Tag Archives: Billy Clockwork^*++++#

00480612

Citrus fruit loving Philip was pleased the lemonade stand was still there on Infinity Lane but had no time today to stop. Must hurry! “Sorry, Bart!” he calls over while sprinting by. “Maybe next time!” he shouts back, already a blur in the distance to the boy colored the same as the product he sells and who still couldn’t sit while he works because of the broken chair that came with the stand. Where’s tireless former robot co-worker Billy Clockwork when you need him? he always frets around the 4 hour mark on any full shift these days. But it was off to the big city for him when he graduated local Nawt Vaya State University with a degree in economic ergonomics, a bunch of real life experience piled up by working with Bartholomew before, between and after classes. He’d learned a lot in both, enough to get him a 6 figure salary right off the bat. We probably don’t have time or space to get into his story in this here photo-novel, rapidly coming to a close (I hope!), but I believe he lives up in the middle of the Nautilus continent. Or was that Nautilus Island? Anyway, back to Philip. With all that writing I just did he’s now had enough time in space to make his way up to Sep Felton’s haircutting establishment more in the northern part of Juho city. He stops at the door, bent over because of lack of oxygen and unable to speak at first, then straightens up and manages: “Nada New Year? (pant pant) Know? (pant) anything about? (pant pant pant) her?”

“Whereabouts?” Sep completes Philip’s assumed sentence. “Here,” and she pivots the barbershop chair she stands behind 90 degrees to reveal the worst for Philip. “Pink? PINK?” But then he realizes he must back pedal the insensitive utterance. Fast! “LOVE IT!”

“*Wait,” mischievously smiling Sep says playfully. “My mistake. This is *Lexi*. Nada is over *there*.” And an at first relieved Philip stares into the darkened corner of the stylist shop she indicated only to see… but just then my computer crashes ARRRRGH. (TBC?)

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0048, 0612, Jeogeot, Juho, Nawt Vaya

00450701 (a new high and low of it all 03)

“My friend Bart got tired of standing so I took over,” Billy Clockwork explained about his presence at the lemonade stand instead of the boy Newt encountered before here. “Seat’s broke, you see,” he said, indicating the fold out chair beside him. “Go ahead. Try it out if you don’t believe me.” So he did.

Next thing he knew he was in a room of unknown location, fire burning brightly in the hearth beside him. “Hi,” it said in a flamey voice, fittingly enough, low but rich with energy. “I guess you’re wondering what just happened.”

—–

Meanwhile, below, further below than you might think, Wheeler sits beside the other fire of the castle, the one just delivered by Philip The Other who was promptly rewarded with a nice, tall glass of lemonade freshly squeezed from a Juho citrus tree, along with his choice of a new girlfriend, 3 willing candidates in attendance.

I believe he might have his eye more on Nada New Year across from him than the other 2, which is a good choice considering she’s actually another avatar and not just a 3d dummy unable to respond to his many emotional needs. Yes, he has needs, and current roommate Lexi is not the one to meet the most important of them, which, of course, Wheeler understands. Being that she’s also (Lexi’s current love interest) Shelley.

(to be continued)

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0045, 0701, Jeogeot, Juho, Nawt Vaya, NVFS

00450202

Just enjoying a drink beside some pretty fluttering butterflies at Pan Estates Regional Center while waiting for my ordered money to be deposited into my account so I can pay my rent for the week. Yeah, I still have my Aisle of Palms virtual village set up in Mugunghwa over on the Jeogeot continent. Can’t quite seem to let go of it. Next decision date is 12/16/24 — next Monday.  Maybe I should start saving my builds over there earlier so the decision will come easier. Because I have to derezz the place. Don’t I? I think I do. The Baker Family of (Our Second Lyfe) avatars is already spending the money I’ll save. Well, Wheeler is spending the money. More expensive furnishings in her new, basically free house in lower upper left right central Nautilus. “Let’s hope it stays longer this time,” were the last words I’ve heard from her about it.  Edward D. is over there too. They bought some kind of crazy bookshelf, he said to me the last time I checked in with him as well. Tends to deform their bodies with its built-in crazy animations like martial arts, zombies, and drunkenness, he said, so they might have to send it back. Said they also bought a barrel of fairly expensive wine from somewhere called Touisant, but I knew this was a lie. Wine, yes. Barrel, yes. But not from that place with the Witcher. Not really.

Well the money shows up online but not in my in game account. Looks like I’ll have to log out and then back in to get the cash. Goodbye for now!

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0045, 0202, Big Woods, Heterocera, Jeogeot, Witcher

00450106

I see the Wall the Wall sees me.

—–

“Find anything?!”

“Gold!”

“Yeah, it’s out here!” the silhouetted man calls back from the distance.

“Just laying around! Like rocks!”

“Yuup!”

“So why aren’t there…?! I mean…!”

