadn't been caught in the mechanical joints already. Debirding was the gruesome task of climbing out to the edge of the semaphore, scooping out the crushed, burnt bits of bird and re-lighting the lantern so that the code could pass on.
They started calling her Princess because she was the only girl there. Well, Wheezy Halfsides may have been female, but asking questions like that from a dwarf is at best impolite, and at worst, suicidal. She knew she didn't really look like a real Princess though, not like the ones in the stories. She was scrawny like every other poor peasant in Upper-Überwald who grew up on a diet of half-frozen beets and potatoes. She tied her mousy unwashed hair back with a scarf and she had a sharp, pointed face that always managed to look a little mistrustful.
She also worked a lot harder than your average princess. In the first year, she mostly just made tea, heated bread-soup, scrubbed the floors when they needed scrubbing, and did simple repairs, but her incessant questioning and her rapt attention to the answers meant she soon learnt the workings of the tower. She learnt the slang, she knew the difference between the message itself and the instructions in the overhead, she could tell donkey from non-donkey, overload from underfoot. In his free time, Grandpa even taught her to read from a little book about a rather stupid man and his difficulties locating his cow. In her free time, she read all the available instruction manuals, and soon she could shift code herself, passing on the messages from Tower 180 to Tower 182. She could go for hours straight, her on the upline, Roger on the downline, and Grandpa sitting up with them, repairing shutters.
Her first thought upon seeing the words of a dead man coming in with the hubwards wind was that even though all the things it said was true, it couldn't be really true, because except for zombies, people stopped talking after they died. Her second thought was that it may be possible to lie in the overhead: not simply by sending a message that is untrue, but by making it appear as if someone else had sent that message from somewhere else. Her third thought was that she needed to tell S.
S was her… friend. Friend wasn't exactly the right word to use, since they had never seen each other, or heard one another's voice. Alice didn't even know what his, or possibly her, real name was. All she knew was that S was another person working somewhere on the clacks line, and that they thought a lot like Alice herself did. And that S was the one to tell her that there was a way to read encrypted private messages if she filched the codeletter from the message-tag, then thought about it long enough. They both loved the clacks, like all real workers; unlike most others, they didn't care about the hinges and the shutters, the wondrous complex mechanics of it. What mattered to them was the code, the way it could take information, break it down into easily portable elements and then reassemble it. They developed their own shorthand code so their messages looked like the erratic meaningless junk code that sometimes accumulated in the Overhead messages: for the last year, they have been talking, trading concise letters in the strange half-Morporkian pidgin everyone spoke down the line, regardless of the language that was their own. Their messages took multiple days to find their recipient, and every time Alice (or A, as she signed her short missives) shifted code, she was waiting for a reply to turn up.
She wasn't disappointed in S's answer to the news: they shared her enthusiasm for new developments, and said it gave them ideas about tampering with message sources. S also pointed out something she would have never have thought of on her own – that the Grand Trunk was out of the hands of Reacher Gilt and soon, everything would change for the better.
Since this was Upper Überwald, where the roads are difficult in the summer and impassable in the winter, the word 'soon' had a very relative meaning. It was more than four months later when a coach showed up, and three tired-looking Morporkians clambered out to inspect Tower 181. They introduced themselves as Mad Al, Sane Alex and Undecided Adrian from the Grand Trunk, and they said they were having a look at every single tower so they could plan the Great Repairs. The one who called himself Sane Alex clambered up the tower, opened and closed all the shutters, pulled at all the ropes, jumped on all the floorboards, said 'tut, tut' and took notes on a neat little notepad. Undecided Adrian sat down with Grandpa, who was the senior member of the tower crew at the ancient age of twenty-six years, asked him lots of difficult questions about downtime and back payments, and drank three mugs of sweet hot tea. But the one they called Mad Al just looked around quietly until he found Princess, shifting code at the top of the tower. They proceeded to talk about what she was doing, which was quite difficult considering he spoke no Überwaldian and her Morporkian was far from perfect. The conversation consisted mostly of numbers, numbers that were flying in the air and numbers that were safely preserved on paper and numbers that were still in people's heads, numbers that really were letters or colours or sounds, or even numbers that told other numbers what to do. Before leaving, he said 'Little girl, we could do with a mind like yours in Ankh-Morpork. You show up there, people will think you are the bee's knees, you are the cat's pajamas.' She didn't really mind being compared to insectoid appendages or feline sleepwear – after all, it is the sort of thing you expect from a man who calls himself Mad.
