MAX DESTINO-COIN
I met Max Destino-Coin about a year ago. He was living at Infinity Gateway at the time. Not any more though. He’s moved to a private mansion in the Fluorescent Light area of Globopolis. He still calls round occasionally to chat to me and Clancy. We both like him. For some reason the Snoops don’t bother him.
I thought that there was something strange about Max as soon as I clapped eyes on him. To start with, the name Max Destino-Coin struck me as unusual. It had an exotic ring to it. He didn’t look like anyone else I’d seen. His long silver-grey hair was a bit of a giveaway I suppose. Then there was the red eagle emblazoned on the back of his green leather jacket – the eagle had two yellow 
glass eyes that shone in the dark. Scary. And then there was his liking for Cuban cigars. He would make a point of lighting them up inside Infinity Gateway even though you weren’t supposed to smoke inside the building. But then I suppose he was a resident paying a fortune to live there and I was just the night porter who could be removed in the blink of an eye.
I’ve always liked the smell of cigars. They make me think of casinos and illicit deals. Max obviously didn’t play by the rules. I immediately took a liking to him. He wouldn’t be pushed around by anybody. And since I didn’t like the rules either I felt an immediate empathy with him.
Anyway, he lived for six months here in Infinity Gateway and I used to talk to him in Esperanto about languages, space travel and aliens. He was a smart guy Max. He learned Esperanto in a couple of months. At the time I didn’t think that he believed a word I was telling him, especially when I started talking about creatures from outer space.
But I obviously misjudged him. Why else would he have contacted me to ask me to write this blog? `Write whatever you want,’ he said. `Be as controversial as you like. Readers have seen enough Anticlockwise “normality” to last a lifetime. They want something different. You needn’t worry about the Snoops. They’ll never know. The blog won’t be published in Globopolis. It won’t be visible anywhere in the Anticlockwise Empire. So what you write won’t be seen by the Anticlocks. People round here wouldn’t understand. No, we’ll be publishing in Outer Neblus, a distant galaxy. I’ve set up a secure transmission channel. It’s top secret.’
I can see him now with that wicked smile on his face as he laughed out loud and said: `You can be my agent of subversion, a front-line correspondent offering an insider’s view of the Anticlockwise world’. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about at the time but I didn’t really care. Even though I was scared stiff at the thought of being a dissenting voice in Anticlockwise, I was flattered to be invited on board by Max Destino-Coin.
So that’s why I’m here. My task is to offer an insight into what it’s like to live in this lunatic Anticlockwise Empire. Max said that I could be as outrageous as I liked, whatever that was supposed to mean. To be honest, I just need to be myself I suppose. That’s all he was saying really. `Just act like you do all the time Zeb. That’s all I’m asking.’
Anyway, that’s enough about Max. We’ll just have to see how this experiment works out…
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