A question put to an artificial intelligence, and then made harder by insisting it be answered as somebody else: an Englishman of forty, married, with two children in secondary school, who has been left one million pounds in his father's will. This first of three parts fixes the man, prices the sum against what he actually owes and when he owes it, and finds that a million pounds is a house, or an income, or a runway, and cannot be all three at once. It sets his answer against the machine's earlier one, names the solicitations that will arrive in a predictable order, and states the instruction its narrator would defend hardest, which is that the man should do nothing, and decide nothing irreversible, for ninety days.