“Why aren’t there more people around, then?!”

“Yeah!”

“Because it’s fool’s gold you fool! fool’s gold you fool! fool’s gold you fool!”

—–

Fern wakes up under the umbrella the color of TILE. Desert dreams. Badlands. There’s actually only her out here… and Billy, who doesn’t really count since he’s a 3-4 foot, chrome plated mechanoid. He observes with bright, electric blue, pupil-less eyes her awakening not 3 feet away, out of the shade and into the sun. If he stretched out in place, he could almost prop his shadowed, robotic feet up on her torso. “Hi” he metes out as is his duty, and adds a little glinty morning salute to his sunny smile. “Cereal and milk has already been poured in that order. Just like you like.” He winks and his smile also appears to glint like his arm did before. Fern checks her watch (not on her arm?). 9 o’clock. She overslept by an hour and Billy was ready at 8. Can’t blame him for the sogginess then, pheh. Just following orders. She makes a mental note, to add to those orders, to rouse her at the appointed time and not let her sleep late. But for this morning, limp Toasty-O’s Snakes and Ladders pepper and mint flavored breakfast in heavily colored red and green milk to make gray it is.

He washed Fern’s bowl without water, using the sandpaper hand attachment #4 to do the job. Ceramic would hold up under this finer abrasion, he knew. But what happened to all the water? He had produced soo much of it with his endless waterfall toward the end of photo-novel 44, the last installment in our series and also perhaps perpetual it seems. At least I don’t see an end anywhere in sight using my future vision. I’ll switch it off now; back to the present.

After being unable to sand out a particularly persistent stain in the required time according to his inner clockwork, Billy cusses in his peculiar robot vernacular (“Nuts and Bolts!” I believe it was) and throws the bowl into the gorge next to them and proceeds to fashion another from the local clay. Will take him all morning, Fern reckons. Time for her to explore the hills around here without being followed everywhere. She’ll enjoy the isolation.

In the middle of the desert which was also its edge, she soon comes across this military grade helicopter, not so much landed here as crashed — both at once. Philip Stevor was working on one of the broken landing wheels presently. She approached, recognizing the figure. But why was he *here*? In the desert? Outside Nightsity?

“Cpt.,” she said about 10 feet away, unnoticed in approaching the chopper and addressing him the way she always did. He drew his gun as he stood up and spun around. Not drunk this morning, it appears, Fern thought. Impressive! Must have done a required stint in rehab.

“Oh,” he said, relaxing and putting the gun away. “It’s you, phew! So many bad things out here in the Badlands. Guess you came here through the portal — don’t mind if I keep working on the chopper while we talk, I hope. Gotta get out of here asap. I can take you with me. If you’re also stuck out here in the middle of nowhere for reasons still unknown to me.” He turned only his head now while the hands were still busy with the wheel. “Are you?… stuck?”

Was she?

Was I?

(to be continued)

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Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0045, 0106, Badlands, C2077, South Dakota

00440616

“Well Wheeler. Here we are at the end.”

“So… you’re admitting I’m Wheeler,” spoke Shelley to his side, also watching the water rise on the scene below.

“You’re Wheeler, yes. You’re my *daughter* Wheeler. I also have a wife Wheeler. And probably a mother Wheeler and also a dog Wheeler.”

“Down there,” she spoke, pointing to the robot dog still positioned in the middle of the bar, likewise water walking Fern Stalin studying it, wondering what makes it tick or if it could have ticks or fleas, but especially where it’s taking humanity as a whole. Obviously a lot of people will die as a result of this — flood. But the ones who survive will have a cleansed world to repopulate, free of the former dirt and smut and filth. Led at least in part by Fern, the chosen one. The one with the WOW factor.

“What about Billy?” asked Wheeler-Shelley, seeing the water submerge his small 3-4 foot robot body completely now.”

“Waterproof,” Newt spoke.

“Oh, of course. From novel 34.”

“Well,” said Newt. “Close enough.” He raises his glass of high alcohol purple snog beer from the counter. “So should we toast to the end? Another successful photo-novel?”

“Not quite,” Wheeler-Shelley said, keeping her beer on the counter and knowing more was to come.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0044, 0616, C2077, Kabusie, Nightsity

00440615

“Why is this lady dancing up a storm?” Billy logically asked.

“I don’t know, but she better be *careful*,” Fern returned. “She better remember Edward — out in the desert.” But then she turned away from frenzied bartender Lexi to stare at Edward in a nearby booth with the owner of the night club, this Tin Lizzy she knew pretty well now. She’d brought him here just for this very reason, she then understood. To prove that the other Edward, the other Edward D. even, is separate from this one, who is still alive and well thank you very much and living in Our Second Lyfe where he belongs. Not up there in the real (virtual) world of Cyberpunk 2077.

