That was my guiding principle in the design: that Annie’s world was one derived from a heedless benignancy that based its assumptions on fine ideas rather than messy truths, and in the process birthed not a Utopia but a kind of great Procrustean bed on which the whole of Britain must lie. It was the spring before the vote on our relationship with the European Union, and so I started from what I saw all around me. I imagined that we might lose the vote, despite the obvious absurdity of that outcome, and from there I conjured a Europe made weak by division in the face of predatory Russia, and limping along just offshore, a Great Britain buckling under rising debt and the asinine policies of a Conservative administration hostage to its more ridiculous fantasists. I pictured a rising authoritarianism on both the Left and the Right, and internationally a flagging centrist instinct struggling to find a voice that could not be shouted down. What if, I asked myself, the great liberal project that was the underpinning of all British political parties was truly not stuttering but collapsing under the weight of its own Victorian contradictions? What if Annie’s generation became persuaded that predictability and security for the many were more important than those caught in the sharp corners of the government machine? It had been in my life an unchallenged tenet that a nation should strive to accommodate all its citizens, even if that occasionally meant the tail wagging the dog. How, though, if the new formulation of democracy for the coming century did not accept that? How if it rejected the presumption of innocence in favour of a scientific and inquisitorial finding of truth? From this cauldron I conjured a state constructed on the sacrifice of privacy in exchange for a power that seemed direct and real, but was at heart undermined. I built it to be seductive, yet unsettlingly flawed, and I expressed those flaws in how it looked and felt. Nowhere was the truth of Ethiopia as I knew it more evident than in the map and image of the capital, the new buildings decreed by the Emperor rising above the old ones: the future emerging from and crushing the past. I made my new London in the spiritual image of my old Addis Ababa, and always, always, there must be the hint of Annie’s Minotaur: the subtle, unforced error which made everything in the game world fraught where it might have been fine.