PURPLE POINTED HATS
My head was filled with images of Purple Pointed Hats.
I was sitting in a coffee shop in the main railway station of Globopolis waiting for my girlfriend Tia. She’d spent the day working in 
Kandrovins, a small town just outside the city centre. We’d arranged to go for a meal together that evening in a recently opened Lissochen restaurant situated in the station forecourt. Lissochen sea food is all the rage at the moment – they cook everything in spicy seaweed.
Tia’s train was late, so I spent about an hour idling my time away in the coffee shop staring distractedly at the thousands of people swarming around the station – an endless stream of commuters unconsciously wending their way home after a day’s work in the city.
I was particularly struck by the image of the swarm. Looking down on them all from above, they seemed like a seething black army of ants ceaselessly moving in unified columns across the station, ascending and descending escalators, passing through ticket barriers, pressed in their thousands against each other as they waited in semi-stupor for the arrival of their trains.
They were no longer human beings. Their souls had become fused into a collective unit, their minds taken over by an external agency. They’d become an integral part of a shifting black mass moving in unison to the tune of an invisible ringmaster who was pulling the strings of their existence. Their humanity had been stolen from them, confiscated by an alien force.
The scene reminded me of the rare occasions when I used to go to the zoo as a child. At the time, zoos had appeared to me to be the most natural of things. Wild animals needed to be kept in cages where they belonged. They were locked up, so the argument ran, to prevent them from going on a senseless stampede killing innocent people. I was convinced that we were doing them a favour, feeding and watering them, and supervising their general state of hygiene.
Now, I realise that these were just foolish, childish thoughts. Locking up wild animals in a confined space so that the general public can go around gawping at them, taking photos and selfies, and congratulating themselves on their superior human status is a heinous crime not only against nature but also against humanity itself.
I understand now because I’m no longer part of a superior human race. I myself have suffered the ultimate indignity of wild animals. I’ve been locked up like a savage beast in a cage called Anticlockwise. And the agents of the state, the Snoops, spend their time gawping at me, checking that I’m not about to run amok in their ordered society and upset the civilised nature of things.
How I sympathise in retrospect with the humiliated and forlorn expression of the huge gorilla I saw so often sitting in abject despair in his cage all those years ago…The semi-human commuter ants in the station and the domesticated wild animals in the zoo were both the same – their ability to resist had been shattered over time.
That brings me to purple pointed hats. I’d been surfing the net on the LLink and had stumbled across an ebook whose title had caught my 
attention: The Purple Pointed Hat Phenomenon by Minty Cortantex. I’m always fascinated by strange book titles, especially if the author’s name is a bit out of the ordinary as well.
Minty Cortantex’s novel recounts the gradual descent into lunacy of a fictitious advanced society called Purpurantia. At its height Purpurantia was the greatest, most sophisticated and celebrated civilisation in the known universe. All societies, however, come to an end. Following an unforeseen and devastating plague which spread through the country like wildfire, the population of Purpurantia was decimated by twenty per cent.
The catastrophe was so severe, the death toll so high that the Purpurantians began to question the very foundations of their own society. Within a few years, they were transformed from a self-confident, outward looking nation into an introverted, quarrelling, angst-ridden, divided mob. They were prey to a whole host of absurd ideas that slowly took root in their minds. Competing demagogues rose to prominence seeking to exploit the situation.
Finally, one particularly Machiavellian sect, the Purple Pointed Hats (PPH), through astute manipulation of artificial intelligence and subliminal brainwashing techniques, brought the whole populace to heel. Within a matter of months every Purpurantian citizen was wearing exactly the same clothing as a sign of their acquiescence to PPH.
In particular, they all wore Purple Pointed Hats as the visible sign of allegiance. They had lost their autonomy. They were reduced to docile, obedient savage beasts in a land that was their own but which no longer belonged to them.
It struck me that I was just like them. I tried to imagine what I would look like in a purple pointed hat. I’m caged up in Globopolis like a wild animal in a zoo. I know that I’m an insignificant ant, one of millions of faceless drone workers in the Anticlockwise Empire – just like those I can see here at the railway station. I have even succumbed to wearing a green armband with my Anticlock number printed on it – I’m no different to those sheep-like Purpurantians wearing purple pointed hats in Minty Cortantex’s fictional account.
The problem is that in my mind I cannot accept that I am one of them. I refuse to believe that I conform. Yet, in my actions, I remain a conformist every minute of every day. I kid myself that I’m resisting but deep down I know that it’s all a charade. I may as well be an unthinking worker ant, a ferocious zoo exhibit or a brainwashed Purpurantian dressed in a purple pointed hat.
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