That explains the black and white photo on one side of the bar; she also obviously set that up as part of the message (“Crybaby”)…

… along with the other b&w on its opposite side. So if one side of the bar is a foot, she thought, then the other side is also also a foot?

“Got it!” she shouted again in a Eureka moment, common for the brilliant, ever-thinking woman. She could see now what was really going on. In the middle of the bar, Lexi changed into a dog which spoke to Billy in a language only robots could understand. “End this,” it said to him.

The perpetual waterfall, Billy remembered. The final attachment. He and Lexi were waterproof — they’d be fine, ha ha ha ha. Ho ho ho ho ho.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0044, 0615, C2077, Kabusie, Massachusetts, Nightsity

00440612 (‘Gotta light?’ 02)

“Fern?

“Over here.

“The switch.”

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Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0044, 0612, GTA, South Dakota, Twin Peaks

00440610

“‘I kill them,’ he said to me in the dream within the dream. ‘I kill them all.’ All the white people that accepted him, I realized, took him in and away from the shed. I felt horror. I was next!”

“Dawg, *dam*mit!” said Frank Lynn, alone as a listener now and picturing Mikie’s described awful scene in his head.

“But then he was back, just a dummy or something in a shed in the middle of nowhere, the nearby landfill smelling stronger than ever. I realized this was his proper place. I woke up.”

—–

“I think we’ve found our Slaughterhouse,” spoke observing Fern to — probably Billy still, I’m guessing. Yes, there he is.

(to be continued?)

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0044, 0610, Badlands, C2077, GTA

00440603 (Nomans Land)

Is that a *shoe* represented below Martha’s Vineyard’s left foot as pointed out by Gerald’s lap-dancing robot Chomp formerly Chop?

Hmm. Anyway, having successfully found the light inside the dark in the interior of the Badlands Grocery Store in Interior, Fern Stalin and Billy Clockwork decide to visit 4 Buttes while they’re up in the real world, since it’s just a hop and a skip away from them over the South Dakota line in Montana. Or so they thought. But what they viewed when they got there 7 hours and 47 minutes later surprised them (again!) and made the much longer than expected trip kind of all worthwhile. The buttes didn’t appear pointy at all now like in the photos from section 02, seemingly worn down by the erosions of time. “Something’s flat, something’s off,” Fern free associated beside the rental truck while staring, thinking of soda and fizz and the lack thereof.

After taking the last draw off her old soda in hand, Fern decides that they missed something in South Dakota which caused this alternate 4 Buttes to, er, arise. “Wall,” she said intuitively to her clockwork traveling companion. “Something about Wall.” Billy knew Fern was talking about the original Real Life town they teleported into from Our Second Life (thanks Mistress!) before making their way across the the heart of the Badlands to Interior. “Maybe something to do with the famous tourist trap drug store there also named Wall,” she continued in this vein, thinking back to their visit to it through her photographic memory. “Maybe…”

“Got it! A postcard I saw there. 420, Billy — seating capacity for the drug store’s cafe on the postcard but so much more. That’s what we’re looking for. Something at or about 420.” And another welcome sign, she also soon gleaned.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0044, 0603, Heterocera, Massachusetts, Montana, Rubi^, South Dakota

00440602

“So here we are, Billy. Interior: beyond (The) Wall. Here we’ll find the information we need, I believe.”

“I… believe.”

—–

“Let’s pull in here and get some gas before going further. Don’t want to run out in the middle of the Badlands, ha.”

“Ha (or ho).”

—–

“Let’s now go to that Badlands Grocery Store we saw advertised beside the town welcome sign. We’ll stock up with supplies there, some proper food.”

“1/2 priced yogurt?”

“Perhaps, Billy.” But Fern didn’t think so. Billy would have to get use to more primitive life up here in the Real World, above and beyond the comforts of Our Second Lyfe.

—–

Fern parks the now filled up rental truck in front of the store 2 blocks west of the gas station, as the billboard she saw and memorized earlier indicated. “Keep in mind through all this that we’re looking for something *interior*… to Interior, even,” she said, walking up to the front door. “The town’s name is just a signifier, a pointer.”

Then in synchronicity, Billy points to something in the distance.

“Ball. Silver.”

“Good, Billy. Good.” Fern knew this was just a propane tank seen on edge but Billy was definitely on the right track. Change of perspective. They go inside.

But there was nothing within the grocery store but BLACK, which so happens to be the former name of Interior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interior,_South_Dakota

In 1891, the former way-station was called Black with Mary Johnson as its first postmaster. In 1893, the town was renamed “Interior” by George Johnson because he did not think the name “Black” fit the description of the White River that surrounded the town.

By losing her vision, Fern had found what she was looking for here. They carefully make their way through the darkness to find the white light.

(to be continued?)

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Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0044, 0602, Google Street View, South Dakota