They had to wait another six months for the new tower, but once the workers arrived, it was up in a week: it was made of sturdy Überwaldian pinewood and painted with red-and-white stripes of waterproof paint. It was far more graceful than the old one, its semaphores blinking and swaying the message with sleek, slick movements. It took Princess a few weeks to get used to its workings, its coloured alchemical flares and complicated pulley system, but in the end she could shift code twice as fast as she used to. The other great advantage of the new towers was that unlike the old ones, they hardly ever attracted birds. But people were so used to it happening that every time something went wrong, they still rolled their eyes, sighing 'bird again', and minor repairs of rope tangles and miscodes were still called debirding.
Three months after the Great Repairs, there was a flurry of excitement and alarm running down the clacks likes: the Ribbon Collectors were back in Überwald. Princess had never liked them – they were a group clad all in green, numbering a few hundred, mostly men, mostly well-trained and always well-armed, mostly from the big cities on the plains, and their sole purpose was to collect the Black Ribbons of the teetotaller vampires they killed. As far as she knew, they hated all vampires, but especially despised the ones who tried to integrate into the daylight world, who tried to pretend they weren't depraved bloodthirsty animals. Princess knew only one vampire, from the time when she worked in a tavern, and he didn't seem like a depraved bloodthirsty animal – in fact, he was an unfailingly polite young man who never trod mud on the carpet and always tipped well. So she decided to take the Ribbon Collectors down.
She wrote S, asking if they wanted to test that theory about changing the source of a message. It took them one day to break into the internal c-mail system of the Ribboners, another to figure out where they kept their funds that paid for their travels, their weapons and their bribery of law enforcement officers. In another two weeks, they built a message that would work, although they had to ask for the help of some on-clacks acquaintances including two Ankh-Morpork bankers, a Quirmian swindler and a Borogravian preacher to help with the translation. (Many people asked the clacksmen for favours – to delay a transmission, to reveal a source, to crack a message – and all favours need to be repaid.) The resulting message was both a command and legally binding contract, including a string of numbers that meant money, a string of numbers that meant the Ribbon Collectors, and a string of numbers that meant the personal signature of the Chairman of the PrinzessinMarienGutenMorgenBad savings bank. S came up with a way to route it through Sto Lat, Klatch and the Ramtops so it would appear that the Second Lieutenant of the Ribbon Collectors sent it himself, with a time delay small enough that it could be blamed on birds.
She sent it as soon as it was ready, on a foggy and otherwise rather unremarkable Octeday. She was exhausted, but she could hardly sleep for the next few days – she had nightmares of the Bonk police coming up the tower to drag her away into prison, and she awoke clutching the railing on the platform where she dozed off, whining that she didn't mean to do it. The news came two days later: the Ribbon Collectors disbanded after their First Lieutenant publicly assaulted their Second Lieutenant with a crossbow. The motive for the altercation was that the latter chose to irrevocably donate the organisation's entire wealth to the Most Accountable and Reasonable Association of Our Omnian Brothers, Sisters and Spiritual Siblings of Other Numerous Genders United in the Cause of Heavenly Charity. Alice could hardly believe her eyes – the trick had worked, and nobody could trace it to them! The only unfortunate side effect of this victory was that she could not keep the grin off her face, and each time someone asked what she was smiling about, her explanations became more and more incoherent.
This was only the beginning. Now, she and S really got to work. They both had their real work to do too, twelve-hour stints in the coding chair and maintenance and cleaning, but in the short bursts of time they were allowed to have, they figured out increasingly elaborate ways to create something, then hide the stitches. They made things then tested them, but always starting harmless and small. They didn't want to repeat the risk they took with the savings bank; after all, that had been luck, and even lightning should remember that lightning doesn't strike twice. They had fun, though, and they kept learning. They made a message that transferred a single penny from one bank to another without alerting anyone. They encoded the tune of 'The Hedgehog Cannot Be Buggered at All' into numbers, and sent it to a major clerk's office. They sent out a Hogswatch greeting that re-sent itself to everyone that person ever connected on clacks, and it spread to the point that the official owner of the Grand Trunk, Adora Belle Dearhart herself, had to make a public statement, claiming that the project was their gift to their customers. Then she wished everyone a happy Hogswatch with a murderous expression.
But the best thing they came up with was the Flock. The idea arrived when war broke out in Borogravia. Alice herself wasn't from Borogravia, but Roger was, and he shifted code clumsier and heavier every day he didn't get news of his parents, his older sisters.
