EXILE IN ISOLIUM
I felt suicidal yesterday. Sometimes when I start thinking about the futility of my life in Anticlockwise I’m overcome by such a deep sense of despair that I contemplate ending it all. I suppose that it’s because of my solitary existence. When I’m left to my own devices I start dwelling on my deepest fears and anxieties. I can’t do anything about it. I just sink further and further into depression and gloom. I can never see any way out of the black hole I’ve dropped into. When Tia and Clancy aren’t around, the only thing that keeps me vaguely sane is the Lightning Link. I use it more now as a survival technique rather than as a means of communication. That’s how I learned about Mollino’s separation form his family and their exile in Isolium.
I woke up in my room in Infinity at around three o’clock in the afternoon. I’d been having a nightmare about being suffocated in the toxic fumes of Globopolis. My head was being split in two by a migraine. I knew that I had to do something to escape from the black thoughts in my mind. So, I switched on the Link and began searching for signs of life in Outer Neblus. I tried contacting Elejida with whom I’d exchanged messages many times before but she didn’t respond. Eventually, my call sign was captured by someone I had not encountered before, Mollino. He’d been trawling the Link and stumbled across my signal by chance.
Talking to Mollino got me back on an even keel. He’d been reading my posts over the past few months and had been intending to contact me. But he’d been wary in case I was a spy or an informer in the pay of the military dictatorship that had only been overthrown on Outer Neblus two years earlier.
I immediately felt comfortable with Mollino because his paranoia reminded me of my own. You could sense the mistrust lodged deep inside him from the way he wrote his Link messages – they were full of evasions and ambiguities. It was as if he was looking over his shoulder all the time. My depression dispersed the more I listened to him. He seemed to be completely isolated with no-one to confide in. At least I had Tia, Clancy and Max.
We spent an hour or so on the Link. The more I opened up to him about my sense of desperation and abandonment in Anticlockwise, the more he relaxed. His messages became more focused, more explicit. He needed to be sure that I wasn’t in the pay of the Snoops. He was convinced that the Snoops would have links with the military dictatorship that had made his life a misery.
During the military repression Mollino’s father Rubital, who worked as a clerk in the Ministry of Defence, had been arrested for subversion. 
Mollino insisted that the charges were trumped up. The army though needed to make an example of someone to discourage anti-government activities. Rubital was put on trial and sentenced to death. In the end, the death sentence was commuted: Rubital and his entire family were given a life-time exile in Isolium, the capital city of the Faraway Galaxy, a notoriously repressive regime. The Neblusian military had developed close links with Isolium.
The worst part of the story though was that Mollino himself was forced to stay in Neblus. Even though Outer Neblus had now been liberated from military dictatorship, Mollino knew that he would be separated forever from his own flesh and blood. The Faraway Galaxy remained under the control of a totalitarian regime that would under no circumstances release the prisoners of a former ally.
Listening to Mollino put my life in perspective. Mollino probably had friends in the new Neblus. But when he was speaking to me he appeared to be utterly alone. His entire family had been sentenced to exile in Isolium and there was no chance whatsoever of ever seeing them again. My situation paled in comparison. I started to view things differently, more positively. When I spoke to Tia later, she agreed with me that Mollino’s solitary life on Neblus sounded worse than our life together in Anticlockwise.
Ridiculous as it might seem, for some inexplicable reason I still harbour the illusion that unlike Mollino I can make contact with my mother Orgiva, my cousin Alcazarin and my friend Motrilox in Safronika. I don’t know how. It’s just an intuition I have. Maybe I’m deluding myself. But we all need something to cling on to, don’t we? Anyway, that’s the reason I feel less abandoned than Mollino.
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