Nightmarish memories told him that all the King’s horses and all the King’s men would have merely fetched a spade and a bin liner, but, studying himself more closely he saw only a few cuts on his hands from broken glass scattered on the floor. Perhaps other damage lay concealed under the paper overall he wore, though all he could feel was some bruising and a tight cramped stiffness. He stood up carefully, his spine and knees clicking and sudden cramp tightening his feet. He gazed down for a long moment at the things enclosing his feet – items made of the same compressed paper as his overall, but thicker on the underside – and could not for the life of him remember what they were called. Then he looked around again, wondering where the strange voice issued from.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked. ‘And where are you?’

‘My inception name is Janus,’ the voice replied. ‘I am speaking to you via a fone implanted in the bone right behind your right ear, but I am myself constantly changing my location over Govnet servers.’

Saul understood at once. ‘You’re an artificial intelligence.’ He paused to consider, before asking a question that only then occurred to him.

‘My name is Alan Saul but . . .’ Though now clear in his mind, his name seemed like a label on an empty box.

‘You have stated you are Alan Saul,’ Janus replied.

‘That’s not enough,’ Saul declared. ‘I don’t remember . . . me.’

‘My circumstances are similar, since my inception was only twenty-six hours ago.’

A terrifying panic washed over Saul. He knew the world he existed in. He knew how it operated, and knew he possessed large mental resources. But gaping holes lay open in his mind, like naming whatever those things were on his feet, and why he had been interrogated and why his body showed no signs of the torture he had suffered. Or like how he had come to find himself in a crate heading towards an incinerator, or his entire life prior to that point, and, beyond his name, who he really was. Two years later, as he applied a surgical saw to Avram Coran’s neck, he still did not remember most of his previous life. But by then he had learned enough about the Inspectorate to know how he had ended up in that crate, and he also remembered enough to know that his route there had been different from other victims.