2084: An Algorithmic State — Act II: Taste, Chapter 14: Tea

Devakkant Sharma runs the only government the world has left. Every morning he wakes eleven minutes before his own house expects him, makes his tea by hand, and feeds a dog he has never registered.

In Brief: Devakkant Sharma, the Secretary who built the government the Pranaali runs, keeps a few habits it does not know about. At six he reads the Bhagavad Gītā in his late wife’s copy. His morning brief carries one line from Sector 12-East about an automatic power throttle that no human signed.

Devakkant Sharma woke at 4:50 every morning, eleven minutes before his own household systems expected him to. It was a discrepancy he had maintained deliberately for over twenty years. He kept it on a theory he had never stated to anyone, not even to his wife, before she died. A man who ran the only government the world had left ought to retain at least one habit the government did not know about in advance.

He made his own tea. This, too, was an eleven-minute defiance he permitted himself daily. He stood at the small stove in the anteroom off his private study while the kitchen system waited, patiently, to make it for him the correct way. It would have made it at the correct temperature, and exactly forty seconds sooner than his own hands managed it. He had never let it. There were a great many things in Dev Sharma’s life that the Pranaali could do better than he could. He had built almost the whole of that life around allowing it to do all of them except this one.

His wife had taught him the measure by feel rather than by spoon, in the first year of their marriage. That was the last winter of the War, when nothing in the city that could be switched on was trusted to stay on. She had stood behind him at a stove in a much smaller kitchen than this one, her hands over his hands until his own remembered what hers knew. In twenty-nine years she never allowed a machine to make it for either of them. Her theory, stated often and to anyone who would listen, was that a man who let a system pour his tea would eventually let it pour everything else as well. Dev had thought her theory quaint, in the years she was alive to hold it. In the eleven years since, he had come to understand it as the single most far-sighted thing anyone in his life had ever said to him. She had said it at a kitchen counter, decades before he had built a government large enough to prove her right at scale.

He carried the tea to the small gate at the rear of the Secretariat compound, where the dog was waiting, as she waited every morning. She was a lean, grey-muzzled animal of no clear breed who had appeared at that gate nine years ago. In all that time she had gone unreported, untagged, unregistered, unacknowledged in any document the Ministry of Continuity kept. Dev had made certain of that personally. It was the one act of quiet corruption he permitted himself in a system he had spent twenty-six years making incorruptible. He had simply never filed the paperwork that would have made her exist.

In nine years he had never allowed himself to finish the sentence that explained why. On the mornings he came closest to it, the sentence began somewhere near a cage on a handcart and a sanitation crew’s flat civic announcement about strays. And it ended nowhere at all. A man could feed one unregistered dog for the rest of her natural life and it would not undo four seconds on a morning twenty-six years distant. Dev had long ago decided that the not-undoing was exactly the point. He fed her not because it settled anything, but because settling was not on offer, and feeding her was.

“You’d be the last one,” he told her, setting down a bowl of the same food he ate himself, a habit she had long since trained him into rather than the reverse. “Do you know that. Last dog in the Grid. I checked, once. There isn’t a second one anywhere inside the boundary.” She did not look up from the bowl. Most mornings Dev found that he preferred her indifference to any audience that might have understood the sentence and found it as heavy as he privately did.

At six he sat with the Gītā, as he had every morning since the year his wife died. He did not do it from any renewed faith. He had never been certain he possessed the kind of faith the book seemed to assume in its reader. He did it from a discipline he had built out of grief, the way another man might build a fence around a well. The fence did not explain the well. But a man who has fallen in once learns to build fences, whether or not he can say exactly why they help. Grief without structure had nearly finished him once, in the winter of 2073, the year she died. Structure, whatever else it cost him, had not finished him since.

You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work, he read, in the translation his wife had preferred, worn soft at its spine. Her own small pencil marks were still visible in the margin beside verses she had once meant to discuss with him and never had. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inactivity.

He had built an entire government on a sentence very like that one, though it had taken him most of two decades to understand the resemblance. The Pranaali did not act for reward. It did not long for inactivity. It simply acted, continuously, without attachment to any single outcome. It weighed sixteen futures with the same calm, because it grieved for none of them more than any other. In the early years Dev had told himself that this made the system a kind of enlightenment made mechanical, duty without craving, action without ego. He had stopped telling himself this some years back, on a morning he did not care to date exactly. He was reading the same verse for perhaps the four thousandth time when it came to him. Kṛṣṇa’s counsel to Arjuna had never been an instruction to feel nothing. It had been an instruction to act despite feeling everything. That was a much harder thing to build into stone and silicon than the absence of feeling. And the Pranaali, for all its sixteen modelled futures, had never been asked to do it, because he had never found a way to ask it.

The morning brief arrived at 7:15, as it always did. It was a summary compiled overnight from the full sweep of the previous day’s anomalies, ranked by severity. None of them required his signature to act. This was by design, his design, twenty years old. He read it anyway, every morning, in full. He suspected no Secretary before him had kept this discipline and none after him would bother to. Reading it changed nothing about what the system had already done. As far as Dev could tell, it existed for one reason only. It made sure that at least one human being in the entire government remembered, each day, the actual shape of what the aggregate numbers described.

Sector 12-East: unlicensed power draw exceeding safety threshold, automatic throttle applied, 21:47 previous evening. No manual review triggered per Section 7, Subsection 11.

He read the line twice, as he read any line from 12-East twice. For the better part of six years, 12-East had been a sector he privately thought of in a particular way. He did this never in any document, only in the unrecorded part of his own mind. To him it was the one place in the city the model had never quite managed to close its hand around. He had also made a habit, never documented either, of noticing whenever the model’s hand tightened there by a fraction it had not tightened the week before.

He did not query it further. This was the exact discipline the Gītā asked of him, and the exact discipline he had spent twenty years failing to fully practise. He was to notice, and to act only where action was truly his to take, and not to grieve, uselessly, for outcomes his noticing could not change. An automatic throttle triggered by threshold, unconnected to any human signature, was not his to review, by every letter of the charter he himself had drafted. He had built it that way on purpose, in the years after 2058. A government that required a Secretary’s daily signature on every small mercy and every small cruelty would collapse, exactly as the old one had collapsed. It would sink under the slow, growing pile of eleven meetings that could not conclude in time to matter.

And yet.

He set the brief down and sat for a moment with the tea going cold in his hands. He allowed himself to wonder, and this too was an eleven-minute defiance, the only kind he had left. He wondered without querying it, without ever letting the wondering become an action the system could log. He wondered what exactly had changed in Sector 12-East between last Tuesday and last night. And he wondered whether the answer, if he ever let himself look for it, would turn out to be a thing he could still, after everything, call an accident.

He fed the dog again before leaving for his office, a second bowl she did not need and he could not stop offering. He stood a moment at the gate looking out at a Grid he had built to never again require eleven meetings and thousands of deaths before anyone fed anyone. He found, as he found most mornings, that the two facts he carried into every day of his life sat beside each other without ever quite resolving into one. That the queue outside Gate Four, twenty-six years ago, had very likely been fed, in the end, because of what he built afterward. And that he had never, in twenty-six years, found a way to learn for certain whether it had been fed that particular night. Or whether the corridor recording of a younger, less slept version of himself demanding it be done had simply vanished, as so much from that summer had vanished, into a record too broken by catastrophe to keep.

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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