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Ashwin Menon has spent twenty-two years standing next to documents nobody reads. In a lane he has never seen, he says one sentence to a woman at a tea stall. It contains the name of an eight-year-old girl.

A well-dressed stranger asks three people in the lane where to find the Handler who resigned over a girl named Ruhi. He never asks for her mother. Ruhi’s name sits in the Archive, searchable forever, because Samar put it there.

The oversight committee spends four minutes on Amendment 4.9. It changes nothing the model does. It only makes every Handler’s screen say, in the same clean sans-serif: This determination has already been executed.

In 2059 a dying woman said four lines in Bhojpuri at a relief counter. The file kept a six-line summary. Her great-granddaughter Kavya has been applying for the original since she was twenty-two.