2084: An Algorithmic State — Act IV: Trust, Chapter 22: The Union Bureau

Priya and Rohan meet at the Union Bureau with a 94% match. Samar Varma, carrying a 31% of his own, watches them through the glass while a screen tells them what to talk about.

In Brief: Samar visits the Union Bureau, the Grid’s office for licensed marriage, to ask about exceptions for his 31% compatibility score with Kavya. Through a window he watches the first meeting of Priya and Rohan, a couple matched at 94%, as a screen suggests their topics one by one.

He told himself he was going to ask a question he already knew the answer to. That was, even as he walked there, its own kind of answer about why he was going at all.

The Union Bureau occupied a building three blocks from the Ministry. Samar had passed it several hundred times without once going in. It was a long, pale structure with the plain calm the Grid reserved for buildings where important things were made to feel unremarkable. The woman at the reception terminal took his query, historical exception rate for compatibility scores below 40%. Within four seconds she returned the same figure his own notification had already given him. Zero per cent. Not a single exception had been granted, in the Programme’s entire history, for a score as low as the one sitting in his file.

“Is there an appeals process,” he asked, already knowing.

“There’s a re-assessment window, if new data becomes available that materially changes the modelled variables.” She said this kindly, in the manner of someone who had delivered this exact sentence to a great many people who had not wanted to hear it. “New data doesn’t typically include...” She paused, choosing the word with a delicacy that told him more than the word itself would have. “Sentiment. The model doesn’t reweight for reported affection. It reweights for demonstrated stability.”

He thanked her, and did not leave immediately. Only now, with a reason to look at it properly, did he notice the waiting hall itself. It was busier than he had expected of a building he had walked past a few hundred times without ever seeing it as busy. A family of four sat in one corner. Their Union Certificate was already printed, and a grandmother was folding it with some ceremony into a document sleeve. She kept touching its edge as though to confirm it was real. A single man stood alone at a side counter, filing what a discreet sign above it called a Dissolution Request. His face was set in the neutral stillness of someone who had decided, before arriving, exactly how much of this he would feel in a public room. Two teenagers, no older than sixteen, were filling out a form. After a moment Samar realised it was not a Union application at all but a Preliminary Compatibility Registration. This was the Bureau’s earliest possible entry point. It was open to citizens old enough to begin building a matching profile, which the system would refine for another decade before ever suggesting a name. An entire civilisation’s romantic life was cradled here, from its first data point to its dissolution, inside one pale, unremarkable building. It stood three blocks from where Samar had spent eleven years believing love was simply a thing that happened to people, privately, elsewhere.

The Bureau’s waiting hall had a window into what a small brass plaque called the Introduction Suite. Through it Samar watched something, for as long as it took him to decide he had no reason left to stay. He saw later that he had been circling it the whole way there, without letting himself know it was the destination.

Two people sat across a low table from each other. A screen between them was angled so each could read it without craning. A Bureau facilitator stood a discreet distance back, present but not taking part, the way a lifeguard is present at a pool he trusts almost entirely not to need him.

“Priya,” the woman said, and held out a hand. It was a Grid gesture, and Samar had only lately, out past the checkpoint, learned to notice it as one. It looked oddly out of place anywhere else. “Ninety-four per cent. I looked you up before I left the flat this morning. I hope that’s not strange to say.”

“It isn’t. I looked you up too.” The man smiled. He was Rohan, according to the small identifier card each of them wore. The Bureau provided the cards as a courtesy, so that a first conversation need not spend its opening minutes on names. His smile had the brightness of someone who has rehearsed being pleased, and has just discovered that the rehearsal was not necessary after all. “Ninety-four is the highest score anyone I know has ever been given. My cousin got seventy-one, married anyway. No licence, no joint allocation, and they’ve been having resource strain for three years running. I kept thinking, watching them, there has to be a better way to do this than hoping.”

The screen between them offered its first prompt, gently. It came in the same clean sans-serif that had once told Samar a woman’s dependent sang before she could read. Suggested topic: shared risk tolerance, travel. Priya read it and, without any apparent irony, asked Rohan whether he liked to travel. Rohan answered, and asked the same question back. For a while they simply used the screen’s topics one after another, like two people using stepping stones across a river neither had ever needed to learn to swim.

