‘Wait! Tell me—’

LEAVE. GO TO YOUR WORKSPACE AND FILE THE PETITION. WHEN YOU DO, YOU WILL REQUEST PERMISSION TO STATE THE GROUNDS FOR YOUR APPEAL IN PERSON.

‘In pers—you mean you want me to actually go to—to go to—to the—’

EXACTLY. NOW LEAVE, AND DO AS YOU HAVE BEEN TOLD.

‘You’re crazy! Nobody’s ever—’

THEN YOU WILL BE THE FIRST. GO FILE THE PETITION. I WILL CONTACT YOU.

‘But—’

YOU NOW HAVE 31 MINUTES.

Albert took a step back, and then turned and ran, not looking back once till he reached the door, his head reeling. Yet again he was a puppet, dancing, performing as he was told to while SUE pulled the strings. He reached the stairs, panting heavily, and began to climb up as quickly as he could. He could still hear that horrible whirring, that insistent drone—staccato and frenzied at the same time—ringing in his ears.

If he hadn’t known better, he could have sworn the machine was laughing at him.

6

The rest of the day passed in a blur. Albert made it back to the cubicle, panting, and then spent the next few hours swivelling around in his chair, fingers clasped together, trying to devise a way to extricate himself from this morass. There was none he could see, at least none that didn’t lead directly into an interrogation cell. Vaguely, he wondered where those people whom SUE had talked about had found safety. Then he cast it from his mind. There had been something creepy about that ‘been deleted from the system’ bit. Something told him he didn’t want to find out where those people had gone. Which meant figuring out the problem at hand, and soon.

If he didn’t do as it wanted, he was sure the machine would turn him in, and nobody would ever hear of him again. Not that too many people would ask in the first place, he thought, a trifle bitterly. But the alternative was just plain crazy! How could he just march up to the Justice Machines and demand that they unplug another machine? Outrageous! Goodness knows what laws he’d be flouting, no matter what the machine said about it not being illegal. And even if it was telling the truth, and he wasn’t breaking the law, that didn’t make it any less preposterous. Nobody, as far as he could remember, had ever been to the Hall of Logic, let alone on someone else’s behalf, let alone a machine’s! He didn’t even know if he could trust SUE. What if he went through with everything, and, by some miracle, SUE survived it and then informed on him?

Whichever way he looked at it, there didn’t seem any way out of this fix. He was trapped, well and truly.