'What are they fighting for anyway?' asked Alice. Roger just laughed, or at least tried to laugh. A war never for anything, it was always against something, and this time it was against the Margrave of Laandgraab. Serfs like Roger's family couldn't care less about him signing trade treaties with Zlobenia, but the Borogravian War Council decided it was enough reason to send in the troops.
'Want to help me stop a war?' she asked S that night, and they said yes next morning. She knew that all troop movements were coordinated via the clacks – and whoever had control of the clacks had control of the troops. All she had to do was cut off that connection, and both the armies and the headquarters would be lost. S and her stayed up all night to write a string of letters that made the chemical flares stutter and blink out, requiring fifteen minutes and a steep climb to be lit again, and what was the best about it was that it looked like an accident, a glitch, like it was just another bird. She managed to get the position of the Borogravians from an anonymous source only calling themselves 'Mal' and the position of the Laandgraab army was made pretty obvious by the huge castle they were encamped in. All Alice and S did was take every message written in military code, and add the script that forced all towers to shut down instead of patching the message through. All civilian messages passed through just fine, but all military communications were struck deaf and dumb – they gave order after order to attack, but in vain. The troops were left without instructions just when winter was falling and the roads became impassable.
When spring came, and the first daring horseman made it from the Borogravian headquarters to the disputed territory where the army was seen, he found them safely ensconced in Laandgraab castle, alongside Laandgraab's own soldiers. It turned out two sergeants from the Borogravian side had trekked across the snow to hammer out a makeshift peace with the Laandgrabians, offering a share of their supplies in exchange for shelter and warmth in the castle. By the time the generals took control again, the Laandgraab conflict was officially resolved. Alice deleted the script that silenced the army, and the orders roared through the clacks: come home already and stop making us look ridiculous.
On a damp spring day, the prophetess of the Borogravian people stepped out in front of her people, flanked by the military command, and declared that the war was finally over, that the failure of the clacks was not a misfortune, but indeed a blessing in the hour of great need. Soldiers went home, as did refugees. Road were reopened, houses rebuilt, and Roger's family prepared for another harsh but peaceful year of farming beets.
People kept wondering about the clacks. Some thought it was the Borogravian snowstorms, or the will of patient god Om, or the revenge of the bloody annoying god Nuggan, or treachery in the upper echelons of the Borogravian army, but nobody claimed to know for sure. The official explanation was that it was a mere case of birds, but when the Morporkian news team arrived to interview the local clacksmen, one Hermann Grendelssohn was quoted saying 'It weren't no bird, sir! And if it was, it was an entire flock!' For the next week, newspapers all over the Disc talked about the mysterious Flock that defeated two armies and brought peace to their small sharp-teethed countries.
Alice couldn't believe it. They did it. They did it again. Their victory over the Ribbon Collectors wasn't luck – it was them. Princess wanted to tell S how she felt, the terrified exhilaration of having done something that changed something, of having done something that mattered to someone, but her feeble attempts didn't translate well, and she was never one for words anyway. So she said – S, it's like we could flip the whole disc like a coin. And S sent back the letters X and D, forming a laughing face, like they understood. They had never seen each other, but that late windy afternoon it felt as if they had been sitting side-by-side, shoulders brushing as their feet dangled off the edge of the world. Princess didn't know what that was apart from a boundless triumphant happiness, but when she recalled that moment years later, she could give it no other name than love.
By this time, Princess was fifteen, and she was running the tower with only Roger, the new towermaster and Wheezy, the mechanic. She still worked in half-day shifts, she still lived on dry bread and cold potato soup, she still wore the same overlarge man's coat, but she felt invincible. If a politician said one thing in public and another in private, he could find his correspondence sent to every clacks address in his constituency. If a preacher preached hate, she received increasingly irate messages from her god. If rich men thought they were above the law, the nearby watch departments were sent elaborate reports on their movements, as traced by their clacks usage. Some of what Princess and S did went unnoticed by anyone apart from the people who were targeted, some were so visible that entire countries wondered if it was divine judgement, and only an editorialist at the Ankh-Morpork Times, some woman named Sacharissa, wondered if inexplicable clacks malfunctions could be connected to whatever, or whoever, caused the Flock.
These years were the best in her life. She lived on twenty square feet in the middle platform of Tower 181, hardly setting foot on solid ground anymore, but she spent her days flying. She and S, they could touch anyone and make them do anything and nobody could stop them. Or at least she thought so, until the letter arrived. It came from an unknown address, it was under far heavier encryption than what she and S used amongst themselves, and it was far shorter than the rambling theoretical conversations they had those days. It took her hours to decode it, and what she read felt as if the entire tower had collapsed on top of her.
