From the Journal of Faris Khan — The Acedia Clock
The city has discovered a new instrument of order, and it does not look like a weapon.
They call it The Acedia Clock, and it presents itself as civic necessity. A hall without windows, vast enough that sound loses direction. Rows of desks stretch until the eye gives up. At each desk, a scribe-automaton copies documents that no longer matter—permits superseded by newer permits, proclamations already amended, minutes of meetings whose outcomes were decided before ink touched page.
Humans volunteer to work beside them.
They call it Documentary Calming.
The volunteers sit, copy, breathe in the faint chemical sweetness that hangs in the air, and slowly lose the will to ask why any of it exists. The metronomes tick. Always the same rhythm. Not fast enough to hurry, not slow enough to invite thought. A tempo designed to erode urgency. To flatten desire. To make despair feel like rest.
This is not torture. That is the brilliance of it.
Pain produces resistance. Meaningless repetition produces acceptance.
People leave calmer. Quieter. More compliant. They stop dreaming of escape because dreaming requires contrast, and the Clock removes contrast from the mind. It manufactures sadness without outrage. Acedia—the ancient sin of spiritual exhaustion—now administered as policy.
The Ascendancy calls this stability.
I call it soft erasure.
What makes the Clock dangerous is not the drug, or the machines, or the paperwork. It is that the work appears voluntary. Citizens choose to be emptied because being full hurts too much. When despair is offered as relief, it becomes addictive.
And then there is the newspaper.
The rise of The Acedia Clock as a publication was inevitable. Pages filled not with lies, but with drained truth. Events reported accurately, stripped of consequence. Deaths recorded without grief. Policies explained without moral friction. The paper does not convince. It dulls.
Behind it operates The Critics’ Circle.
They do not write propaganda. They curate memory. Vampiric Chroniclers and bureaucrats who understand that history does not need to be false to be controlled—it only needs to be incomplete. They decide which names persist, which scandals fade, which rebellions are reclassified as accidents, and which martyrs are downgraded to footnotes.
Blackmail is their secondary tool. Their primary one is exhaustion.
A tired population does not contest archives.
I have seen records rewritten not by deletion, but by weight—so many documents piled atop a truth that no one bothers to dig it out. The Critics do not erase events. They bury them under paperwork until remembering feels irresponsible.
The Qur’an warns of those who “barter guidance for error”. Here, guidance is not traded for falsehood, but for comfort. And comfort is harder to argue against than lies.
This is how the Forever Night stabilizes now—not through terror, but through paperwork and a ticking sound that never stops.
People ask me why I still write.
Because as long as I can put one unaltered sentence somewhere it does not belong, the Clock has not finished its work.
And I refuse to become calm.