For Saul, every test, both mental or physical, was of overriding interest and in nothing he tried did he fail to excel. He practised martial arts, taking his second black belt in shotokan karate whilst studying for eight doctorates in the physical sciences and three in the arts. Very soon he began to produce: making vast improvements to the software of agricultural robots, then designing a new kind of materially inert microbot that could hunt through the human body for cancer cells without causing rejection problems. Next he applied the same inert materials to someone else’s invention of a chip interface to the human mind, so it too would not activate the immune system. That was Hannah’s invention.

Saul thus became a ‘societal asset’ even as the Committee was just inventing the term. When Committee political officers realized how valuable he could be, he was seconded to a gated science community secure in the Dinaric Alps of Albania and there, for the first time, and like all the other scientists thus seconded, he came under intense political scrutiny. This was where he had first met Hannah.

‘That was forty years ago, Alan,’ Hannah told him.

‘How old am I?’ he asked.

‘Somewhere in your sixties,’ she replied. ‘Just like us all, you received anti-ageing treatments.’

‘I see.’ He nodded. ‘So how, then, did I end up in a crate heading for the Calais Incinerator?’

‘You didn’t do what you were told. You kept antagonizing them.’ She gazed at him steadily. ‘Most of the community thought you a brat. They’d been working under the eyes of political officers since their school days, yet you’d experienced none of that.’

‘How . . . how did I antagonize them?’

‘Probably the first example was what you did thirty years ago when you were into splicing nanotech and viruses.’ Hannah shrugged. ‘They still haven’t been able to work out what you actually did, and neither have I. You created something: a splicing of the cancer-hunting nanite you’d developed and a retrovirus used to fix the genetic faults that lead to some cancers – one of the so-called magic bullets. You injected it into yourself and actually edited your own DNA. You wouldn’t tell them what you’d done, and that’s when they really started to get pissed off with you.’

‘Why wouldn’t I tell them?’

‘I think you had developed an extreme dislike of Political Director Smith.’

That name again. The mention of it caused some sort of deep reaction and, as on previously hearing it, he again chose not to analyse the feeling.

‘He wouldn’t allow you unsupervised contact with your sister,’ Hannah added.

‘I have a sister?’ Saul felt a surge of something inside – something difficult to identify.

‘You do. As brilliant as you, apparently, and seconded like you to work on government projects.’

‘Her name?’

‘I don’t know. You never talked about her much.’