ON THE RUN. ARREST IMMINENT. ILLEGAL CLACKSCRAFT. WONT SAY WHERE. STAY SAFE LOVE AND SEND ME HOME. S.
What could she do? She wanted to trace the message to its origin point, but it was cleverly re-routed through so many clacks around the Disc that trail doubled back on itself, and she couldn't find it again. She tried writing back to the same address, and she got the automated reply that the account was terminated. S was gone, and what was worse, S didn't ask her for help or a rescue, only to send them home. Every clacksman knew what sending home meant: taking the name of a dead comrade, putting it on the overhead where the maintenance and meta-messages travelled, and sending it back to their town of birth, so even if their body was buried in foreign ground, their name and their soul rested peaceful at home. S didn't expect to survive whatever had happened. But how could she send S home if she didn't even know what their full name was?
She knew there was nothing she could do, but she refused to give up. She kept looking. She read all news reports that entered the clacksline, she cracked the encryption on military intelligence, she even broke into the private communications of Lord Vetinari, but she found nothing. Then again, she didn't know what she was looking for: if S was a man or a woman, if S came from the Ramtops or Agatea, if S was wanted by a watch or a king, and in the end she started doubting if S was even a flesh-and-blood person like her. She had nothing to go on, no word from S, and no scandal connected to the clacks anywhere on the Disc, no mayhem with S's fingerprints on it. More than four months after that last letter, she walked up to the top of the tower, sat down in her chair, wrote a sequence that made a message circulate indefinitely in the overhead, and then added the message itself, a single letter S. After a moment of thought, she also added the mathematical sign and the number 3 before sending it out into the unrelenting winds above the Disc. Then she climbed down the ladder, told Roger she was quitting, picked up the small bag that held all her worldly possessions, gave Wheezy Halfsides a firm, affectionate headbutt, and left the lucky Tower 181.
She knew what she had to do. S was the only person who understood her, or, for that matter, the only person she understood. And if she couldn't find S, maybe she could make S find her. All she needed to do was go bigger than she had ever done before, to take the risks she never took before, and the only reason she couldn't do this from her own tower is that she didn't want to get anyone into trouble. So she walked to Carolingburg, took the first job she was offered which happened to be dishwashing, and got to work. She didn't have the clacks anymore, but she could still write messages in her own hand, and pay a handful of small change to send them. She revealed the infidelity of an Omnian high priest and the corruption of the Sto Lat Vice-chancellor, both of them with sending loud and theatrical denunciations to all noteworthy newspapers on the plains. When one of the newspapers, the Quirmian Questioner, published an article claiming her accusations were fraudulent, she attacked them in turn – every clacks message they tried to send turned into the letters QQ, crippling their news empire until they published her message with a grovelling apology.
Princess smiled and moved on – a scullery maid spending her hard-earned coins on sending nonsensical strings of numbers on the clacks, that had to be suspicious. She walked from town to town, never straying too far from the main clacksline, but never talking to the clacksmen directly either, taking whatever jobs were offered to an untrained but hardworking young woman. She waited tables, she cleaned stables, she peeled potatoes and brewed beer, and she kept waiting for S to notice what she was doing. She uncovered conspiracies and punished wrongdoers and worked harder than she ever did, but S didn't appear.
It took about a year for her to get desperate, and start showing off in earnest. She wrote little programs in her head while she worked, she scribbled them on paper, she sent them at the nearest clacks station, then she skipped town. She stopped caring about safety or elegance or morality. She lashed out blindly in hope S would do something, even if that something was telling her off or making her stop. She remade the Flock, and set it at everyone in her way. She paralyzed the entire Ramtops clacks system just because she could. Then she did the same to the much larger network in Sto Helit. She sent 100 random people decryption codes that unlocked the personal messages of anyone they targeted, and laughed at the series of scandals that ensued. She stopped work and just took money from banks and cities and rich people, she figured it didn't matter much since most of them didn't even notice the hefty sums they kept sending to post offices in small Überwaldian towns. Princess attacked anyone and everyone, ruining clackstowers, redirecting thousands of messages, isolating countries, causing unbelievable damage, but S still didn't reply.
