ORPHANS AND EXILED FAMILIES
I’ve been reflecting on orphans and exiled families recently. I made contact with a Neblusian called Elejida soon after I started using the Lightning Link. I had to experiment with the Link at first. It took me some time to get to grips with the technical side of things. Max isn’t too good at explaining anything to anybody. Once he’d reached an agreement with me to write the blog, he left me pretty much to my own devices. So it took me a few attempts to get the hang of it.
Anyway, after sending about six posts into the ether, I finally got this message from Elejida. She’d stumbled across my blog by chance. I’d almost given up hope of hearing from anybody and was even beginning to doubt that the Lightning Link actually worked.
It didn’t take me long to realise that I was on the same wavelength as Elejida. I hadn’t intended to reveal too much about myself in the blog. Apart from wanting to keep myself to myself, I still didn’t really believe that Max’s security system was 100% reliable. You never know when the Snoops might be listening in. But Elejida’s personal story drew me out of my shell.
Once she’d started talking about herself, it just seemed the right thing to do to tell her about me, however much it went against the 
grain. She was an orphan who’d lived all her life in Etherea, the capital city of Outer Neblus. She’d never met her parents. It seems that there are many like her on Neblus where for the past forty years they’d been living under a military dictatorship. Many children had been separated from their familes as part of the State’s enforced educational policies. Elejida was one of thousands who’d suffered this fate.
The similarity with my own situation in Anticlockwise was striking. The big difference though was that six months earlier there had been a revolution on Outer Neblus and the dictatorship had been overthrown. So they were all living in a state of euphoria. They were hopeful that the future of Outer Neblus would be bright – a far cry from the surveillance culture of Globopolis.
I was overjoyed to have made contact with Elejida. For the first time I’d come across someone outside Anticlockwise who could understand what I was living through. It was like a dam bursting in my mind. The words just tumbled on to the screen in a spontaneous torrent.
That’s how I came to reveal that I was an orphan too, and that I had no idea who my real parents were. I was born in Globopolis but after I’d been left to fend for myself, I’d been adopted by a Safronikan, Orgiva Nuron, who’d taken care of me as if I were her own son. I’d gone to school in Federex, the capital city of Safronika, and made a life for myself there for eighteen years before I moved back to Globopolis to study at the Interpreters School. So even though I’d been born in Globopolis, I felt that my real life had been stolen from me because I’d been trapped in the city of my birth after the arrival of the Anticlocks.
The only other person who knows all this of course is Tia. But she’s as much a prisoner as I am in this dispiriting place. I felt so much better about life after I’d explained to Elejida about my previous existence on Safronika, after I’d talked to her about the family from whom I was exiled: my mother Orgiva Nuron, my cousin Alacazarin Nuron and my best friend Motrilox Alba. We’re all orphans and exiled families in this Anticlock environment. I feel as if I’ve abandoned my family in Safronika, but there’s nothing I can do. There’s no escape from Anticlockwise.
Knowing that there’s someone outside this lunatic asylum to whom I can talk about my former life in Safronika helps.
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