The charter keeps one door open. A Handler’s exit statement goes into the Archive whole, never summarised by a machine. After eleven years at the same desk, Samar Varma opens the exit statement field and starts to write.

At 6:14 on a Sunday, Meghna Rao reads the notification she half-expected for a year, standing at her kitchen counter while her tea goes cold. At her office a second file is waiting, from a Handler she has never met.

Twenty-two years ago Dev Sharma wrote a clause he never expected any Secretary to use. Tonight fourteen sectors are amber, his machine cannot say why, and the clause asks for one name.

In 2061 a young engineer gave the Pranaali’s modules four Sanskrit names. Twenty-three years later Dev Sharma finds a fifth, struck through, and the initials of the officer who removed it are D.S.

A grain notice reaches 4,200 households with the words dependency patterns requiring monitoring. Forty-one of them read the whole thing. Ganga Devi Yadav reads it twice and puts it in the stove.

Tarun Ghosh has about four seconds to decide what nine hundred people will see on the Forecast. On a Tuesday he breaks a thirty-year rule of the desk for the sector where he lived until he was six.