S didn't, but the watches and clacksmen and investors started putting the picture together – that the clacks malfunctions were no accident – and the newspapers spoke of the mysterious Flocker who took down the towers for his own reasons. Some said the Flocker did it for money, some said it was for fame, some suggested diverse political agendas, and none of them thought of wild desperation as a possible motive. But Princess was desperate – she threw larger and larger stones into the still water of the clacksphere, making wider and wider rings of ripples, and she still couldn't find her friend – all she found were enemies, bankers putting out ransoms for her and clerks shifting through the code to find her footsteps and watchmen questioning innkeepers. When a group of ducal bounty-hunters almost caught up with her in the city of Glurgeburg, she knew she had stretched her luck.
For the next few months, she took to the woods. In retrospect, that had been a rather foolish idea, considering she had no knowledge or experience of living anywhere outside cities. She could have died, had she not run into some orcs. (Although she was aware that in most cases, that sentence worked the other way round.) These orcs seemed not only peaceful but downright welcoming, and they were very careful to only tear people's heads off after due warning. They also spoke some standard Überwaldian in addition to their native tongue, and told Princess stories about the two wanderers who taught them crafts and protected them from the humans: a wise-speaking orc and a plump, kind-hearted human woman. It seemed a strange story, but Princess had seen stranger, and anyway she was far more interested in the way orcs counted days: eight fingers and eight toes made for sixteen numbers. She learned their way of numberworking, and set off on her way.
Once she re-entered the world of men, she saw that after six months, people still haven't forgotten about the Flocker, but at least they stopped putting up wanted posters. (The wanted posters were not much use anyway, since they had a line of question marks in place of the name, and a large question mark in place of the picture.) She didn't feel like being the Flocker anymore, now that she knew it wouldn't do her any good, so she became Alice again, for want of a better person to be. She travelled, she took jobs just to avoid suspicion, while skimming off small sums of banks' wealth. She filled scraps of paper with scrawled sets of numbers, trying to talk in sixteens like the orcs did, and she kept moving.
She travelled alone, and she thought it was for the best, until she met Jenon. Jenon was a musician, a travelling fiddler, walking from village to village to play at weddings and feasts and funerals, and he had black hair that bristled in the back and he turned up the linen sleeves of his shirts above the elbow, and his voice sounded close and warm and he always smelled a little like hay, and when he kissed her underneath the smoky midsummer sky, she knew she never wanted to be apart from him. She followed him on his travels, took whatever work she could, cleaned his boots and whistled his songs, and she was content with this life of uncertain shelter and untrustworthy food. She was in love, after all, so in love that one evening, laying wrapped in the same worn blanket as Jenon, sweaty and sated and drifting off to sleep, she whispered to him the greatest secret she had.
'You? The Flocker?' he gasped, and then started laughing in earnest. He laughed and laughed, his beautiful face contorted with mirth, his chuckles rumbling in his chest. It took him a long time to calm down enough to add 'And I thought you had no sense of humour!'
She tried to tell him again, to insist, to prove, to plead, after all it was the only thing she could give him. She was a bastard child of a peasant woman, homeless, and at the moment penniless, her body sharp and angular, her voice toneless and her movements graceless. Her command of numbers and clacks and liquidly flowing information was the only part of her she thought really worth of love, it was the part someone else had loved before. But he just smiled at her in a sort of fond belittling annoyance, and his laughter got softer and softer as he drifted off to sleep.
She should have stayed, but she could not make herself look at him again without shaking with humiliated disappointment. So she put on her travelling boots again, picked up her bag, gave him a wistful kiss on the forehead, and walked away in the dead of the night. She reached the town of Bad Blintz early next morning, barged into the clacksman's office the second it opened, and dictated a sequence of words and numbers she came up with on the way. She didn't even need to write it down, she knew it would work, and it did. In one week, the entirety of Upper Überwald was plastered with wanted posters, seeking one Jenon Karpentir for attempting unholy union with goats. Unlike the posters for the Flocker, these ones had pictures.
Winter came as a shapeless colourless dream. She reached the town of Bad Blintz, holed up in a small attic room, and did nothing. At first, she found the duality of the city quite interesting – the city of rats existed under the city of humans, and the two worked together in remarkable harmony, although they often had to resort to committees. But she couldn't find the strength to do much of anything. She left the clacks, so she could no longer shift code. She lost S, and there was no point in numbercraft if she could show it to nobody. She left Jenon, and she had nobody to keep her warm and shake her out of the slowly settling quiet. She didn't know if she still had the knowing of the flowing code, but she couldn't see herself as a person if the clackslines weren't drumming their insistent messages in the back of her head. She spent most of her days asleep, her nights half-dozing in bed or aimlessly pacing up and down, and leaving the room only in the early morning hours to buy herself some bread, some cheese and the local speciality, sugar-rats, with the money a corrupt charity organisation in Genua was still sending her to ensure her silence.
