The totalitarian regime was crumbling. Gone was its state’s days of being the region’s main political power. It was no longer a heart that was aggrandized as it annexed its pitiful border states with every beat; instead, it festered in a state of quickening atrophy.

In a boarded-up tool shed off of the state’s capital’s main square, two men and a woman huddled shivering around a few feeble flames. The adults had risked food rations, money, and reputation to associate in this atypical way, but they had long passed the point of caring about such things.

“Our country’s leader is an anathema,” the bearded man croaked. “He enforced atheist ways upon us all, and now God is punishing him for his impudence by stirring up foreign armies to strike back at this state.”

"It will take more than outside forces to take him down, though," inserted a woman known solely as S. "We, too, must unite and work from inside to destroy him."

"And what if he is destroyed?" the student Mark asked. "One of our neighboring nations will merely suck us up and implement their own form of government upon us! We've experienced democracy here, to no avail. Now the government is a dictatorship, and it's the worst thing that's ever happened to us. Enough with all governments, I say. It is time we tried out anarchy—this is what our revolt must establish!"

In the silence that followed, a slow drip-drip of rainwater could be heard pattering onto the tin roof. A few well-placed droplets poured through the jagged cracks above and onto the people below, soaking irregular patches onto their worn attire. The fire spluttered and cast shadows on S's apathetic face.

"It could…" The bearded man hesitated, his words breaking through the fog that had settled. "It could work. It could be good." As Mark grinned, S. slowly nodded her head.

"Yes," she murmured, "and I know just what we can do to achieve it—"

Up until that moment, no one had bothered to pay the rusting ammeter in the corner much attention. Up until that moment, it had been just like every other aging object in that shed. Up until that moment—

BOOM.

The totalitarian regime was crumbling. Its police force, however, was not.