Destruction of Anticlockwise

No-one had foreseen the destruction of Anticlockwise.

It was early March. The sun had been shining but everywhere there was a bitter cold that seeped deep into the marrow of your bones. I had always found that time of the year particularly dispiriting. My earliest childhood memories were of March days when the winter refused to come to an end. March had always struck me as a life-deadening experience of arctic coldness that plunged an icy dagger into your heart.

Looking back now on that wintry March morning, it is striking how uneventful everything had seemed at first. It all looked exactly the same as before. Yet it was a day that would transform my life and that of every other citizen in Globopolis from top to bottom.

None of us knew anything of course as we walked around the streets that frosty morning shivering in the cold sunlit air. The citizens of Anticlockwise were always the last to be informed about what was going on. We didn’t count. We were simply the passive recipients of decisions taken in distant administrative buildings far away from our daily lives.

Slowly, however, it began to dawn on me that something was different. There weren’t any Snoops about, at least there weren’t any that I could see. That had never happened before. I imagined that they had been called away by the Anticlock authorities for some greater purpose that we would discover later. Their absence, however, still didn’t really raise my suspicions. I felt sure that this was just a temporary blip and that they would soon return. So, I decided to make the most of this unexpected good fortune and go for a longer walk than usual.

Globopolis: Silent City on the Eve of Destruction

I passed by the giant Infinity Gateway sign that dominated the entrance to my apartment block and made a point of going due north in a direction that was normally patrolled by the Snoops. It was an opportunity not to be missed. After walking for about twenty minutes, I began to feel slightly uneasy. I was struck first of all by the absence of noise. The centre of Globopolis was normally a hive of activity filled with the sounds of road and air traffic, factory noises and people’s voices. Everything now seemed ominously quiet.

There was also something else. I didn’t recognise any of the people passing by. More important, they all seemed to look the same. And that was bizarre because most of the people in Globopolis looked really different from one another. As a capital city, Globopolis naturally attracts people from all over the Anticlockwise Empire. The inhabitants are an assortment of classes, races and religions. Their differences were strikingly apparent. That is why the people passing me by on that fateful morning looked so strange. There was something eerily inhuman about their faces, a strange, detached look in their eyes filled with indifference. They appeared to show no interest whatsoever in anybody else.

Now I’m not the most gregarious of human beings. I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid contact with people. They tend to distract me from what I want to do. There have been a few exceptions, but generally I prefer to keep myself to myself. So, I don’t know a lot of people in Globopolis. But what was really strange and uncannily different on that cold March morning was that every single person I came across on the street seemed indifferent to my presence.

Most of the time in this Anticlock city almost everyone took too much notice of me, and I didn’t like that. I could normally feel their eyes piercing me in the back, carefully checking out who I was, making sure that I had the right to be there, verifying that I was not an illegal immigrant intent on the destruction of  Anticlock society.  The Anticlocks were always on the lookout for subversive activity. They were quite paranoid about it. Their minds seemed to be constantly preoccupied by the possibility of imminent destruction. But this day everything was very different. Nobody seemed to be the slightest bit interested in me. At first, I enjoyed being left to my own devices. Then slowly I found their indifference Increasingly worrying. This wasn’t in keeping with the social order of Globopolis. I began to realise that I was missing something.

SpirianA Capital City

I carried on walking, trying to act naturally, casting the occasional glance at the people around me. Whenever my eyes made contact with theirs, they seemed to look straight through me as if I wasn’t there. Their lifeless gaze appeared to be focused on something in the distance far beyond me. It was an eerily uncomfortable experience that I had never encountered in Globopolis before. And then I turned a corner and came face to face with a gigantic road sign pointing in the direction of the city centre. The sign was painted black with huge white lettering designed to have the maximum impact on anyone passing by. The words that appeared like frosted snow on the black background were stark and straightforward:

SpirianA

CAPITAL CITY OF SPIRIAN ALTRA

I stood rooted to the spot for several minutes, transfixed by the sign’s simplicity and brutality. I knew instantly that something radical and far-reaching had occurred. This wasn’t a road sign that had been erected by a disaffected citizen of Globopolis mindlessly lashing out at the Anticlock regime. A petulant display of this sort would have been instantly crushed by the Snoops. But the Snoops were nowhere to be seen. They had been eradicated. Anticlockwise was a ghost town populated by thousands of silent people minding their own business. This was no longer Anticlockwise. It was SpirianA.

At that precise moment I recalled vividly the nightmare that I had had several months earlier. It had left me with a deep sense of foreboding as Spirian Altra had uttered her final prophetic words predicting the destruction of the Anticlockwise Empire:

‘Do not forget me Solitanu. I am the voice and the face of the future. My name is Spirian Altra. The Anticlocks think that they are in charge, but their grip on power is slowly diminishing. My time has not yet come. Mark my words. Spirian Altra will appear on the scene in the not-too-distant future and the Anticlocks will be crushed. If you survive the transformation that is about to occur, you will remember this night for the rest of your life’.

Zeb Solitanu

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Zeb Solitanu sketch by Jill

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