Seasons passed unremarked, uneasy. Things seemed like they would never change, until the fishhead-pie she bought for her dinner came wrapped in a newspaper, and a short report peeking out from underneath a patch of greasy sauce informed her of the foundation of the Upperweb project. Apparently some wizards in Ankh-Morpork put together a machine that could think. That sounded improbable, but she knew better than to question the actions of wizards. But their newest idea was to create more such machines, and to connect them to the clacks system. 'The end result would be some sort of a web.' – explained the lead researcher called Ponder Stibbons. 'A web made of knowledge that can be accessed from any point of the clacks system because it isn't strictly speaking somewhere, it is anywhere, above the world.'
Alice didn't even need to make the decision to go to Ankh-Morpork, she immediately knew she would. There was nothing keeping her in Bad Blintz, or anywhere else for that matter, and people in Ankh-Morpork were asking the sort of questions she was good at answering. She packed a small travelling bag, bought some sturdy second-hand boots, and set off. She took post-coaches when she could find the money, she walked when she couldn't, she accepted rides on broomsticks and cabbage carts and underground dwarf barges, and she came to the gates of Ankh-Morpork in the early days of a sooty, mucky winter.
The first thing she did was walk to the High Energy Magic Building and ask to be let in. They turned her away when she said she wanted to talk to Ponder Stibbons, and she found that she wasn't even surprised – she didn't look respectable or even very clean, and her thick Überwald accent incited immediate distrust in everyone she addressed. So she got the smallest, smelliest room in the cheapest boarding house she could find, and set to work on brushing the dust off the numbers she used to think in. Going by the clacks-order deliveries, (mostly greasy Genuan pizza) it took her less than a day to infer Ponder Stibbons's home address, and she showed up there late in the evening, having also unearthed the information that Ponder rarely arrived home before midnight.
The clocks of the Unseen University were tolling a single peal of silence to signal it was one o'clock in the morning when the wizard showed up. He didn't look like much of a wizard – he was relatively young-ish, with no beard, and not a respectable amount of stomach. Also, he was wearing a T-shirt with a terribly ugly drawing of a spider with UW written on its thorax. The first thing she ever said to Mr Stibbons was 'I want to work on the Upperweb project.' The first thing Mr Stibbons said to her was 'Aaagh!', and in retrospect it may not have been a good idea to stand in a shadows while having an Überwald accent. So she stepped out into the light, and repeated it.
He seemed confused, so she unconfused him as fast as she could, by rattling off the clacks script that caused the simplest type of Flock to form. He blinked, surprised, repeated the code to himself, then looked her over, a wiry young woman with weather-worn clothes and unwashed hair. He stated 'you are a woman' as if this was something to be got out of the way, but as he scrubbed a tired hand over his eyes, it was clear that his pragmatism was stronger than his prejudice.
'You are going to have to wear the T-shirt.' He said, and she found no reason to argue with that.
The very next day, she showed up to at the High Energy Magic Building in the shirt Ponder lent her, and she started work immediately. The others were mostly young, mostly wizards apart from a few ant-movement-technicians, all of them men. Nevertheless Alice fit in right away. The rocket wizards explained her the basics of Hex's system and pointed her in the direction of their clacks-related problems, treating her as if she had always been there, and they didn't really seem to mind that she was a woman. It might have been the shirt – it was the shirt everybody else wore, and admittedly it made everybody the same shape.
Ponder was an acceptable boss – he didn't interfere much with what she was doing, he took her side when she tried to convert the other wizards to counting in sixteens instead of tens, and he made sure she received an acceptable salary, enough to rent a slightly less small and less smelly room, and to buy herself food when she had enough of the Klatchian take-out, the Genuan pizzas and the Dwarvish food everybody else ate out of paper boxes at odd hours in the morning. She worked on Hex, and the way its information could be transferred onto the clacks, and while she often hit walls, she always punched through them.
She wasn't the only girl on the team for long – soon, two rogue sciencers from Howondaland arrived, declared that they wanted to collaborate on the UpperWeb and accidentally dropped a jam jar that upon breaking turned out to be full of spiders. After he shook all the spiders out of his robes and stopped whimpering, Ponder Stibbons gave them a hearty welcome. He had to, because they invented something extremely interesting: they taught silkspiders to make and destroy pictures, a far more efficient interface than painting goblins or magic mirrors. Slender, cloudy-haired Blue talked to the spiders, and stocky, bearded Ref wrote the codes. Well, Blue and Ref weren't their full names, but they chose to be called that, since they had introduced themselves as Blue Flower With A Name That Does Not Translate and Reference To A Mythical Hero Not Known In Your Culture, respectively. Alice liked them, especially when they commiserated with her when she complained of Morporkian weather, although they found it too cold while she suffered because of the heat.
