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Once again, I wake up. Bugger.

The Government-issue alarm clock is what wakes me. It apparently has a personality tailored to my morning needs, for my comfort and convenience. To provide a better service. Mine's defective in some way because every morning it tries to engage me in vapid sub-Heat magazine conversation about the lives of people I have and intend never to meet. I was beginning to regret the flippant answers I gave in the personality test. Maybe it's me who's the defective model here.

I shower, clean my teeth and ablute. The holoradio DJ's a chippy, chirpy sort playing music for chippy, chirpy sorts. An unnecessary headbutt silences the smiling little cunt. The bastard's winsome at half pat six in the morning. Winsome! I ask you. I'm half tempted to report him for non-approved behaviour, but then I remember that the Government owns the network wholesale. Maybe he's being provided for me as someone immediately hateable to provide me a better service.

I zip up the armour-plated jumpsuit and pull on the thick, grubby-smelling nanorod gloves that make up my uniform. My job's a Convenience Coordinator. The jumpsuit's designed to look like an ancient uniform - police I think - and the Government tries to get everyone to call us Bobbies. We're the public face of the Government's desire to be everyone's best friend and protector. I put on my biggest, fakest smile and set out to be helpful.

Reporting at HQ, I'm propelled to my beat area with a brilliantly polished and substantially antiquated teleporter. Estate 44-44-44 - All The Fours Zone - is where I have to coordinate convenience for anyone that requests it. As a Coordinator, I've got command of about half the resources of the station there. Still have to do the legwork, though, wandering around this wasteland of burnished steel and glass. The streets are clean, and you don't have to lock your doors at night. The streets are silent and locks are banned.

The curtains twitch as I walk past. I can imagine the conversations going on behind closed doors, and don't blame the people of this estate for them. I'm the same when I'm at hope, looking at the CoCos wandering past and silencing my jailbird organ - modern slang for a blues harmonica - until they're gone. I tap a pocket as I walk, whistling a Government-approved jaunty tune largely by force and wondering when my bloody contact is going to show up.

An hour into my beat, wandering around the estate like the lost tourist my contact's impersonating, he arrives. The man's short and skinny, wearing thick plastic-rimmed sunglasses, cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt that reminds me of a vomited kebab on a pavement. I'm not quite certain how that image arrives in my head, but images and metaphors like that are why I'm seeing him. How convenient.

We mutter greetings and walk together. I talk to him about knowing where the River Museum of Accessible History is and where he can find it, pointing out various landmarks and suchlike along the way. All the time, we're speaking in Kellersign, a code he devised. My contact is the head of an organization of people discontented (a hanging offence) with the Government (crucifixion). Silently, we tap each others' palms as we proceed, relaying news. As we reach the Museum, our business concluded, I palm him a datacrystal containing something absolutely forbidden. My dreams.

In my dreams I go somewhere else. Back in time, I think. It looks like the City but it isn't the City. For one thing it's smaller and the buildings are hewn from stone rather than panelforged metal. They call it London, which it's been called for close on two and a half thousand. For another thing, it ends. There are limits to the urban landscape, and green grass and other plantlife growing unchecked outside them.

I've been recording my dreams on datacrystals like that one for all of my adult life, secreting them inside my bedposts, with backup after backup hidden everywhere my colleagues would never think to look. Imagination isn't exactly criminal, but it might get you looked at closely by Internal Affairs. In a strictly convivial manner, of course, probably over Government-approved drinks and sandwiches in a branch of the Citizen's Arms. I can't take the risk. As far as my superiors I'm a stolid, dull but fundamentally well-meaning Bobby. A credit to the uniform. Jumpsuit. Whatever. My contact thanks me for the help and wanders off.

* * * * *

It's been a month, now. My contact and his organisation have received every copy of my dreams to date. They've constructed a VR simulation which will tell them what I already know. That the City was built on a lie, that after the Climate Crisis was averted the only enemies which sought to assail our shores were the ones inside it, plotting control on the grandest scale. That the sky and the foreign holidays people went on were computer simulations, designed to hide the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust that the Founders started. That every life lived in the city is a lie.

Now that I've told my story, I realise something. If we remove the City's Convenience Patrols, if we let the people take back their rights and their freedoms, without the limits imposed by Founder law, then we are likely to either kill ourselves in civil war or end up with something even worse. I write it down on an old datasheet, stylus gliding across it swift and smooth. It's just plastic on plastic. It doesn't care what the words scrawled down are. They're just numbers, zeroes, ones and twos, stretching out across space. They mean nothing.

I pull back the hammer of my service-issue Unhappiness Removal Unit and place its barrel in my mouth. I've never so much as fired a training shot with it Still, my little rail pistol, painted a happy shade of yellow, came ready-filled with bullets. For my comfort and convenience.

To provide a better service.