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.

Forty-one households stopped filing their weekly consumption logs in the same week, and none of them had talked to the others. This month Samar saw the first asterisk on the Forecast’s confidence figures in four years.

Samar Varma approved what Kavya Nair’s file told him to approve. Three days later he stands in her courtyard in clothes that do not fit, beside a machine that changes colour and will not say why.

Gopal Mehra has inspected 140 carts in Sector 12-East for nine years. A new sub-clause wants each one fifteen centimetres from the wall behind it. In this lane, not one of them can be.

Every morning Fatima pours a second glass of tea, lets it sit for one full boil, and tips it out. She has done it for six years. In eleven years she has never written down what anyone owes her.

Eleven years of level paving taught Samar Varma’s legs one gait. Three steps past the checkpoint the ground stops being level, and a woman selling guavas tells him to leave his face somewhere else.