In the following years, Ankh-Morpork officially became the centre of hexcraft. Ponder always scowled in a frustrated way and started to explain that only the original machine was called HEX and the others would receive a better name, but Alice secretly suspected he found it flattering. Ankh-Morpork was the center of Hexcraft, and if anyone wanted to know anything about, or hexes, or codes, they would come to the High Energy Magic Building to ask. They hexers, as they took to calling themselves, lived in a flurry of numbers written on parchments, whiteboards and napkins, of spiderwebs and ants and ram skulls and horrifyingly ugly teambuilding T-shirts, and in the intoxicating knowledge that nobody on the disc would understand the things they were talking about. (Well, apart from the scholars of High Place Big Think, and everybody agreed that they didn't count – their scholars were trolls zealous for knowledge, who climbed up to the Hub mountains to freeze themselves near-dead, coming up with brilliant formulae they themselves wouldn't understand the next day.)
It was a brilliant three years. There was work, lots of it, and all of it interesting. There were people, and strange they may have been, but they were definitely interesting too. None of them had much of a connection with the outside world, the world with people and trees and suchlike – they preferred numbers and ideas and that was fine with her. They brewed Klatchian coffee, ate takeout and sickly-sweet Howondaland biscuits, communicated in an increasingly complicated lingo that made the clacksmen's jargon appear a toddler's babble and they took a shy sort of pride in working on this project together, in being hexers, even if nobody outside that job description cared what that meant. After the first few months, Alice hardly went home to her tiny hired flat, preferring to collapse on the couch in the corner of the hexing room whenever the numbers started swimming in front of her eyes too much. It became her home, their pidgin became her native tongue, their baggy jeans and ugly T-shirts became her uniform.
In three years, with Ponder's construction of smaller anthills, the Howonda spider-based interface, some theoretical diagrams from High Place Big Think and Alice's coding innovations, the first Hexbox was ready to connect to the Upperweb. The system was so simple, so intuitive that even an idiot could use it. (And they knew, because they had tried it out on the Archchancellor.) After the announcement of their success, there was calm for a little while. And then it all exploded in a confusingly positive way. Everybody wanted to have a hexbox, everybody talked about hexboxes, genuans were already trying to built a cheaper version called charmtrunk, all big companies wanted their records transferred to a hexbox and made available by clacks, all newspapers clamoured for UpperWeb access to get their material early and their corrections prompt, everybody was either interested or enthusiastically faking interest, and of course, they wanted to know who the rocket scientists were who invented it all. There were interviews. There was photography. There were lots of rocket wizards, shut-in hexers who never expected to be looked at in their life, awkwardly shuffling this way and that way under the strict instructions of a caped photographer whose Überwald accent was even thicker than hers. When the newspaper man asked her name so they could write it underneath the picture, she hesitated. She didn't know her father's name, she wasn't entitled to her mother's, and she felt unwilling to call herself by the slur she left behind more than a decade ago, even in the knowledge that Ankh-Morpork wouldn't understand it, and would probably mispronounce it. So she just said 'oh, on tower 181 everybody just called me Princess' which was technically true. The next day her picture in Ankh Morpork Times was subtitled 'Princess Alice von 181'.
At first, everybody had questions about the Upperweb, and then they just had problems, and then they just had lists of demands and things they wanted fixed immediately. The others on the team threw themselves headfirst into troubleshooting, into oiling this machine of theirs into perfectly smooth operation. Alice tried to do that too, and it took her months to realise she was lethally bored. But since she didn't have anything to do, she kept showing up and helping out, because she cared for the people if not the project.
