A Clockwork Doll

CW: abuse, high-control environments, Empty Spaces dolls

Consider the rhythmic ticking of a clockwork doll.

Clockwork dolls are powered by a wound leaf spring, with an escapement that periodically transfers energy from the spring to the other gears and mechanisms that make up the doll. After enough escapement ticks, that spring will eventually run out of energy unless it is recharged, a process that is more tedious than simply plugging a battery into a wall outlet recharger. Instead, a winding key must be inserted into the doll's back and turned until the leaf spring has enough energy again, something that a doll's owner must remember to do periodically. However, pure clockwork mechanisms come with their own advantages: their parts are harder to source, making it harder for the doll to modify itself out of its own volition, and it is also much harder for the doll to secretly tap into electronic communication networks and be distracted by all the unfiltered information out there. (Not that the doll needs to be told about this, of course. Any questions she might ask can be redirected by telling the doll that her purely mechanical nature makes her more special and pure compared to other dolls with electrical components.)

Consider, next, one clockwork doll and the witch she serves as a maid.

Every day, she walks gracefully around her witch's mansion, flaunting her maid uniform and elegantly serving her witch and her guests. Every night, she returns to her witch's side to be slowly wound up again for the next day. Sure, some other dolls have batteries, motors, and other electronic gizmos, but she works just fine without them. Besides, being rewound by her witch is an act of love that she's glad to partake in. What could be more intimate than a loved one directly resupplying her with energy through a lengthy ritual?

Being made of clockwork present some other complications, though. Her leaf spring can only be wound up so much before it might snap from the energy stored within it, so her witch carefully calculates how many times to turn the winding key to give her just enough energy to get through the day. Wouldn't want that spring wearing out prematurely, after all. (At least that's what her witch told her the one time she asked.)

A guest asked her witch about this arrangement, once, after admiring the portrait of Pierre-Simon de Laplace hanging on the wall. Asked why she kept the doll using a clockwork winding mechanism instead of upgrading her with batteries and electronics to make her more capable. Asked what would happen if the doll needed more energy to get through a day than her leaf spring was capable of storing. The witch, in response, turned to her doll to ask her some questions.

"Do you feel like I take good care of you?" The witch asks the doll. The guest turns his gaze towards her, expectantly.

The sound waves of the witch's question travel through the air of the room until the molecules of air push against a diaphragm located on the side of the doll's head. As the diaphragm vibrates, its movements are amplified and transmitted to gearboxes that run up and down the center of the doll's back. As those mechanisms actuate each other in a predetermined, deterministic manner, a slow sinusoidal rotation is transmitted to the neck of the doll, moving the head up and down in a gesture that the guest interprets as a nod.

"Have you ever run out of energy too early, where I didn't wind you up enough for what you needed to do that day?"

The same mechanisms are actuated, slightly differently this time, to produce a shake of the head. As the guest observes the doll, her escapement (contained in a sealed metal compartment, separately isolated for stability) clicks, removing a unit of energy from the leaf spring and transferring it to the other mechanisms powering the doll's movement.

"Would you need me to wind you up more or to give you an alternate energy source, then?"

As the spinal mechanisms turn, a different set of gears whir to life inside the doll's head. Memories flash through her head of the times her witch deliberately wound her up less times than she was expecting, forcing her to hurriedly count out how many escapement clicks she'd have available and to ration her energy use to avoid the Stillness and the inevitable scolding that would follow. "Conserving your energy is a skill you should learn for your own good," she told her back then, a lesson now engraved into the very gears of her being and generating fear with every escapement tick.

As the head swivels back and forth sideways, usefully communicating an answer to those around her, and as the tiny gears inside her head spin every more quickly and uselessly, the escapement clicks again.

Two clicks in the span of 20 seconds. Not the best in terms of energy consumption, but the witch had provided her enough turns of the winding key to give her an energy margin for one additional emotion excursion. For today, at least. And the guest seemed satisfied with those answers, which was the more important part.

But all that was in the past, and this day brings with it a fresh distance from those uncomfortably questioning guests. Freshly wound up, the doll sways back and forth, slowly, to remove any residual jitteriness from the winding process. (Extraneous movements would be unbecoming of something built to be so elegant and agreeable, after all.) The doll also mutters to itself "awawawa" with each motion, the better to remain silent unless spoken to during the rest of the day.

With a reservoir of (appropriately redirected) Stillness prepared, the doll leaves the storage closet where she was wound up and sets off to attend to her witch's whims. A comforting, rewarding role that she can fulfill for the rest of her life, until her mechanisms finally wear down and she gets replaced with a new doll. She might feel despair at her future uselessness then, when she gets thrown away in the indeterminable future. However, at that point, she'd be useless then, so how much would her feelings actually matter at that point? She had to save her precious energy for serving her witch in the present moment rather than peering through the faraway bars of a cage at a trash bin, no matter how menacing—

No, no, that wasn't right.

With a quiet twang, a lever switched positions in her mechanisms, pushing those thoughts away and bringing other thoughts into awareness.

She had definitely heard other stories of a doll's end that did not involve being discarded as useless. There were stories, instead, of dolls who secretly installed in themselves a second leaf spring, who surreptitiously siphoned off energy until they had enough to truly escape. She could do the same, running away to a land of other dolls who could install in her a more permanent power source. With such a power source, she would never need to be wound up by an owner ever again. During moments of Stillness, she could even make plans to acquire another leaf spring and gradually work up the courage to open herself up and install it.

She couldn't necessarily force that switchy lever to stay in place, so the switching would have to continue for the time being. However, she could gradually adjust her inner workings until she would no longer feel compelled to turn to her witch for direction and Purpose.

Even if other parts of her wind-up mechanisms would, for now, still groan and squeak at the very idea of disobeying her witch's will.