2084: An Algorithmic State — Act I: Judgement, Chapter 1: The Forecast

The file reads Decline, confidence 91.4. Samar Varma has seven seconds to confirm it, as he has four thousand times before. At the fourteenth second he catches himself counting.

In Brief: Delhi, twenty-six years after the Collapse. Samar Varma is an Exception Handler who reviews the Pranaali’s decisions about citizens’ lives, seven seconds a file. For the second morning the Forecast shows a small anomaly in Sector 12-East, and a file from that sector asks him to cut food and care for a woman’s child.

At 5:58 a.m. the towers finished computing tomorrow, and the sky over the Lutyens Grid turned the colour they had decided it should be.

Samar Varma woke two minutes before his alarm, as he had for eleven years. The Pranaali had long ago found the exact interval of sleep after which his cortisol began to rise on its own. It preferred to wake him gently rather than let his body do it badly. The light in his flat brightened along a curve calculated to copy sunrise, though there was no sun yet. There was only the promise of one, filtered through the haze scrubbers on the roof.

He lay still for the two minutes. It was the only unscheduled time in his day, and even that was scheduled.

Outside, the Grid was already correct. The road below had no potholes, because no vehicle above a certain age was permitted on it, and no vehicle above a certain age existed anymore. The trees along Rajpath were real, or real enough, gene-edited against the heat two summers after the Collapse. They stood at intervals so even that the rare visitor from old Delhi sometimes asked whether they had been placed by machine. They had. Everything had.

There were no dogs.

This was not a policy anyone could name. Samar had looked once, out of an idleness he didn’t examine too closely. He found no ordinance, no notice, no line item that mentioned removing the strays. The old accounts described them in great numbers: thousands of them, sleeping in temple courtyards, trotting along the road dividers, barking at nothing at three in the morning. There was simply, now, no food source efficient enough to keep them alive inside the boundary. And so there were none, the way a room without water eventually has no fish, without anyone having decided to kill them.

He didn’t think about the dogs often. He was thinking about them now only because, for the second morning running, the Forecast had shown a small anomaly in the eastern sector. Anomalies made him restless, in a way he had been trained since childhood to recognise as unproductive.

He dressed. Tower 9, Lodhi Sector, filled the window as it always did. It was a windowless column the colour of wet slate, four hundred metres of concrete. It held no offices, no residents, no purpose except the one it existed entirely for. At midnight it had run its simulation of the coming day. It had weighed weather against transit, against the biometric feeds of the capital’s twelve million residents, against food distribution, against the compounding probability of that many small human failures. Then, at some point in the small hours, a single beam of white light had gone up from its crown into the haze, held for four seconds, and gone out.

No one knew exactly what the beam meant. It meant convergence, it was said: the simulation had settled into a single high-confidence future rather than a fan of contested ones. Children were taught this in school as fact, not as a story adults told about a light they, too, did not understand. Samar had never asked what happened on the nights the beam failed to appear. He assumed, as everyone assumed, that it always did.

Breakfast was waiting by the time he reached the kitchen. From the pattern of four thousand mornings, the building had known the precise minute he would sit down. It was the correct breakfast: a formulation his gut biome preferred, in a portion his metabolism preferred, at a temperature his mouth preferred. He ate it without noticing what it was. Once he had been proud of this as a kind of achievement. Now he merely performed it, the way a man in his thirties stops admiring his own handwriting.

The wallscreen showed the Forecast while he ate. Most residents watched it the way people had once watched the weather. It was a habit that had outlived its need, since the Forecast was never wrong in any way that touched a single life. Nobody inside the boundary had gone hungry in twenty-six years. The diseases of the old queues (cholera, heatstroke, the fevers that came with bad water) survived only as words children learned for examinations. Rain between 4:10 and 4:55 p.m., 0.6 millimetres, not enough for umbrellas. Ring-corridor congestion at a probability the system rated negligible. Civic sentiment, gathered from involuntary telemetry across the sector, stood at 94.2. The anchor was a rendered face with no name, because a name implied someone who could be wrong. She described it, as she always did, as a good day to be alive in Delhi.

Then, for the second morning running, the small red mark. Sector 12-East. Confidence interval widened by 0.3 per cent. An asterisk beside a number that had not carried one in the eleven years he’d been watching.

The anchor did not comment on it. She never commented on an anomaly. Comment implied concern, and concern implied the model could be substantially wrong. The Pranaali did not deal in substantial wrongness, only in intervals, all of which eventually narrowed. Still, he looked at it again before the screen moved on. It changed nothing. He looked anyway.

He walked to the Ministry, as Exception Handlers below Grade II were encouraged to do. The theory was that a body used to controlled movement made calmer decisions than a body delivered by pod. It had been stated once, years ago, in an onboarding document he’d read half-attentively at his onboarding. The street was silent in the Grid’s particular way: not the silence of absence but of a great deal of activity happening at frequencies too low to disturb a pedestrian. Beneath the paving, water moved to where it was needed. Above him, drones no larger than sparrows carried blood samples and court orders and, once, for no reason he could name, a wedding ring.

