Most of your thoughts are not yours. They were installed before you could refuse them, and this book is one man's record of pulling them out and taking back the controls of his own life.

Behind the grain market there is no scoreboard, no sensor and no licence. Samar Varma, eleven years a Handler, is handed a bat and told he does not have to play it correctly.

Manzoor is seventy and walks a route nobody in the lane knows is a route: Fatima’s stall, the Agarwals’ shutter, a widow upstairs who needs nothing. Twenty-nine doors, every morning, between two glasses of tea.

For fifteen years Aisha has told strangers how a grain convoy saved her mother. Her mother was twenty-three that night, not nineteen. She does not remember any headlights. She remembers diesel.

The terminal heard every word the dhobi said and reduced it to a line: Refer to Sector Utilities, Tier 2. Chhaya missed six seconds of it, and she wants them back. In her second drawer is a pad of paper slips kept since 2071.

Chhaya Deshmukh has not typed a word at work in nine years. Her job is to be looked at while a machine listens. Twenty-two grievance categories, four sentiment values, and no field for an old man’s father.

In 2058 a routing pilot ran sixteen futures for one evening’s grain and sent a convoy down the wrong lane. Aisha’s mother was three doors from home. Aisha has defended the machine ever since.

Devakkant Sharma runs the only government the world has left. Every morning he wakes eleven minutes before his own house expects him, makes his tea by hand, and feeds a dog he has never registered.

In October 2059 Kavya’s grandmother stood twelve hours in the Referendum queue, read all forty pages of the charter on a cracked phone, and pressed Decline. Within the month she lost her ration registration.

For six years the power tap under Kavya’s courtyard sat below the threshold. On the night a Grid Handler stays two hours, the light inside the junction box is green. Nothing is broken. It has been throttled from outside.

In July 2057 a child died ninety metres from the drug that would have saved her, because the log was a book in a locked drawer. Sanyal has not lost a child to a supply failure in twenty-two years.