2084: An Algorithmic State — Act IV: Trust, Chapter 23: Renu’s Ledger

At nineteen, a slide with two error rates taught Renu Sen to stop consulting her own instinct. Thirteen years later the Bureau matches her with Arjun at 89%, and she cannot find a single fault in him.

In Brief: Renu Sen, Samar’s colleague at the Ministry, writes one line a day in a paper ledger bought past the checkpoint. Her mother is pressing her to accept Arjun, an 89% match from the Union Bureau. Renu also keeps a private count of the file volume in Sector 12-East, and tells no one.

Renu kept a ledger, an actual one, paper, bought from a stationer two lanes past the checkpoint. The Grid did not sell such things anymore and had not for some years. Not accounts, not figures, only a line a day, written in the ten minutes before bed at the small table by her flat’s one window. The thermos her mother had given her stood empty beside the pen. She had never, in thirteen years, managed to write the day down before she’d finished the tea that helped her remember it properly. She had started the ledger at nineteen, the year she’d chosen her degree, and had never let a day pass unrecorded. Even the days that produced, when she sat down to write them, nothing worth the ink.

Samar pulled logs again today, she wrote, on the evening of the twelfth day since he’d started. Didn’t ask me to look with him. I didn’t offer.

She put the pen down without writing the rest of the sentence she would have written a year ago. That sentence would have explained, briefly and to her own satisfaction, why not offering was the correct choice. These past weeks, she had noticed, the explanations were coming slower than they used to. Without deciding to, she had started simply leaving the sentence where it stopped, instead of pushing it the rest of the way to a conclusion.

She had, in fact, kept her own private count of 12-East’s volume in the weeks since she first mentioned it to Samar. It was nothing so deliberate as the audit logs he was pulling, only a running tally in the back pages of the same ledger. She updated it most Fridays, out of a habit she had not yet examined closely enough to call it what it probably was. The volume had not settled back to its old quiet baseline. If anything, across those twelve days, it had crept a little higher. She had mentioned this to no one, not even to the ledger’s own earlier pages. She had built her career on trusting the aggregate over her own instinct. A woman like that, she found, was not easy to convince that her private tally of one sector’s file counts was data worth acting on.

That same week a form had come to her terminal from the Personnel Integrity Division, the one that went to every Handler on the floor once a quarter. Sector Variation Acknowledgement. Three questions, a box beside each. Had the Handler observed file volume in any sector she reviewed outside its historical band. Had the Handler discussed such volume with any colleague. Did the Handler wish to attach a note. Renu read it twice, as she read everything. She knew without opening the ledger what its back pages said. The Friday counts ran down the margin, and the latest stood four above the one before. She ticked No, and No, and No, and submitted it before the first file of the morning. The terminal thanked her for her review. That night she wrote the three ticks into the ledger as a line of their own, and put nothing after them.

Her mother called at half past eight, as she did on Tuesdays and Fridays. She asked, as she had asked for three weeks running, whether Renu had given any more thought to Arjun.

“I’ve thought about him the amount you’d expect someone to think about a name and a percentage,” Renu said, propping the phone against the thermos while she poured. “Eighty-nine per cent, Ma. It’s a good score. I know it’s a good score.”

“Eighty-nine is better than good. Your cousin married at seventy-four and she’s perfectly happy.” Even over a connection years old and never upgraded, her mother’s voice carried the warmth she kept for arguments she considered already won. They needed only Renu’s cooperation to finish. “What is there to think about, if the number is good.”

“I don’t know, Ma. That’s rather the problem. If I knew what there was to think about, I’d have finished thinking by now.”

Saying it, she noted that this was not quite honest, or not honest in the sense her mother would have wanted. She knew exactly what there was to think about. She knew it in the specific and irritating way one knows a fact without being able to produce the reasoning that supports it. She simply did not yet have a sentence for it that she trusted enough to say out loud, to her mother or to herself. For thirteen years she had built her whole professional identity on the discipline of reading things carefully before deciding anything. She found she was not prepared to make an exception for the one decision that was actually hers to read.

