Conscience, said Sigmund Freud, is the perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us. However, Robert Louis Stevenson had a different definition, revealing the heart of the matter when he said "Conscience is the one thing I cannot bear." As you can see, this is a story about conscience, and the best place to begin a story is at the beginning - but rules were meant to be broken, so we shall begin ours neither at the beginning, nor at the end...