They did some superb work, finally managing to install a terabyte processor inside a human skull, though never able to connect it up completely to the human brain, only managing to wire it in through the sensory nerves. Saul decided he wanted one of these processors inside his own skull and so, with his usual blinkered focus, he hacked into research-team security when Smith was absent, and falsified the orders . . .

‘I inserted that processor in your head, Alan,’ Hannah now told him. ‘I thought it a stupid risk to take, but I never disobeyed orders. I assumed you had suggested it to Smith and he’d agreed, perhaps after you claimed that by using the technology you might be able to crack the mind–silicon interface.’

Saul had then been concentrating on trying to copy the function of the human mind into software, on silicon, to make it easier to crack that same interface. Smith and his advisers were getting both very worried and very excited about this work, and when Alan used some of his comlife, as he called it, to punch through security so easily, it seemed that their worries were justified.

‘Smith hated you, though I don’t think he could have done anything about that if your mother had still been alive, but she’d died a month before.’ Hannah shook her head. ‘I tried to excuse your behaviour by telling Smith you’d gone a bit strange after your mother’s death, but the truth was that you showed no reaction to that at all. It just didn’t seem to interest you.’

Smith finally cleared permission to take Alan off the project and send him for adjustment. But that came a little too late, because Saul crashed computer security systems and all the research computers before escaping. While in the outside world, he created false community credit, a false identity, and even managed to penetrate secure Committee files to erase all details that might be used to track him down. Alan Saul thus disappeared from most computer systems and most live computer files, except for the discs retained at the Dinaric community. It was the information on a single disc like this that enabled newly developed recognition software to track him down. Enforcers arrested him while he was living in a ministerial apartment in the Caribbean, and handed him directly to Smith for adjustment.

‘He used the hardware inside your head and pain inducers to torture you,’ explained Hannah. ‘He even brought me and the rest of the team in to watch, just so we understood where any disobedience would lead. When he’d finished, you didn’t have a mind left; in fact large parts of your brain suffered lethal bleeds, and tissue had died inside your skull, too. They then dragged you off for disposal, so I don’t know how you can be here now.’