2084: An Algorithmic State — Act III: Empathy, Chapter 15: Aisha’s Mother

In 2058 a routing pilot ran sixteen futures for one evening’s grain and sent a convoy down the wrong lane. Aisha’s mother was three doors from home. Aisha has defended the machine ever since.

In Brief: Samar returns to Kavya’s courtyard to help re-route the throttled tap. There he meets Aisha, who grew up in the sector and refuses to treat the Pranaali as a villain. She tells him what happened to her mother on the second night of the 2058 riots.

She was waiting at the courtyard three evenings later, and she did not introduce herself.

Samar had come back to help Kavya finish re-routing the tap. The woman simply began talking. She had clearly heard a great deal about him already, and she had decided, on her own schedule, exactly when the conversation would start.

“You’re the Handler,” she said. It was not a question, just as Kavya’s naming him had not been, but the tone underneath was entirely different. Kavya had the wary precision of someone weighing a stranger. This was closer to a challenge, offered without hostility, the way a boxer offers a round she has been looking forward to for days. “Kavya’s told some of us about you. About the throttle.” She held out a hand, which surprised him. It was a Grid gesture, oddly, out here. “Aisha. I live two lanes over. I grew up in this sector.”

“She told you I might have caused it.”

“She told me you might have caused it, in the careful way Kavya tells everyone everything, leaving room for the version where you didn’t.” Aisha said this without bitterness, and settled onto an overturned crate near the junction box with the ease of someone who had sat on it a hundred times before. “I’m less careful than Kavya. I think you probably did, in the sense that your body walking through this courtyard for two hours was very likely the actual proximate cause. I don’t think that makes you guilty of anything, particularly. I think it makes you an example of something I’ve been trying to get people in this courtyard to sit with for about four years now, with limited success.”

“Which is?”

“That the system that throttled our tap is the same system that kept my family alive during the riots, and I am not interested in pretending those are two different systems just because one of them is inconvenient to me this week.” She said this plainly. “My mother used to tell me about 2058. Not the parts that make it into your Ministry’s archive footage. The actual parts.”

DELHI. NIZAMUDDIN BASTI, SECOND NIGHT OF THE JULY RIOTS, 2058.

Shabana was nineteen, and had been for six weeks, and had not told anyone at home that she had stopped believing it was a fact worth celebrating this particular year.

The water had failed twelve days ago and had not come back. Her brother had been coughing since the ninth of those days, in the dry, insistent way their mother said meant a fever building somewhere behind it. There was no way to know for certain. The clinic two lanes over had closed on day seven when its own supply ran out, and it had not reopened. Shabana went looking that night. She did not believe she would find water. But by the ninth day, staying in the room and listening to her brother cough had become something her body would not go on doing. Her body needed some action attached to it, however useless the action turned out to be.

She heard the first mob before she saw it. What she heard was the particular pitch a crowd’s voice takes on when it has stopped being many separate people talking and has become one thing making one sound. She would recognise that pitch for the rest of her life, in rooms that had nothing to do with riots at all. The mob had already passed through their street once, two nights before, over a video. People with the equipment to prove such things would later prove that the video had never happened at all. It was a fabrication assembled from footage of somewhere else, some other decade, and stitched to match a rumour. By the time anyone thought to check it, the rumour had already decided that it wanted to be true.

She was three doors from home when the sound came again. This time it came from the mouth of the lane and not its far end. The distance between herself and her own door had just become the only fact in the world that mattered.

She did not remember deciding to run. She remembered the headlights first: two of them, then four, then more, swinging into the lane’s mouth from the direction she had least expected anything to come from. The engines were loud enough to be their own kind of sound, one the crowd’s noise had to compete with. Men’s voices shouted instructions to each other with the flat urgency of people carrying out a plan, not reacting to one. A convoy. Grain sacks under tarpaulin, and an armed escort riding the running boards. Its route through Nizamuddin Basti made no sense to anyone standing in it. The convoy’s usual route ran two full kilometres east, along a road that had been clear of any trouble that morning.

