Of course, it didn’t take long for the state to find out about the resistance and mount a response. Sometimes they’d go after the app designers, the strategists, pulling them in for questioning. Other times they targeted the money men, the people with small fortunes in time credits, emptying their accounts by detaining them and putting them in a semi-comatose state for days or even weeks, then dropping them off on the hard shoulder of rural highways. In a bid to lend the operation a more chilling, personal edge, one man was abducted on the eve of his wedding. He was drugged and slept for days, until his credit was exhausted, then his slumbering body was dumped on the outskirts of a deserted village.

Upon waking, he thought the world had come to an end.

It was around this time that Yehyia first met Hossam Yousry.

Hossam was having issues with his ID. The picture looked nothing like him. Or rather, it looked nothing like him now. It was an old photograph, taken just as Hossam was about to begin his military service, and in it he was thin and young with a full head of hair and the beginnings of a faint moustache—later mocked by the young woman he loved, and shamefacedly shaved clean. Unfortunately for Hossam, he was one of those people whose appearance can change overnight. Seven years had passed between the shutter’s click and the day he presented himself to Yehyia: plump, prematurely gray, and smooth of chin and lip. With a little concentration, though, you could still see the resemblance between this man and the face: the eyes, though wearier, were unmistakable.

But to those at war with free time, to people like Yehyia, Hossam was the perfect target: he’d spent months and months trying to prove he was the rightful owner of his ID card simply so he could renew it. A single issue that had triggered problems in every part of his life—administrative difficulties leading to financial difficulties; trouble with the police; friction with the security services. And he was pretty much alone in life. His father was deceased, his older brother had gone abroad years before never to be heard from again, and only his blind, elderly mother was in his care. A gifted violinist, he’d been forced to take up work that was tantamount to begging, but even there the problem with the photo reared its head, and without family to vouch for the face on the card, he was left twisting in the wind. A pawn to be pushed around.

Yehyia could do nothing for him, and Hossam’s file departed his desk as swiftly as it had arrived. Months later, though, he was back, and this time his face matched the photo exactly. A rigorous diet had restored his face’s slenderness, his hair was coal black with dye, and the moustache was back. Moisturizers, diligently applied, reestablished his vanished youth.