The directives they sent out were to be implemented at the countless desks and counters of government institutions, and took the form of requests for additional documents, official stamps, countersignatures, and rare paper stamps that were only obtainable from minor functionaries who seemed to have vanished from the earth or from managers who were missing from their desks for half of every day. There were unfulfillable orders to cancel certain papers, miles of speed bumps laid down along main roads and highways, the traffic light network was reengineered to fail. Projects to build commercial centers and off-ramps and switchbacks were begun at great expense, then quietly dropped. There were rigorously executed operations to damage the pipes that carried water and sewage, to disrupt the internet, to design new and circuitous routes for public buses, to double the number of metro stations on each line—to quadruple them. Every piece—each seemingly arbitrary and unrelated to the others—was part of a vast, directed effort to cut the amount of dead time to under two hundred million days per year. But that astonishing reduction, a decrease of over ninety percent, wasn’t enough. For the first time, members of parliament began replacing their traditional calls for more fines and harsher penalties and new crimes with proposals for public works projects. Traffic police and transport inspectors and environmental investigators reported ever growing numbers of people for infringements, and the offenders were obliged to spend hours and hours engaged in these projects, hours that led directly to the laying of more (twisting and roundabout) public roads and compulsory checkpoints and toll booths, none of which wasted more than a few minutes here and there when taken in isolation, but which taken together amounted to an enormous reduction in the overall average.

Yehyia, as he later discovered, was one of the bureaucrats tasked with carrying out this mission; though he, like most of his fellow foot soldiers, had no idea there was a war being fought. Only the higher-ups, people like his boss, had the haziest sense that something was going on, and even then most of them assumed it was a campaign to tighten up procedures and restore diligence to their ranks.

The only people who truly understood were outside their ranks: people who’d caught wind of something through a betrayed confidence, or the indiscretion of a pen pusher, or even just a hunch, subsequently confirmed by personal observation of changes in procedure, of the many alterations to the standards and regulations.

In the end, however rough and indistinct their understanding of its mechanisms, the true nature of the campaign became clear to these few. It was designed to exhaust them, they now realized, to strangle at birth those thoughts and dreams that need free time to in which to take root and grow. And over the course of numerous discussions—the duration of which were curtailed by the efficiency of the campaign in question—they came up with a solution: timeshare.