Father held up a hand and went on. ‘Ninety per cent. Those were the official estimates. There were no others to go by. The actual number may well have been higher. There was no leadership—many heads-of-state were among the first to be infected. Systems broke down—there was nobody left to run them. The Company stepped in to fill the breach and, almost immediately, was overwhelmed. Neighbourhoods burned; Company stores and homes were looted and vandalized. The only stroke of good fortune, if one could call it that, was that the first lawbots had just been commissioned the previous year, almost a decade after they were designed, and it was they who prevented total anarchy, a rolling back of civilization to a time when everybody was just part of the food chain. But they were over-extended as well, just by the sheer numbers. Panic and catastrophe reigned everywhere. Ironically, the one thing that was somehow keeping things together, by the slimmest of threads, was the AI introduced in various previous endeavours. But only just.’

Albert sat there looking down, hearing the words, feeling them penetrate his consciousness, but only so far. Wait! This wasn’t right! Sure, there had been an addiction issue, but an epidemic? It couldn’t be true. Then he looked at Father, then at June and, in that moment, he felt his stomach heave, and he knew it was true, every word of it.

He looked down again as the clear voice continued. ‘Things were critical. Something had to be done, but there was nobody left to do it. Across the world, shock and horror ran amok, except in one place. The Chairman was not horrified—he was furious. This was his world, his kingdom, and overnight, literally overnight, it had fallen apart around him, shattered into billions of information-overloaded pieces of people. Everyone who knew him knew he would do something—the only question was what. What could even the Chairman do in the face of a crisis like this? It was then that he summoned the Company Board for an emergency meeting. And they learned what he could do, which was what nobody else was capable of doing.