Once upon a time there was a boy. Let’s call him James. He was born into privilege in the time between the two wars. His father was Scottish, from the old landowning elite. His mother was a glamorous European heiress. They lived for adventure and each other and they were very much in love.

Young James grew up surrounded by love and adventure and people from all over Europe. He was already multilingual, charming and well read by the time he was 10 years old. His parents boarded him at school during the week so they could travel but every weekend was full of parties in London or grouse shooting in the Highlands. Every holiday he travelled with them. He learned swimming in the Mediterranean, sailing on Lake Geneva, climbing in the Italian Alps and skiing in Austria.

And then came the terrible day when it all ended. His parents died in a climbing accident. Or maybe not an accident. His father was on the board of a British armaments firm and the dark clouds of war were already beginning to gather.

James was sent to a spinster aunt who had absolutely no idea how to properly supervise him. He ran wild. She sent him away to school. He was booted out for 'inappropriate friendships'. She sent him to a tougher, more remote school. He thrived in the wilderness and put up with the school work and the discipline.

War broke out and he joined the Navy as soon as he was able, hoping to do his bit and see the world. Things didn’t go his way and the world he saw turned out to be the Baltic sea and the Arctic Ocean.

He was recruited to military intelligence. They wanted him for his languages. He wanted to do something more meaningful, to see real action, to make a difference and most of all to get back into Europe.

Military intelligence wanted his languages behind a desk in Whitehall. But for the first time in years he wasn’t alone. He was sharing that office with the man who would become a life-long friend. We’ll call him Ian. Like James he was lonely, frustrated, charming and prone to forming inappropriate relationships. Their commanding officers wouldn’t let them fight the enemy face to face so they had to find other ways to fight.

They built a team of charmers and femmes fatales. They went to the US and seduced the American political elite into bankrolling the defence of the UK. They seduced the girlfriends and boyfriends of German Intelligence operatives in neutral cities. They began passionate correspondences with the wives and families of Axis officers. They learned to charm and manipulate and influence.

Ian and James worked as a team. Ian was the better writer but James was the better linguist and slightly more charming in person. James was also the more ruthless of the two. Ian just could never bring himself to kill someone unless they were actively trying to kill him. Together they built an intelligence network that supplied the gossip and intel that allowed the codebreakers at Bletchley Park to crack codes faster. They were even able to run operations behind enemy lines in person.

But the Second World War was mostly powered by irony so when James’ luck ran out it ran out in London.

On the morning of March 27th 1945 James was visiting one of his many mistresses. She was a Jewish refugee living in Stepney. As he left her block of flats it was hit by the last V2 bomb to hit London. James caught a lump of flying masonry that crushed his pelvis and lower spine. He survived but he would never walk again.

Almost everyone who knew him thought that he would break. Everyone except Ian. Ian was waiting by his side when he came round in the hospital. Together they worked out how James could run his network entirely by letter, radio and proxy. Ian built him an imaginary version of himself that his recruits would never meet in person. They would think it was because he was too busy. He would always be a step ahead of them, just out of reach, a voice on the phone or the radio, an enigma to decipher from his handwriting or the rhythm of his Morse code.

It worked. It worked for the remaining months of the war and when Ian left the service James stayed on and went from spying on Nazis to spying on Communists.

Without Ian’s restraining hand the imaginary version of James started to get out of hand. Stories of outrageous missions circulated. Successes were attributed to him. Enemies started to come to James, intrigued to see if he was as charming as everyone said. On paper and by telephone and radio he could be exactly as charming as they had heard.

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In 1952 Ian was suddenly recalled to service. James was in trouble. He’d succeeded in turning someone high up in the Soviet Ministry for State Security but they wouldn’t come in unless James came for them personally. The fictional James, not the badly scarred cripple.

Ian saw the solution immediately. Find someone to be the fictional James. He wrote a list of the qualities they needed. Their man needed to be an unattached orphan. Someone who could keep a secret and who could spend months pretending to be someone else without being missed.

