Alister Crompton was a stereotype—a person of a depth no more than a centimeter—an archetypal melancholic, whose desires are easy to predict and whose fears are obvious to everyone. The worst part was that he himself understood his shortcomings, but he couldn’t change. After all, doctors had made him that way: in young Crompton, who suffered from viral schizophrenia, they identified three main personalities and placed them into different bodies…