The Death-Watch

1

Work, Serve, Live.

The slogan was everywhere and represented everything. The speakers on every street corner shrieked it constantly, posters everywhere glared down at us with the mantra. We worked hard, served our rulers and in return we got to live. Make a mistake and the Death-Watch would intervene, and a few moments later you would find yourself dead. No-one knew how they did it, how they discovered the technology and no-one even knew why no-one knew these things.

I was walking around a corner as I saw the body. It was strewn across the pavement, newspaper in hand, business suit on, ready to work. And it was dead. I remember the stillness of the thing more than anything else. The person was just another faceless worker in a hive of activity, another suit in the crowd. But the stillness, the stillness was like nothing I had ever seen and it terrified me.

I stood there and didn’t move. I would say that I was motionless but that would have been a lie. I was, after all, alive. As I stood there a dark metal van pulled up with the logo on its side, a logo that had me cowering the moment I saw it. A bleached white skull with two clocks for eyes, there time claiming midnight. The slogan, Vita Vestra Manus, was etched in cold text under the leering skull. Your life, in our hands.

The Death-Watch had come and I was frozen in fear. I couldn’t stop thinking “What if they take me too? What if there were meant to be no witness’?” and I wanted so desperately to run but I just couldn’t. Instead I stood and watched as the motionless corpse was dragged into the back of the dark van and was casually driven off.

Only after it had gone was I able to move and immediately I started running. Now, you might think I was running from the van, or perhaps after it. You would be wrong. I want to stress that the van was of no significance to me; just an event that I did not realise would spur me to all but throw away my life. No, it was not because of the van that I ran, but because of the time.

My terror had made me forget the time and I was running late for work. To you that may seem insignificant, I don’t know, but for me, being late to work was a death sentence. It was one of the many things that made the city run so smoothly. Everyone had a routine and every ones routine intertwined so as to create an efficient metropolis in which everyone could live happily. At least that is what the government would have you believe.

In truth there were hiccups, little blips in the system that caused delays and minor problems for people. The governments answer was to delete the blip. Erase the problem and they hoped it would fix itself.

All this was running through my head as I ran through the now crowded streets towards the small insignificant warehouse, crammed in between a hundred others. The brick had originally been a reddish colour until smoke and dust had stained it a dismal black. Nothing was allowed to stay clean and pure. Nothing but the church.

In every city on this small island, is a towering edifice of magnificence. A building dedicated to a higher order and designed by the greatest architects of the age to remind us of the inhabitants’ holiness. A beautiful building, but an oppressive one.

Their beauty glowers down at us, oppressing, demanding, and threatening. The ultimate power and the biggest threat in a person’s life. The church, the servants of god, the clergy.

As I entered the building that was my workplace I almost ran into my superior. I had made it on time and so I was safe, or at least, not in trouble, for can you ever truly be safe when an unknown power could take you at any moment?

“De’lante, you are being assigned to section 13. Don’t screw this up.” He said as I entered. It was how we were all greeted by this particular individual; a designation and a reminder of his power over us with a thinly veiled threat.