[...] around this time, my attitude not only to the Great Report but also towards Koob-Sassen underwent a sea-change. I started seeing the Project as nefarious. Sinister. Dangerous. In fact, downright evil. Worming its way into each corner of the citizenry’s lives, re-setting (“re-configuring”) the systems lying behind and bearing on virtually their every action and experience, and doing this without their even knowing it … I started picturing it, picturing its very letters (the K a body-outline, the Ss folds of cloak, the hyphen a dagger hidden between these), slinking up staircases in the night while people slept, a silent assassin. That’s how I started seeing it. I couldn’t, at first, put my finger on a particular aspect or effect of it, nor on a specific instigator or beneficiary, that was itself inherently and unambiguously bad. But after a while I started telling myself that it was precisely this that made it evil: its very vagueness rendered it nefarious and sinister and dangerous. In not having a face, or even body, the Project garnered for itself enormous and far-reaching capabilities, while at the same time reducing its accountability—and vulnerability—to almost zero. What was to criticize, or to attack? There was no building, no Project Headquarters or Central Co-ordination Bureau. What person, then? The Minister with Shoes? She was no evil mastermind; she had no greater overview of the whole Project than I did. Her immediate boss, a man whose intellectual capacities (like all aristocrats, he was inbred) were held in almost open contempt by even his own cabinet members? The Project was supra-governmental, supra-national, supra-everything—and infra- too: that’s what made it so effective, and so deadly. I continued to ponder these things even as I laboured on, week-in, week-out, to help usher the Project into being, to help its first phase go live; and as I did, the more I pondered, ruminated, what you will, the more thoughts of this nature festered."