The fake James needed to be a brilliant linguist. He would have to speak Russian, Polish and German like a native. It would help if he was Scottish because the real James tended to play up his accent. They needed to recruit him from the Navy because their target had served in the Soviet Navy and might want to talk about old times. He needed to be charming and, if not exactly handsome, at least convincing as a man that women might swoon over. He needed to be… flexible about relationships and some aspects of morality but he needed to be loyal to the Crown. I’m sure this is starting to sound familiar.

They also needed someone who could fit the few widely known facts of James’ appearance. Roughly 6’ tall, black hair, blue or grey eyes, slim build. They could add the scar if they needed to.

When they found a likely candidate MI6 were already trying to recruit him. He was a remarkable young man. Let’s call him Jamie. He was born in Edinburgh to poor Catholic parents. His entire family died in a building collapse when he was just a boy. He was sent to a Catholic orphanage that was already filling up with children fleeing poverty and the growing threat of war in Europe. He had a natural gift for languages and was protective of the younger children.

By the time he was 15 he was fluent in German, French and Polish, competent in Hungarian, Lithuanian and Russian, spoke a little Romanian and Italian and even knew a few words of Yiddish.

With his intelligence, charisma, flair for language and a gift for working with children the orphanage began to groom him for the priesthood. With Europe unstable the church sent him to Oxford to study languages but something went wrong. Whether it was meeting girls or discovering how extreme his anger issues were is unknown. What is known is that he decided that a life of celibacy and pacifism wasn’t for him.

He joined the Navy but the war was ending. They stuck him in Naval Intelligence and based him in Hong Kong since by then he’d got bored with European Languages and started learning Japanese, Cantonese and Mandarin.

Jamie was a close match. He was on the young side but he was rugged enough to pass for older. He was a little too tall and a little too broad and his accent was a little too working class but fixing an accent is no trouble for a linguist and everything else would be put down to him being more impressive in the flesh.

James and Ian had him recalled to London and set about getting him into a decent suit and fixing his voice and teaching him about fine food and wine and Soviet Naval History. He spent weeks reading and re-reading all the correspondence so he could pass for the person who sent it.

When Jamie was finally ready to go it went far too well. He didn’t just act like the fictional version of James. He thought that’s who he was. He had perfect recall, not just of the correspondence but of James’ whole life pre-injury and whole invented life post-injury.

Ian and James had run out of time. They sent Jamie off to Berlin to do the job and then, at last, had the good sense to ask Department Y for help. When Jamie returned, Soviet defector in tow, a Department team was waiting for a quiet chat.

There were many quiet chats. It took the Department experts a while to figure out what had happened and Jamie was simply too useful an asset to have sitting around while they worked. And had it not been for the operations he went on they might never have worked it out. What had happened to Jamie was so unusual it didn’t even have a name until many years later.

Ian and James had done too good a job of creating the fictional James. It wasn’t that he was a particularly convincing invention; it was more that people wanted to believe in him. He was someone that ought to exist. The invented personality was so powerful that when Jamie put it on it partially over-wrote his existing personality.

That was the start of the Blank programme. James was put in charge. Ian helped in the beginning but eventually went back to journalism. They created the 7 Blank personalities. They made the original one Lucky Number Seven because they knew it had been pure chance. We warned them that it might never work again but James’ point was that even if the other 6 never took hold properly they were camouflage for the original.

Number Seven is what we now call a fiction suit. It’s so powerful that those who wear it don’t know it’s a suit until the time comes to take it off. Over the years it’s become so powerful it warps reality around it. That’s why people see the suit and not the man wearing it.

So far it’s the only one. None of the other Blank personalities has quite crossed that line but the process of hiring lonely people to do monstrous things in the name of Queen and country seems to be working exactly as intended. No other power has worked out what Number Seven is. No one is trying to duplicate it.