2084: An Algorithmic State — Act II: Taste, Chapter 12: The Cut

For six years the power tap under Kavya’s courtyard sat below the threshold. On the night a Grid Handler stays two hours, the light inside the junction box is green. Nothing is broken. It has been throttled from outside.

In Brief: Kavya Nair’s installation has gone dark in front of thirty people. She opens the junction box behind it, with Samar Varma, the Ministry Handler who has started visiting her courtyard, standing beside her. Bilal, who knows the lane’s old power and water lines, arrives with a coil of wire.

The panel behind the structure was smaller than Samar had expected. A battered junction box, its housing scavenged from something that had once been Ministry-marked, the stencilled fragment of an old departmental crest still visible under years of grime. Kavya had it open within a minute, working by the light of a hand lamp someone in the courtyard produced without being asked. Her hands clearly knew this box. Most evenings, watching her, it held nothing worse than a loose contact. The ordinary small failures of scavenged equipment, the kind of fault a person fixes without needing to think about it.

This time she went still over it, the same stillness she’d gone into at the mention of the asterisk.

There was a light inside the box, small and steady. It was not the colour Samar had half-expected without knowing he was expecting anything. It was not the amber flicker of a fault, and not the dead black of a burnout. It was green. Functioning. Correctly. As designed.

“It’s not burned out,” Kavya said, half to him, half to the box. “There’s no fault. It’s been throttled. Cleanly. From outside.” She looked up at him. The look was not accusation, not yet, but it was already close to it. “The tap we run off runs through an old distribution line that used to feed a Grid substation before the boundary moved. It’s supposed to sit under the threshold that would ever get it noticed. It’s sat under that threshold for six years.”

“And tonight it didn’t.”

“Tonight it didn’t.” She closed the panel, slowly, and stood. She was doing the arithmetic he had been trained for eleven years to do without thinking. She was running backward from an effect to the smallest set of causes that could explain it. “Six years under the threshold, and on the one evening a Grid Handler comes and stands in this courtyard for two hours, the draw gets flagged and throttled within an hour of dark.” She said this without heat, which somehow made it land harder than heat would have. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I can hear how that sounds. I don’t think you carried a tracker in here on purpose.”

“But you think I carried one.”

“I think a body that’s spent eleven years inside a system built to know where every citizen is, at every hour, down to the metre, does not stop being legible to that system just because it crosses a checkpoint on foot.” She said it gently, which was worse than cruelty would have been. “Your terminal knows your face. Your Handler credentials sit in a Ministry directory that logs access requests. I don’t know exactly what followed you here tonight, Samar. I know that something in this courtyard changed the night you started coming to it, and I’ve lived long enough on this side of the boundary to know that the honest thing to do with a coincidence like that is to take it seriously before you decide it’s nothing.”

Around them, the courtyard had not emptied, exactly, but it had thinned. People drifted off in twos and threes, unhurried, and the drifting was its own kind of practice. This courtyard had absorbed small emergencies into its evenings before, calmly. Panic was itself a pattern, and pattern was the one thing this whole side of the river had organised its practice around refusing.

Bilal arrived before Kavya had finished speaking. He was mid-stride even standing still, a coil of wire already over one shoulder, as though he had known what he’d be needed for before anyone had sent for him. He crouched at the box, opened it again without a greeting for either of them, and ran two fingers along a seam in the housing that Samar hadn’t noticed. Then he made a small sound in his throat that seemed to tell Kavya something it did not tell Samar.

“Same line as the water pump’s old feed,” Bilal said, to the box more than to either of them. “If they’ve found this one, they may have found that one too. I’ll check it tonight, re-route what needs it.” He looked up at Kavya, and then, for the first time, at Samar. The assessment took perhaps two seconds and did not, so far as Samar could tell, arrive anywhere generous. “Grid face brings Grid trouble. Tell your friend that, next time he wants to visit.”

“He’s standing right here, Bilal.”

“I know where he’s standing.” But he said it without real heat, already moving to the panel, already working. He was a man who kept his anger, it seemed, for problems that could actually be solved by having it. Everything else, including, apparently, Samar himself, he treated as a fact to be routed around rather than argued with.

“What happens now,” Samar asked. “To the piece.”

“It comes back. It always comes back. I’ll re-route the tap through a different line by next week, and it’ll sit under the threshold again for however long it sits under it this time.” She said this with the flat fatigue of a tenth repair, not a first. She did not believe this fence would finally hold. But a mended fence is, for a while, still a fence. “That isn’t what worries me.”

“What’s the part that worries you.”

She looked at him directly then, for the first time since the panel had come open. In the last several minutes she had decided that he had earned the right to hear what came next plainly, whatever the cost of plainness turned out to be.

“The part that worries me is that throttling an unlicensed draw isn’t a decision.” She let that sit a moment. “Which means nobody in your Ministry decided to do this to us tonight. Nobody weighed it, nobody signed it, nobody will ever be able to tell either of us why tonight specifically, out of six years of nights, was the one the threshold caught us on.” A short, unamused breath, not quite a laugh. “I don’t know whether that’s the funniest thing that’s happened to me this year, or the most frightening. I keep landing on both.”

That green light stayed with him longer than anything she’d said. A fault would have been almost a comfort. A fault could be someone’s error, correctable, apologised for. A green light meant the system had looked at the courtyard, at the structure, at the six quiet years of a line sitting under a threshold. And it had done, calmly and without malice and without a single human being anywhere in the loop, exactly what it was for.

Samar walked back to the checkpoint alone, well past the hour his flat’s lighting curve expected him to be sleeping. He walked through streets going dark with no schedule behind them at all, dark in a way no street in the Grid was ever permitted to be. He turned over the arithmetic Kavya had run in front of him and found that he could not make it come out any way that left him blameless. For eleven years he had believed that a man who read files carefully was, whatever else he was, not the cause of anything. The cause lived upstream of him, in the model, in the twenty-six years of aggregate data. It lived in a corridor in 2058 he had never stood in, the one on the Archive’s footage, a year and a building away from Sanyal’s hospital. It lived in a referendum he had never voted in. His own seven seconds were, at most, a place where causes passed through on their way to becoming outcomes. It had been the most comfortable lie eleven years had ever told him.

In his flat he did not wait for the lights. He put his thumb to the wall screen and asked the Ministry directory for his own access record, a thing no rule forbade and he had never once done. It came up in under a second. Three lines. Biometric crossing, 12-East boundary, outbound 20:04, inbound 22:51, the first night. Outbound 09:12, inbound 11:40, three days later. Outbound 17:56 tonight, inbound 00:19, eight minutes ago. Each line carried a time and a sector code and nothing else. No flag. No note. Nobody had written a word beside any of them. While he read, a fourth line arrived under the third. Directory query, own record, 00:27. He had crossed three times without leaving a mark anyone cared to make. He had now made one himself.

He thought of the beam atop Tower 9, four seconds each midnight, announcing a tomorrow already settled. He wondered, for the first time, whether somewhere in tonight’s version of that tomorrow, a single line existed that had not existed the night before. A subsector, a threshold, a name. And whether he, without meaning to, had just become the reason it was there.

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

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Next: Chapter 13: Kavya’s Weight