2084: An Algorithmic State — Prologue: Gate Four

Nine sachets, two mothers, one trestle table at Gate Four. The Registrar has been awake nineteen hours, his only rule is first come, and the quiet child is not crying.

In Brief: Delhi, the ninety-fourth night of the Collapse. A Registrar runs a relief depot at Gate Four with a ledger, a dwindling stock of rehydration sachets and one rule written on a scrap of paper. Near two in the morning, two mothers with sick children reach his table in the same minute.

There was no light at Gate Four except what the queue brought with it. Three torches. A phone a boy of about ten held up so his mother could read a form she could not read. And far back, where the line went round the corner into the dark of Ali Manzil Road, nothing at all. Just voices. The particular sound five hundred people make when they have stopped believing that standing here will change anything and have decided to stand here anyway.

The Registrar had been on shift for nineteen hours. By the time it ended it would be his ninth night in a row. Somewhere around the sixth night he had stopped being able to tell which kind of tired he was: the kind sleep fixes, or the kind it doesn’t.

He worked from a trestle table inside the depot gate. On it were a ledger and a stack of ration chits gone soft with handling. Behind him, in three cardboard boxes, was what was left of the rehydration sachets. At his midnight count there were a hundred and twelve, against a line of five hundred, most of them there because of a child.

He had a system, if it could be called that. First come. He’d written it on a scrap of paper and propped it against the ledger, in case anyone doubted him, though nobody had asked. It was the oldest rule there was, and the only one that didn’t require him to decide anything, until near two in the morning, when it did.

Two women reached the table within the same minute.

The first was young, maybe twenty-five. She had been standing since before dark. He remembered her from three hours back, near the middle of the line, because she had not made a sound the whole time. She had not made one even when the boy in front of her was sick on his mother’s feet. She held a child of about four, limp against her shoulder in the particular way that meant the child was not sleeping but was past the energy for anything else. She said nothing now either. She reached the table and stood, the way you stand when you have used up everything you had for the standing.

The second was perhaps forty, and screaming. She had come around the side of the queue rather than through it, holding an infant. Its crying was thin and weakening, and in ninety-four nights the Registrar had learned to fear that kind more than the loud kind. Please, she was saying. Please, please, look at her. The word had worn down to a single repeated shape. Behind her, forty people shouted that she’d jumped the line, that everyone’s child was sick, that if she went first the whole thing would come apart.

He had nine sachets in the reachable box. He would not open the second box, the one with ninety, until the count forced him to. That was also a rule, and also his own. Even as he reached past the second box, he understood that it was not a rule at all but a superstition. It was a way of pretending the ninety were a decision for some better-rested version of himself.

Nine sachets. Two women. Behind them, everyone else.

He looked at the quiet one first, because she was first. That was the rule he had built, so that a night like this would never ask him to do what it was about to ask.

“Name,” he said. His voice came out smaller than he meant it to.

She told him. He wrote it. His hand did this without him, the way it had learned to do most things by the sixth night. He had counted the ration into her palm, two sachets, water to follow at the pump. Then the other woman’s hand came down flat on the table, hard enough to make the ledger jump.

“She isn’t even crying,” the screaming woman said, meaning the quiet child, meaning it as an accusation. For one full second the Registrar understood that she was right. From where she stood, the quiet child’s stillness looked like a child who was managing, and a screaming child was plainly the one in danger. In the same second he understood that this was not how it worked. The ones who went quiet were very often the ones nobody had time left to notice. And he understood that he had perhaps a dozen seconds to decide something a hospital would have given a doctor, a nurse and forty minutes to settle. He was not a doctor, and had never wanted to be one. He had taken this posting because the pay grade was a point higher than the last, and his mother had said it would look good on a form.

He gave the second woman four sachets, more than the ration, and wrote her name in a hand that did not look like his. He told himself the infant was smaller and needed the stronger measure. Some of that was true. The rest he was saving for later, for the man who would need a reason.

