Station Commuters Walk Backwards

Seamus Adeyemi walks backward down the high-speed transit corridor every morning. Like thousands of other office clerks on the Aurelia Girdle, he is trying to outrun his own ageing process. By walking against the station’s spin at nine kilometres per hour, he exploits the ring's speed to slow his own time.

The average commuter now claws back 4.12 nanoseconds of life per shift. It was 3.8 last month.

Older station staff are unimpressed. Teodor Kowalczyk, a senior track mechanic, has to repair the composite floor plates. "They are wearing out the heels of their soft-shoes," Kowalczyk says. "And they bump into the cleaning carts because they refuse to look where they are going."

It takes eighty-four years of constant backward walking to gain a single second of retirement.

Yet the habit is spreading. On Friday, the station’s largest data-firm introduced backward-only lunch hours to boost staff focus. Tiihu Farahani, who manages the firm's filing pool, believes the savings add up. "We are more efficient now," Farahani says. "I have already saved enough time this year to take a deep breath."