Hanging up, she remembered the exact classroom she had been sitting in at nineteen. She had made the earlier version of this same decision there, in a much smaller way. The onboarding lecturer was a tired man near retirement himself, giving a talk he had clearly given several hundred times before. He put up a single slide with two numbers side by side. One was the historical error rate of Handler judgement, unaided, across four decades of pre-Programme record-keeping. The other was the projected error rate of the Pranaali’s aggregate modelling, run against the same historical cases. To Renu at nineteen, the gap between the two numbers was the single most persuasive thing she had ever seen presented as fact. She walked out of that lecture and made a decision she had not, until this week, ever once needed to revisit. Her own instinct, however loudly it sometimes spoke, was simply less reliable than the number. The honest, adult, disciplined thing to do with an unreliable instrument was to stop consulting it and start trusting the better one instead. She had built thirteen years on that afternoon.

By every measure the Bureau’s report offered her, Arjun was an entirely reasonable match. He was a structural engineer, four years older. His compatibility profile ran high on stability and low on the volatility indices. Renu privately suspected the model quietly penalised volatility in everyone, whatever it claimed about neutral weighting. She had met him twice. Both meetings were pleasant in the unremarkable way a well-matched pair’s meetings were designed to be pleasant. Both times, afterward, she could not find any specific fault in him worth reporting to anyone. He had asked good questions. He had listened to her answers. But in neither meeting had he said a single thing she was still turning over hours later. In the three weeks since, she had begun to wonder whether this was itself the fault. Perhaps a match built to minimise volatility had also, quietly, minimised one other variable. She had never seen it listed on any Bureau report, and she had no model for measuring it herself.

She poured the tea her mother’s mother had taught her mother to make, and her mother had taught her. Pouring it, she thought of Samar’s face the day he told her, at the canteen table, that he had pulled some audit logs. She had chosen belief a long time ago, on purpose, the way a person chooses a discipline instead of falling into one. Whatever had come loose in Samar these past twelve days, she had spent her whole career making certain it stayed fastened in her. Until these last three weeks, she had never needed to apply that discipline to her own life instead of a stranger’s file. Applying it now, she was discovering that the two exercises did not feel nearly as similar as thirteen years of professional practice had led her to assume.

Her uncle called on Thursdays, a habit as old as her ledger. This Thursday, without quite deciding to, she found herself telling him about Arjun before he had finished asking after her mother.

“Eighty-nine,” he repeated, in the dry voice age had given him. She knew only from the stories that the voice had once been young enough to argue in favour of five-minute review windows. “In my day we didn’t have a number. We had aunts. Worse system, probably. Louder, certainly.”

“Did the aunts get it right?”

“About as often as your number does, I’d imagine, though nobody ever ran the comparison, because nobody thought to keep the data.” A dry, papery laugh, the sound of a man amused by his own life’s total absence from any record that might have settled the question. “You’re asking me the wrong question, Renu. You’re not calling your old uncle on a Thursday because you doubt the number. You’re calling because some part of you that the number was never built to measure is doing exactly what it’s built to do, which is object, quietly, to being left out of a decision this size. That part of you doesn’t have a file. It never will. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to be making noise.”

“You make it sound like a virtue. Objecting.”

“I don’t know that it’s a virtue.” He paused, and in the pause she heard a man deciding whether to say a thing he had decided, some years ago, not to say again. “I gave mine up, Renu. Somewhere in my thirties. Stopped noticing when it spoke, and told myself that was maturity, and by the time I understood it wasn’t, I’d built a whole retirement on the not-noticing. I’m not telling you what to do about Arjun. I’m telling you not to mistake the quiet for its absence. Mine went quiet. It was never gone.”

She wrote, that night, a longer line in the ledger than she had written in some weeks. Uncle says the objecting part has no file. I think that’s the first true thing anyone has said to me about this in three weeks, including myself. She looked at it for a while before closing the book, and did not, this time, reach for the sentence that would have explained the feeling away. She kept the ledger shut in her lap, her tea going cold beside her, in exactly the place she had always been most certain there was nothing left to find.

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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