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.

Farah and Iqbal, eighteen and twenty-one, walk into the Grid in clothes a size too loose and spend four hours doing nothing at all. At the terminal kiosk, Iqbal has been told to type nothing.

Fifteen people sit on cushions above the grain market, under one bare bulb. Four years ago they flooded the model with noise for eleven days. Afterward its confidence rose from 78% to 84%.

At nineteen, a slide with two error rates taught Renu Sen to stop consulting her own instinct. Thirteen years later the Bureau matches her with Arjun at 89%, and she cannot find a single fault in him.

Priya and Rohan meet at the Union Bureau with a 94% match. Samar Varma, carrying a 31% of his own, watches them through the glass while a screen tells them what to talk about.

The Ministry rates Samar Varma and Kavya Nair 31% compatible. The highest-variance factor is trust in the Pranaali. Since the Programme began, no score below 40% has ever been approved.

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.