It must have been the boredom that took her edge so much that she didn't even flinch when the Watch came for her. When one morning an extremely polite troll showed up on her doorstep, (well, not exactly her doorstep, he couldn't fit that far in the corridor) and escorted her to the precinct, she was merely baffled. When she was ushered into Sir Samuel Vimes's office, a wave of cold dread hit her, and she wondered if she was finally paying for her one off-track year as the Flocker. But when a tired and irritated-looking Vimes told her about the rise in c-crime and the city's current inability to do anything about it, she found it difficult not to grin a huge childish grin of enthusiasm. She had work again, and what work! She looked through files and records and reports and transcripts all day long to find the origin point of crimes. These people called themselves flockers, and she found that ridiculous, because most of them were rather clumsy – nothing like the easy elegance of her code with S. Still, they did considerable damage, transferring money, erasing messages and tangling semaphores. The ones who disappointed her she stopped and handed over to the Watch with a quick note about their name and address. The ones that disturbed her, like that man selling sneak photographs, she obliterated. She stockpiled proof, she found out where they lived, where they worked, where they shopped so they had no means of eluding the watch. But the ones that impressed her, that were funny and fast and harmless and original – those she shut down herself, with a brief message on what to do better next time.
She still met up with the rocket scientists every Octeday to drink machine-cleaning alcohol and play Howondaland Hopscotch, a game based on colourful spots, a spinning dial and careful placement of limbs. She was still friends with them, but she could not stay still, and now her life changed into full days at the Watchhouse poring over endless fascinatingly incomprehensible lists, drinking a slightly different variety of terrible coffee, and explaining her findings to the wide-eyed new recruits taking notes as if her every word was vital to their survival. She didn't have a badge, she hadn't taken an oath, but she was allowed to wear a spectacularly ugly sash that said 'Civilian Person Assisting Ankh Morpork City Watch on Official Business.'
Sometimes she had calls from abroad – local watches heard about Ankh-Morpork stamping out c-crime like a hysterical man stomping on a mouse, and since they blamed the city for the existence of flockers anyway, they kept bothering Mister Vimes about it. And Vimes usually just sent somebody to dump the paperwork on her table. Occasionally, she even had to travel - the Sto Lat stamp robbery and the Lancre spellsending were so serious that she needed to examine the clacks towers in question to be sure of the identity of the wrongdoers (a rather single-minded stamp enthusiast and a young girl claiming to be controlled by elves, respectively.) She was Alice von 181, troubleshooter and flockerhunter, wearing witty rocket wizardry T-shirts, messy pony-tails and fingerless hexer-gloves, respected by all and feared by criminals. She was needed again, useful, like she had been on the tower, and she was almost as happy as she had been up there. Sometimes it bothered her that nobody knew that the person to catch flockers was the one who inspired them in the first place, but then she found a new riddle, a new question, and the feeling passed.
'I'm sending you to Klatch.' Said an ever-more-than-normally-tired Vimes on an even-more-than-normally-rainy morning. '71-hour Ahmed has another one.'
'Another what?' she asked.
'Another case when he can't tell if the stupid bastard is one of his or one of mine.'
He threw her the files, and she couldn't help gasping aloud when she read them. This code was familiar. It was familiar like the footsteps of a friend or the heartbeat of a lover – it was as if she herself had written it. She read on. It was baffling. They weren't doing anything harmful, but made it obvious that they could if they wanted to. They shut down banks and businesses and newspapers and churches and royal administration for whole hours, leaving messages but taking nothing. They attacked everyone with power who they thought was misusing that power, who was silent about the suffering of others or misled its believers or cheated its customers or lied to its subjects. They started out in Klatch, then spread, all over Überwald and Howondaland and set to reach Ankh Morpork. They made demands, but unlike other flockers, they didn't want money or revenge or safe passage – they just wanted people to think about how they were living, to think about other people, to think for themselves. To realise that in the age of the UpperWeb, they do not even need to fight for power, only reach out and take it.
They called themselves the Nameless Ones, and never gave away anything of their identity, not their numbers or names or locations. They were genuinely, distressingly, breathtakingly good. So very good. Alice wiped her forehead with a shaky hand, and read their mission statement again. 'Many of you suffer without knowing the reason, many of you are punished without knowing the crime. The world has become an unjust place, but now it is within our power to right the wrongs that have been done. To flip the whole disc like a coin.'
Alice took a deep breath, dropped her head in her hands, and for the next ten minutes, she very deliberately did not cry. Then she put on her 'Civilian Person Assisting Ankh Morpork City Watch on Official Business' sash, and got on the first post coach to Klatch. She smiled to herself at the thought that whatever else may have happened, S was still alive, and smiled even wider at the thought that her three years with rocket wizards and two years of police work in addition to her time on the tower made her the perfect person to find them. And she had to laugh when she thought of what she would do when she met S, when she saw S both again and for the first time, because despite everything else that may have happened, she knew S. would be just as glad to see her as she was to see them.
And she also knew what to do about the Nameless Ones. Why defeat a revolution when you can get the city of Ankh-Morpork to finance it?
THE END