“I used to worry,” Priya said, some minutes in, in a lull the screen had not yet filled, “that this would feel... cold, I suppose. Meeting someone this way. My mother worried more than I did. She kept saying, in her day, you’d meet at a wedding, or through a cousin, and you’d just know.”

“Did she know. With your father.”

“She says she did. She also says they separated when I was six, so.” Priya laughed at her own mother, not unkindly. It was the tone of a daughter who has made her peace with loving someone whose wisdom she has also learned not to fully trust. “I’d rather have ninety-four per cent than a feeling my mother swore by and then unswore three years later. I know how that sounds. I’ve made my peace with how it sounds.”

Something crossed Rohan’s face in the pause that followed. It was brief, there and gone before the facilitator behind him could have registered it as anything. Samar recognised the flicker only because he had spent eleven years learning to notice exactly this kind of flicker in a citizen’s file. It was a hesitation with no vocabulary built for it yet. Half a second later Rohan covered it with a small laugh of his own, agreeing with something Priya had said. From the other side of the glass, Samar had just watched a man overrule some small, wordless objection in himself. Rohan filed it, without ceremony, under a heading that did not require him to examine it further.

“Can I ask you something the screen hasn’t suggested yet,” Rohan said, a little later, and Priya’s eyebrows lifted, pleased, at the small transgression of it.

“You’re allowed. I don’t think anyone’s watching that closely.”

“Does it worry you at all. That we don’t know why. Ninety-four per cent of what, exactly. The report doesn’t say, mine didn’t anyway, just the number and the tier.” He said it lightly, the way a person raises a real question by pretending, briefly, that it’s a smaller one than it is. “I asked the facilitator on my way in. She said the model weighs several hundred variables and the specific weighting is proprietary, for citizen protection, so nobody games their own score. I found that reassuring at first. I’m less sure now that I’ve said it out loud.”

“I think that’s the part you’re supposed to trust,” Priya said, after a moment, “rather than understand. My aunt always says that’s the whole difference between this and how people used to do it: you used to have to understand a person before you could trust them, and half the time you were wrong anyway, dressed up as understanding. Now you trust the number first, and the understanding just... arrives. Eventually. If it’s going to.” She said this with total sincerity, with no performance in it at all. Rohan looked visibly relieved to have been given permission to stop worrying at his own question. He nodded and let it go.

The screen offered another prompt. Suggested topic: long-term residency preferences. Neither of them hesitated over it. Neither of them, Samar thought, had any reason to. The model had already run this exact conversation sixteen times in simulation before either of them sat down. It had already confirmed that their answers, whatever they turned out to be, would sit compatibly beside each other. All that was left for the two of them to discover was the forgettable furniture of facts that made up an answer already known to be safe.

He thought of Kavya’s voice on the courtyard wall: “It’s measuring whether we’d be legible, as a pair, to everything that comes after us.” Priya and Rohan were building, prompt by gentle prompt, a life neither of them had yet had the chance to be surprised by. Watching them, he saw the thing Kavya had described to him in the abstract made suddenly, uncomfortably concrete. There was no jailer forcing two people apart, no villain to resent. There was only an entire civilisation’s worth of citizens, sincerely grateful, walking hand in hand into exactly the future they had been told, with ninety-four per cent confidence, to expect.

The facilitator caught sight of him lingering at the glass and offered a small, professional smile through the window. She was used to Bureau visitors watching a little longer than strictly necessary. They were moved, she no doubt assumed, by the tenderness of it.

Samar smiled back. His hand went to the side of his jaw, where Kavya’s had been the night before, and came down again. Any version of the truth he could have offered her in its place would have needed an explanation. Standing there, he had neither the words nor the authority to give it.

He walked back to the Ministry with the number still sitting in his chest, thirty-one, not ninety-four. He did not envy Priya and Rohan their ninety-four. They would very likely be happy. Happy in whatever sense the word still meant anything, once you had let a model decide for you which parts of a life were worth risking. He thought of Priya’s mother, three years unswearing a certainty she’d once sworn by.

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 23: Renu’s Ledger