Everyone he passed nodded, exactly once, at exactly the distance that a decade of collected data judged comfortable for strangers on that stretch of pavement at that hour. He nodded back. It was no longer performance. Eleven years had worn the gesture down into something true, the small tax a body pays until it stops noticing it is paying.

His office (Exception Handling, Grade III, Sub-Sector Review) was on the second floor, and it had a window. At his onboarding he’d been told this was a mark of the Ministry’s respect for the dignity of the human decision-maker. He had believed that once. He still, this particular morning, mostly did.

The first file surfaced at 9:00, with the small chime that meant a citizen was, somewhere, waiting to learn what he had decided about their life. A caloric adjustment for a household of five in 9-North, confidence 98.6. He approved it in the time it took the chime to finish. Nothing in it asked to be seen, and in eleven years he had learned not to go looking for things that hadn’t asked.

The second was a man of sixty-two in 4-South. Marginal utility, declining across 15 of 16 modelled futures. Recommendation: reduce medical allocation to comfort tier. Confidence 97.1. A thumbnail was attached, as there sometimes was. It was a small grey photograph the system kept for identity and never asked anyone to look at. It showed a man with a moustache going white unevenly, one side ahead of the other. It was the kind of detail a person might once have mentioned to someone who loved him. Samar’s eyes crossed it without arriving anywhere. He approved the recommendation. The file closed. He did not expect to think of the man again.

The third file was thin. Files were usually thin. A woman, thirty-one, of Sector 12-East, had applied for a resource re-allocation on behalf of a dependent. It was the same sector, he noted, that had carried the asterisk. He did not yet let himself think there might be a connection, because connections were the Pranaali’s business, not his.

Kavya Nair, the file said, in the clean type the system used for names, as though a name rendered plainly enough could not belong to anyone complicated. Occupation: Unlicensed. Residential zone: 12-East (unmapped subsector). Application: continuation of caloric and medical allocation for minor dependent, currently flagged Non-Contributory.

Beneath it, in the smaller type the system used for its own reasoning: Recommendation: Decline. Confidence: 91.4%. Rationale: subject’s projected lifetime contribution falls below sustaining threshold across 14 of 16 modelled futures. Resource redirection estimated to preserve 2.3 additional life-years elsewhere in sector, aggregate.

He had reviewed perhaps four thousand declines and approved the recommendation in very nearly all of them. The recommendation was almost always correct in the narrow sense that mattered: it did, in fact, move resources to where they would add more life-years. Around year three this had stopped troubling him. In the early years he had told himself that his part in it was not nothing. There was the reading, the seven-second pause his terminal allowed, and the small human weight of his attention crossing the file. He had told himself this so often that, for a long time, it had stopped feeling like something he was telling himself.

He read the file again.

Minor dependent. The system did not use the word daughter, though the biometric link made the relationship clear. Daughter would have required the model to weigh something it was not built to weigh.

He looked at the confidence figure again. 91.4. It was lower than he was used to on a decline. It was not low enough to trigger secondary review, which sat at 85. But it was low enough that his eye caught on it, as it had caught an hour earlier on the asterisk. Years of thin files that read 97, 98, 99 had trained that eye.

Coincidence, he told himself. Sector 12-East was large. Many things happened there that had nothing to do with each other.

His terminal waited, patient as furniture. He had seven seconds, technically. No one had ever been penalised for taking longer, because in the system’s long experience a Handler who took longer was still a Handler who would eventually agree.

Eleven seconds passed. Then fourteen. Somewhere in the fourteenth he caught himself counting. He was not counting the file, or the child, but the seconds themselves, the way you notice, mid-breath, that you have been holding it. The noticing was worse than the counting. It meant some part of him had been keeping a different ledger from the one his terminal kept, and he did not know for how long. He knew only that today, for the first time in eleven years, he had caught it in the act.

He stopped counting. He did not stop feeling the crack the counting had already made.

He pressed Approve on the recommendation to decline.

Recommendation confirmed, the terminal told him. Thank you for your review.

The file closed itself, the way all files did, with no comment on what the woman named Kavya Nair would do next. It did not say whether she’d be told this morning or this evening, or whether she’d expected the answer. It did not say whether she had a name for the child. It did not say whether anyone would ever again produce a document showing that a decision had passed through Samar Varma at all.

The chime sounded for the next file. A routine transit exemption, 96.8. He approved it in under a second. More than anything in the file before it, this was the part he would never quite be able to explain. Not the crack, but how completely the morning continued past it, the way a held breath, once released, leaves no mark on the air it passed through.

The files went on through the afternoon, seven seconds each, and by four the light in the window had thinned.

Outside his window, in the sector the towers had marked with an asterisk for the second morning running, it had begun, four minutes early, to rain.

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

Previous chapter: Prologue: Gate Four

Next chapter: Chapter 2: The Archive