The old Manx town of Laxey was renamed Goliathopolis and was now the Hong Kong of the British archipelago, a forest of glassy towers striding up the hillside towards Snaefell. The largest of these skyscrapers rose higher even than the mountain peak behind and could be seen glinting in the sunlight all the way from Blackpool, weather permitting. In this building was housed the inner sanctum of the whole vast multinational, the cream of Goliath’s corporate engineers. An employee could spend a lifetime on the island and never even get past the front desk. And it was on the ground floor of this building, right at the heart of the corporation, that I found the Goliath Apologarium.

I joined a small queue in front of a modern glass-topped table where two happy, smiling Goliath employees were giving out questionnaires and numbered tickets.

“Hello!” said the clerk, a youngish girl with a lopsided smile. “Welcome to the Goliath Corporation’s Apology Emporium. Sorry you had to wait. How can we help you?”

“The Goliath Corporation murdered my husband.”

“How simply dreadful!” she responded in a lame and insincere display of sympathy. “I’m so sorry to hear that. Goliath, as part of our move to a faith-based corporate-management system, is committed to reversing all the unpleasant matters we might have previously been engaged in. You need to fill in this form, and this form—and Section D of this one—and then take a seat. We’ll get one of our highly trained apologists to see you just as soon as they can.”

She handed me several long forms and a numbered ticket, then indicated a door to one side. I opened the door of the Apologarium and walked in. It was a large hall with floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a serene view of the Irish Sea. On one side was a row of perhaps twenty cubicles containing suited apologists, all listening intently to what they were being told with the same sad and contrite expression. On the other side were rows upon rows of wooden seating that held eager and once bullied citizens, anxiously clasping their numbered tickets and patiently waiting their turn. I looked at my ticket. It was number 6,174. I glanced up at the board, which told me that number 836 was now being interviewed.

“Dear, sweet people!” said a voice through a tannoy. “Goliath is deeply sorry for all the harm it might inadvertently have caused you in the past. Here at the Goliath Apologarium we are only too happy to assist in your problem, no matter how small—”

“You!” I said to a man who was hobbling past me towards the exit. “Has Goliath repented to your satisfaction?”

“Well, they didn’t really need to,” he replied blandly. “It was I who was at fault—in fact, I apologized for wasting their valuable time!”

“What did they do?”

“They bathed my neighborhood with ionizing radiation, then denied it for seventeen years, even after people’s teeth fell out and I grew a third foot.”