The mob did not enter the lane. Shabana would spend decades turning over exactly why, and would never settle on an answer that satisfied her. Perhaps the trucks’ headlights had simply broken whatever shared nerve had been carrying the crowd forward. Perhaps the sight of an armed escort had done what an armed escort is meant to do. Or perhaps a hundred separate people, each afraid in their own way, had each decided in the same instant. A lane with trucks in it was not worth whatever they had come looking for. She got herself the last three doors home in the confusion, and bolted the door, and sat with her back against it. She listened to her brother cough in the next room. She listened to the convoy’s engines idling somewhere close for twenty more minutes, until they, too, moved on.

It would be years before anyone explained it to her. The convoy’s re-route had not been a driver’s decision, or a commander’s, or anyone’s, in the sense she had spent those years assuming. A routing pilot had made it. The pilot was one of the precursor systems the Programme would absorb the following autumn, and that evening it was running sixteen simulated futures for food distribution. Nobody had asked it to consider her street. It did not know her name, or her brother’s fever, or that she had been three doors from a door that might not have opened in time. It had calculated that the convoy’s scheduled route carried a raised probability of meeting the second crowd. The alternate route through Nizamuddin Basti carried, on balance, a slightly better one.

Aisha had not stopped talking. There was no seam Samar could point to afterward and say: there, that was where the story ended and the present began again.

“Nobody signed that decision,” she said. “Nobody in a Ministry read my mother’s file and decided she deserved to live. A machine ran sixteen futures and picked the one where fewer people died, and it happened, by no one’s design, to be the one my mother was standing in.” She looked at Samar without particular warmth, but without any of Kavya’s careful withholding either.

Kavya, working at the panel a few feet away, did not look up. Her hands had stopped moving over the wiring.

“I’m not saying the system is kind,” Aisha went on. “I don’t think it’s kind or cruel. I think that’s the mistake everyone in this courtyard makes, including Kavya, whom I love, and whom I have been arguing with about this since we were both fourteen. It’s a machine that reduced a specific, measurable category of horror, the horror of eleven meetings producing no decision while people starve, by a very large amount, and it did that at a cost, and the cost is this.” She gestured, without unkindness, at the courtyard around them, the narrow lane, the tap running under threshold for six years. “Some of us live at the cost. I was angry too, for a long time, and if you want to know the ugly part, I am still angry at Kavya for being able to afford the argument she has. I stopped being angry at the machine when I understood that the alternative to this cost was not freedom. It was my mother’s street, twice, in one summer.”

“Then what do you want,” Samar asked. “If not to fight it.”

“I don’t know that I want anything as clean as fight it or accept it,” Aisha said. Samar heard in the answer an echo of something Kavya had told him three nights before, in a different key. “I want the people who talk about destroying it to sit for one hour with my mother and hear what the world looked like the last time nobody was deciding anything fast enough to matter. And I want the people who worship it. There are people who worship it, priests two sectors over who’ll tell you the War was the end of the Kali Yuga and the Pranaali is Viṣṇu keeping the new age in balance. I want them to come to this courtyard and watch what happens to a tap that’s fed a child’s art project honestly for six years, the one evening it finally gets noticed.” She shrugged, a small, tired gesture that made her look, for a moment, much younger than Samar had first taken her for. “I don’t think there’s a name yet for what I want.”

Kavya closed the panel finally, the tap re-routed, and straightened. She wiped her hands on a cloth that had clearly served this exact purpose many times before. “She’s the reason we don’t all agree on anything in this courtyard,” she said to Samar, with the closest thing to fondness he had yet heard in her voice, directed at anyone. “Half of us want to starve the model of data until it can’t predict anything. Half of us want to flood it with so much contradictory noise it collapses under its own confidence intervals. And then there’s Aisha, who thinks we’re all, every one of us, indulging a story about villains and heroes that the world stopped being simple enough to support twenty-six years ago.”

“Somebody has to,” Aisha said, standing, brushing dust from her clothes. “Otherwise every conversation in this courtyard turns into the same argument Kavya and I have been having half our lives, except now there’s a Grid Handler standing in the middle of it, looking like he thinks one of us is about to turn out to be right.”

She left without waiting for Samar to answer that.

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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