2084: An Algorithmic State — Act IV: Trust, Chapter 20: The Cricket Match
Behind the grain market there is no scoreboard, no sensor and no licence. Samar Varma, eleven years a Handler, is handed a bat and told he does not have to play it correctly.
In Brief: Kavya takes Samar, a Ministry Handler who has begun crossing out of the Grid, to an unlicensed Sunday cricket match behind the grain market. Inside the Grid, every pitch is sensor-mapped and bets settle before play. Here nobody can read the score, and a former licensed player named Manoj is trying to forget how to play correctly.
The pitch was a strip of packed earth behind the grain market.
On one side it had a wall that had clearly been repainted many times by many different hands. On the other side it had nothing at all, so a ball hit hard enough simply left the game and became, briefly, someone else’s problem. Kavya brought Samar there on a Sunday with one word, come. She had not needed to explain it to anyone else in the gathering crowd. Everyone else already knew exactly what a Sunday like this one was for.
The crowd along the wall was thicker than he had expected for a game with no scoreboard and no stake. Old men sat on plastic chairs that someone had hauled out for this purpose and would haul back in before dark. A cluster of women shelled something green into a shared cloth spread across their laps, and never once looked up from the conversation running underneath the shelling. Two Sikh boys argued good-naturedly with a Malayali shopkeeper about a run that may or may not have crossed a boundary rope nobody had actually laid down. Someone had a transistor radio tuned to a station playing something with a beat Samar still could not place. It was turned low enough to be a texture, not a competition with the match itself.
“Licensed cricket doesn’t happen here anymore,” she told him, finding a place for them against the repainted wall, in the thin shade of a torn awning. “Not in the Grid. There’s a stadium, if you can call it that: sensor-mapped pitch, biomechanical tracking on every player, betting markets that settle before the match even starts because the model’s already run the outcome to four decimal places.”
She nodded toward the pitch. Two teams were assembling there so informally that the sides themselves seemed only loosely fixed. Players drifted from one group to another, and after a decade of assigned roles Samar found it faintly dizzying to watch. “Out here it’s illegal, technically. Unlicensed public gathering, no permitted sensor coverage, no registered participants. Nobody’s ever been fined for it. I think the Ministry decided, a long time ago, that fining a cricket match would cost more in sentiment than it would recover in fines, and left it alone. That’s not mercy, before you say it looks like mercy. That’s arithmetic too.”
The match itself defeated every expectation his years at the Ministry had built into him about what a match should look like. There was no scoreboard. Someone kept a rough count on a strip of chalked wall. It had been rubbed out and rewritten so often that it had long since become illegible. Two or three people claimed, loudly and with obvious relish, that they were still tracking it accurately. A bowler delivered six balls in six wildly different styles, as though sampling six different eras of the game at once. The crowd’s noise rose and fell with the sheer commitment of each attempt, and not with how the ball turned out. Samar slowly saw that the crowd was cheering something closer to nerve than to skill of the kind the Grid’s stadium prized.
Aisha arrived partway through and settled on Kavya’s other side, with an ease Samar had not been given three days before. She called something across the pitch to a batsman, and he answered without turning around, a private joke worn smooth from long use.
“Watch him,” Kavya said, nodding at the batsman, a broad man past fifty with a strip of cloth tied round one knee. “Manoj. He used to play licensed, years ago, before he aged out of the biomechanical profile they wanted.” She said it lightly. Age had not taken anything from him that a person watching him now would have called a loss. He had simply stopped scoring high enough on the handful of measurements the Grid’s stadium had decided were the only ones worth keeping. “He still bats like the model’s watching him. Every unlicensed match, for about the first three overs, he can’t unlearn it. Plays the correct shot, the predictable shot, the shot a sensor would have told him to play. Then something breaks in him, every single time, and he starts doing this.”
The next ball came in fast. Manoj’s stance had promised the correct defensive shot, but he stepped inside the line entirely and swung with a wildness that should have ended in an edge or a miss. Every mechanical principle Samar had quietly absorbed said so. Instead the bat connected at an angle that sent the ball up and away, over the wall, gone, someone else’s problem now. A noise went up from both sides of the pitch at once, a shared, wordless roar of recognition, with no team celebrating over the other. In eleven years of curated, blood-pressure-calibrated broadcast inside the Grid, Samar had heard no sound like it.
Somewhere behind them, two of the old men on plastic chairs were settling a wager Samar had not heard them make. A fistful of coins changed hands over whether Manoj would last the over. There was no ledger, and no witness beyond each other. The loser handed it over with the good grace of a man who had made this exact bet with this exact friend perhaps a hundred times before. He expected to make it a hundred more.
“He does that about once a month,” Aisha called over the noise, grinning in a way Samar hadn’t yet seen from her. “Nobody can tell you which month.”
Sometime in the second hour, someone pressed a bat into his hands without much ceremony. He found himself standing at a crease that was really just a scuffed line in the packed earth. The bowler facing him was perhaps sixteen years old, and eyed him with the delight of a person about to test a total stranger’s nerve.
“You don’t have to play it correctly,” Kavya called from the wall, and she meant, he heard, something larger than the shot.
The ball came in slower than he expected. All eleven years of trained stillness in him reached for the correct response: weight forward, bat straight, the shot a sensor would have approved. But some smaller, newer thing in him, a thing perhaps nine days old, stepped inside that instinct and swung wide and wrong, and missed the ball entirely, and stumbled. He stood in the packed earth laughing, in the same startled, unregistered way he had laughed three steps past the checkpoint on the first evening he crossed it. He laughed at nothing, for no one, with no feed anywhere to register that it had happened.
“Terrible,” Aisha called, delighted. “Truly terrible. Best miss I’ve seen all year.”
When he looked over, Kavya was not laughing but watching him with an expression he could not immediately name. It sat somewhere between amusement and the careful attention she gave the installation each evening, when she watched for a colour it had not yet decided to become.
The match ran until the light went, and it ended as it had begun, without ceremony. Players drifted off the packed earth in the same loose, undecided groups they had arrived in. The women folded their cloth over whatever they had not finished shelling. The old men reclaimed their plastic chairs one at a time. Someone rubbed the chalked score into illegibility one final time and declared, to general agreement, that it had not mattered anyway.
Walking back through the darkening lane, Kavya was close enough beside him that their shoulders brushed twice and stayed where they were. He found that his hands still remembered the weight of a bat they had held for ninety seconds and would probably never hold again.
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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