The quiet woman did not argue. It stayed with him. She took her two sachets and turned and walked back out into the dark past the line. The child she carried had, by then, stopped making even the sound of stillness. The Registrar watched her go for exactly as long as it took the next person to reach the table. Which was not long. There is no length of time you are permitted, at Gate Four, on the ninety-fourth night, to watch anyone walk away.

The dog was there again near dawn. The queue had thinned to its last hundred, and the sky had gone the flat grey it went before the light. It was a small brindle animal, unremarkable. Sometime in the second week it had attached itself to the depot, and it fed on scraps and on the particular generosity of people who had almost nothing. Most nights it slept curled against the leg of his table. It lay so close that, without deciding to, he had begun to rest his foot against its side while he worked, the way you hold a railing.

He did not know its name, if it had one. The children in the queue called it something different depending on which family had fed it last.

Sometime after five, a loudspeaker two streets over began an announcement he’d heard twice that week. It warned of the fever risk in standing water, of vermin, of strays. The word strays came in the same flat civic voice as everything else. So it took him a moment, tired the way he was, to understand what he was seeing. A sanitation team had come round the corner of Ali Manzil Road with a net pole and a cage on a handcart, and they were not interested in rats.

He stood up. He said something. Afterward he would never be able to remember what, only that at the time it had felt like it ought to have been enough. One of the two men glanced at him the way you glance at someone whose job is clearly not sanitation, and who therefore has no bearing on sanitation’s. In three weeks the dog had never let anyone but the queue’s children near it. It did not run. It had spent three weeks learning that people with poles and reaching hands were, on the whole, people who meant to feed it.

It took perhaps four seconds. He counted them afterward, the way he counted the sachets, as though a different number might have changed something.

He did not stop them. For the rest of his life he would spend a part of every year understanding why he had not, in slightly different words each time. The ledger was waiting. The ninety sachets were in the second box. Five hundred people had not yet been told there was nothing left. And there was the plain fact that he had no authority over anything at Gate Four that morning, including his own hands. None of the words, in any year, ever made the four seconds shorter.

At seven the resupply truck came through, two hours late. He counted three hundred and forty new sachets into the boxes with hands that had stopped feeling like his, and the line moved, and moved. By nine the worst of it was over for one more day. It was over like this roughly one day in three. He had begun to notice that this was the ratio at which a person could keep doing this without lying down in the road.

He did not learn until the following week that the quiet woman’s child had not survived the walk to the pump. A nurse at the fever ward two sectors over mentioned it in passing, not as news. It was not news to her. It was Tuesday.

He wrote nothing about it in the ledger. There was no column for it.

On the ninety-fifth night the queue was already forming in the dark past Ali Manzil Road. He thought about the seconds it had taken him to choose between two women, and the four it had taken two men to decide about a dog. Both choices had been made by exhausted people working from nothing. There had been no rule, no data, no memory of any night before that might have told either of them anything. The problem was not that he had chosen wrong. The problem was that there had been no way to choose right, not that night, not with what either of them had to work with. A system that asked a nineteen-hour man to weigh two dying children against the order they’d arrived in had not failed by accident. It had never been a system at all. It had only been a series of people, alone, taking turns being the one who hadn’t slept.

He was forty-five years old. The Collapse had already broken his career and put it back together twice. This posting was the third shape it had taken, and, he suspected, not the last. He would spend the next twenty-six years making sure no one ever stood at a table like this one again, doing arithmetic with a stranger’s child in his hands. He would build a world where that decision was never again a person’s to get wrong. It would be a long time before anyone asked him what that had cost, and longer still before he let himself answer.

He kept the scrap of paper. First come, first served. He did not know, folding it into his pocket that morning, that he would still have it twenty-six years later. In a drawer. In an office with his name on the door. A man of seventy-one who had built the very thing that made the drawer and the door and his own name on it possible. Or that he would take it out on nights when the model reported a confidence he could not explain, and read it, and put it away again. No wiser than he was now, in the grey light of the ninety-fifth morning. With a queue forming, no dog at his feet, and eleven hundred sachets in a truck still an hour out.

About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time.

Next chapter: Chapter 1: The Forecast