Renu’s network has no list and has never met in one room. It is nine Handlers in four buildings who take longer over their files. In the fourteenth month, one of them remembers a citizen ID she saw four months before.

At twenty-six, the Bureau gave Vikram and Meenal forty-one per cent, and he let her go. He married at ninety-one per cent. Fourteen years later, a dead woman’s file makes him sit for eleven extra seconds.

Confidence 98.9. Renu Sen closes forty files like this a week without thinking. This one holds two stories about the same address, and after thirteen years she asks to see the audit log.

Vikram’s ninety-fourth file of the afternoon is his old maths teacher, the one who kept boiled sweets for boys who came to school hungry. Confidence 96.4. He approves it eleven seconds late.