According to the caption on the right corner of the telescreen, today was the 26th of May of the year 1994. Of course, no citizen in Oceania would ever know if this date was correct or mistaken, but this fact did not trouble Julia's mind. Watches, calendars and other artifacts to measure time had already been invented long ago, but in a society controlled by Big Brother, they were of minor importance. Truth, as everybody had known it, had ceased to exist from the first moment past had been rewritten, and you could as well choose to believe that today was the 5th of December or the 22nd of June.
Besides, as Julia was well aware of, the perception of time varied from person to person, and the same moment could pass like the wink of an eye or last an eternity.
A newsreader was now reporting the weather, forecasting scattered showers in the South of the country and many stormy days ahead. Julia was barely listening; her thoughts drifted away to the war between the three leading powers Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. With which one was Oceania at war with and when would the fighting finally end? Julia decided that this question was not worthy of an answer. A fictitious war that only served the cause of keeping the population under control could never finish, because it had never started.
Frightened, Julia interrupted her train of thoughts and tried to focus her attention on the telescreen instead. After ten years, the methods employed by the Ministry of Love to ensure her loyalty towards the regime were beginning to show some flaws. Was it possible that not everything inside her had vanished away, that the cleaning had not managed to eradicate all the germs? No, that was unconceivable!
But no matter how hard she tried to concentrate on the telescreen, her thoughts seemed to have achieved an independence of their own. It was of extreme importance to conceal her disturbance about this from the telescreens, which had gradually become more sophisticated: by now they were capable of indicating the body temperature and the heartbeat of any living being within the radius of a hundred meters. These improvements implied that the Thought Police carried out many more arrests and vaporizations. In fact, one of the thousands of words that had been removed from the nineteenth Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary was "overpopulation", because the number of vaporizations exceeded the birth rate – for every thousand babies that were born per year, the Thought Police arrested 2460 crimethinkers, which afterwards disappeared mysteriously and were never spotted again.
In the Biology books of schoolchildren this condition was called "natural selection" and it was claimed that it served to maintain the balance in nature and to preserve the human race. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, Julia had to cram – because it could not be called teaching - such nonsense into the brains of the six to ten year olds, and she considered it a complete waste of time, but not because she was particularly concerned about the books' statements, it was more the complete lack of interest the students showed at any subjects that were not related to war and violence in general.
A high pitched voice from the telescreen announced that it was time for the Two Minutes Hate, which were now part of the daily routine of everybody's life. When the face of Emmanuel Goldstein flashed on to the screen, Julia was seized by a sudden audacity, and she left her apartment without a moment's hesitation.
When she observed the deserted streets, all her courage abandoned her; nevertheless an inexplicable force prevented her from returning to the safety of her apartment. Without knowing her final destination, she began to walk through the city. Only one thing was clear: now that she had missed the Two Minutes Hate, she had no choice but to continue until the Thought Police took hold of her.
After what seemed an eternity she turned into a small alley and eventually found herself standing on a big square, a place that she had never seen before on any postcard or inside any travel guide. In the middle of the square there was a big bronze sculpture. It showed a man, presumably Big Brother. Julia approached it cautiously; something familiar about it had called her attention. When she stood right in front of it, she noticed that there was an inscription engraved at the pedestal, hardly legible. Once she had deciphered the letters, her heart felt as if it had turned into ice.
They formed the two words Winston Smith.