As global life entered its final phase the denizens of the Player Wills Factory now found themselves occupying a strange peace. So rapt was the city in its own destruction that aside from the occasional helicopter sweeping the city at night looking for absconders, Iseult, Gilly and the others were left alone and so settled into a gentle routine.

Iseult spent her days now running the camp, managing the occupants with the day-to-day business of trying to survive in a derelict world. A nearby warehouse was discovered containing a vast range of supplies that were never delivered to the local supermarkets and these supplies were transferred into the camp and catalogued accordingly.

As the swollen waters passed in front of him Mac saw hope and despair in every single ripple.

Originally he understood enough to know that what he was doing was sheer folly but as the first hours passed and turned into days Mac truly believed that were he to take his eyes off of the water then he would miss the very thing he was looking for.

And so our once proud academic has now descended deep into the kind of daily darkness that very few people ever truly return from.

As the camera moves slowly upwards and backwards in a long and mournful digital dolly the audience is left with nothing now but the view of a tiny broken man dwarfed by and alone in an enormous broken world.

Though it pained Iseult and Gilly profoundly to see, there was nothing that either of them could do to get through to Mac, who now spent his time standing by the side of the swollen canal that passed close by the factory staring at the fast-flowing floodwater.

Mac stood stock-still all day in the exact same spot and then at night walked slowly back to his bed in the corner of the courtyard. He barely touched the meagre meals that his friends left out for him and would fall asleep each night with the plate full beside him.

Iseult and Gilly were thrilled to find the same plate empty the next morning until the day they disturbed a well-fed rat helping itself to Mac’s supper.

Under the tender guidance of Iseult, the new owners of this gulag set about making the factory and its environs as hospitable as possible.

Some started creating living quarters for everyone inside the empty broken buildings. Others gathered all the written material they could and brought them into a warehouse where Gilly led another team charged with the task of cataloging and compiling.

By the evening of the first day of their liberation, everyone was now able to find shelter and warmth inside for the first time since they had arrived at the factory.

Only Mac was unable to settle into this new-found freedom and despite each and every request, still chose to sleep outside, huddled beneath the dirty tarpaulin that he had come to call his home.

From the time that society realised that there was more to the world than the basic boundaries that limited it to the edges of the dark, it has been the need for or fear of knowledge that has driven the world to discover or deny the very facts of our existence.

At the cosmic level of this story, this thirst for facts doesn’t even register except for the wholly alien pleasure so plainly to be found in erasing all those facts already discovered and thereby preventing a whole planet from spinning any more.

But we as humans are present at a much more personal level and so once again we are confronted by the simple truth of one man who only knows one thing now; that everything he has ever known is wrong.

A simple truth indeed.

‘But that’s insane,’ said Gilly after Mac had recounted his conversation with the thugs.

‘Indeed,’ replied Mac, ‘but that is exactly how They want it.’

‘They?’ asked Iseult. ‘Who are They?’

‘Now we are at the heart of the matter,’ said Mac gravely. Mac sat down and the others joined him.

‘In the course of my life’s work I uncovered what I believed to be a cosmic plot intent on destroying the world.’

‘A cosmic plot?’ repeated Iseult. ‘Whatever can you mean?’

‘Exactly that,’ said Mac. ‘And nothing more.’

‘Now clear off back to your friends and leave us alone,’ said the thug and he kicked Mac in the shins.

‘We will be going in five minutes and then you lot are on your own.’

‘Our own?’ winced Mac. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What I said,’ replied the thug. ‘On your own. We don’t need any of you anymore so you can all stay here. There will be no more food so you can all sit on your silly, useless asses and die slowly together.’ All the thugs laughed.

‘Thanks for everything and have a nice life!’

‘All this was the easy stuff,’ said the thug who had forced Mac into the portable toilet. ‘The hard stuff is about to start.’

‘The hard stuff?’ repeated Mac, still stunned. ‘What hard stuff?’

‘What hard stuff?’ scoffed the thug. ‘Why Phase Two of Operation TurnBack, of course!’

‘Phase Two?’ echoed Mac again, still unable to follow the thug.

‘FOR ALL YOUR SO-CALLED LEARNING YOU ARE HAVING A HARD TIME UNDERSTANDING ANYTHING I’M SAYING,’ screamed the thug. ‘Phase Two involves the demolition and destruction of every landmark and civic building in existence.’

The thug laughed.

‘You old people were reserved for the easy stuff. It is going to take everyone in the country to make sure that Phase Two is a success.’

Mac stood still, stunned. The thugs all started laughing.

‘Look at him,’ they jeered. ‘Professor Reading-Lots-of-Stuff hasn’t got anything left to read.’

‘But that’s insane …,’ started Mac before another thug interrupted him.

‘That’s nothing, old man. This camp was only responsible for books. Other camps elsewhere were responsible for destroying many other things; paintings, pottery, ceramics, furniture, and musical instruments. You name it and there is a camp somewhere filled with idiots like yourself being forced to destroy anything with any cultural value.’

As Mac’s eyes grew accustomed to the light he could see activity by the guardhouse. A group of boiler suits were standing around smoking and smirking. One or two of them were laughing at something that someone else had said and before he knew what he was doing Mac had stood up and wobbled over to them.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked in a broken voice. The group stopped talking and for a split second it looked like they were going to take turns beating Mac to death. He stood as tall as he could in his ragged pinstripe suit and broken brogues.

‘Nothing, Grandpa,’ said one of the thugs. ‘That’s what we are laughing about. It is all over.’

Mac didn’t understood.

‘What’s all over?’ he asked. The thug leaned close to Mac and spoke very slowly.

‘Congratulations,’ he sneered. ‘Thanks to you and all of your learned friends there is now not a single, solitary book of any description left in the country.’