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On the back of a Bureau envelope, Samar Varma adds up eleven years of confirmations. The number is not four thousand. Then he opens one file at random, and choosing it takes nineteen minutes.

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.