He knew his duty as a Citizen all right. Browse the network, check people’s statuses, interact, talk to one person after another, but never the same person twice. And, if you found anyone exhibiting signs of unusual or suspicious behaviour, report them. Because perfection was vigilance. And nobody was perfect till everybody was and everybody was guilty blah blah blah whatever. Some duty. In four years, he hadn’t reported a single person. Not one. He’d never even filed one of those Citizens’ petitions that were so popular with everyone who didn’t know what to do with their time, which was, once again, everyone. Considering that the list of things they were allowed to petition about was so much shorter than the list of things they couldn’t, it was surprising how people kept managing to come up with requests and queries at the rate at which they did. Maybe they all privately agreed that even complaining to a machine was preferable to looking at another selfie on the network.

But, having said that, perhaps he should go through the rigmarole yet again, just so there were no questions asked about why he was clocking so much time off the network of late. And, while he was at it, perhaps he would update his status and comment on those of a couple of others, too. Best to play it safe. After all, it had been two days, as he had just been reminded, and there were whispers that the Justice Department was going to monitor everyone whose activity dropped too low.

He smiled, a brief and mandatory stretching of the lips that was gone almost before it arrived. Even after all this time, it still felt hypocritical to post reactions to updates on events and activities both vapid and untrue, but he knew the reality as well as anyone—when everyone lies, it becomes the truth.

He sighed, squeezed his eyes together, and then opened them again and faced the screen.

‘Log in.’

2

Albert looked down from the screen, relaxing his plastic smile, and turned his head to look at the large red timer on the door. Two more to go. Sitting up straight, he stretched to get rid of the kinks in his back. Now, if only he could figure out a way to do the same with the after-effects of 300 minutes of meaningless conversation with a series of people he’d never seen before and heartily hoped to never see again.

‘Log off,’ he said.