2084: An Algorithmic State — Act V: Moral Imagination, Chapter 29: The Specification

Rehana Qureshi asked for a four-year expiry on a single flag. She lost three to one. Her minority note is four hundred and six words long, and anyone may request it.

In Brief: In 2063, Rehana Qureshi drafts the Pranaali’s passive-monitoring flag and argues that it needs an expiry. The chair, Bhattacharya, asks her for evidence, and her own deputy stays silent. Decades later, at eighty, she reads a journalist’s long piece about the six-second gap.

Rehana Qureshi lost the argument in the winter of 2063 and spent the rest of her career being right about it.

The specification was for passive monitoring. This was the low-cost flag, the one the system set on a citizen whose behaviour did not warrant investigation but did not resolve either. She had drafted most of it, and it was good work. She still thinks it was good work, and she is eighty now and has had a long time to revise the opinion downward and has not.

There were four of them in the room. Bhattacharya from Architecture was in the chair. There was a lawyer whose name she has genuinely lost. And there was Sandeep Vig, her own deputy, who agreed with her before the meeting and did not say so during it. She forgave that within a year and has never entirely stopped noticing.

The argument was over one line.

“There’s no expiry,” she said.

“Correct.”

“I’d like to put one in. Four years.”

Bhattacharya was not a fool and did not treat her as one, which was more than she got in most rooms in 2063. He asked her what problem the expiry solved.

“A flag with no expiry is a permanent condition applied to a person who has not been found to have done anything.”

“It’s not a condition. Nothing follows from it. It’s a note.”

“It’s a note that sits in a file for the rest of somebody’s life.”

“Yes,” Bhattacharya said. “And it does nothing at all for the rest of somebody’s life unless there’s a second matching event, and if there’s a second matching event we want the first one. That’s the entire function.”

She had prepared for that, and made the argument she had come to make. It took her four minutes and she has never improved on it. It went like this. The flag does nothing, and the citizen does not know it exists. If those two things stayed true, then Bhattacharya was right and she was wasting a Tuesday.

But they would not stay true, because some proportion of flagged citizens would find out. They would find out through a friend in a records office, through an access request they had the education to make, through a rumour that turned out to be accurate. Take a person who knows there is a permanent note against their name. That person knows the note does nothing until they do a second thing, and does not know what counts as the second thing...

“...will supervise themselves,” Rehana said. “Forever. That’s what we’re building. We’re not building surveillance. We’re building the expectation of it, distributed into the citizen, at no operating cost to us at all.”

The room was quiet for a moment, and she remembers that. She has been in a great many rooms and she remembers exactly four silences, and that was one of them.

Then the lawyer said: “Can you evidence that?”

She could not evidence it.

That was the whole of the meeting and the whole of the decision. And in a sense she did not have the words for until decades later, it was the whole of the problem.

She had one photocopied paper from a criminology journal, pre-Collapse, about parole conditions. Bhattacharya read it and correctly described it as not analogous. She had no data, because the system did not exist yet and so had produced no data. The only way to produce the data was to build the thing without the expiry and see.

“Set it at four years provisionally,” she said. “If nothing goes wrong we remove it.”

“And if four years is wrong? If somebody waits four years and a day?” Bhattacharya put both hands flat on the table. “Rehana. I am not dismissing you. I want you to hear that. What you have described is a real cost and I think you may be right about it. What I have is a specific failure mode with a specific victim: a person harmed in year five by somebody the system had a note on in year one and threw away in year four. And you have a general condition affecting a population we cannot yet count, in a way we cannot yet measure, that will never appear in any report.”

“That’s true.”

“So you understand the difficulty.”

“I understand it perfectly,” she said. “It’s that mine won’t be in a report. That’s not the same as it not existing. That’s the same architecture we’ve had this argument about four times.”

She lost three to one, and Vig raised his hand with the others.

She wrote a minority note, which was her right, and a right she used perhaps six times in twenty-four years. The minority note went into the record, and the record went into the Archive without machine summarisation. That provision was in the founding charter and had not yet quietly fallen out of use.

It is still there, and it is four hundred and six words, and anyone may request it.

She stayed eleven more years. She was good at the work and she got better at the arguing, and she won some of them. One was the intake counter’s second operator, which everybody has forgotten was ever a question. Another was the audit log’s citizen-access provision, which she got in exchange for something she has never told anyone she gave up. She retired in 2074 and taught for a while and then stopped teaching.

Nobody has ever asked her about the flag.

In the year of the amendment she read a long piece by a journalist about the six-second gap. It was fourteen thousand words, and good, and it did not mention passive monitoring, because passive monitoring was not the story. But there was a paragraph in it that quoted a testimony. The testimony mentioned two young people from an unmapped subsector who had spent four hours in the Grid doing nothing. They had been flagged, insufficient recurrence, no action indicated.

Rehana Qureshi read that paragraph three times in her flat in Vasant Kunj and then put the terminal down.

She did not write to anybody. She is eighty, and the people she would have written to are dead or were never listening. What she did instead, at midnight, was look up the minority note, which she had not read since she wrote it. She wanted to see whether the fifty-nine-year-old version of herself had put it well. She had put it adequately. But there was a sentence in the third paragraph she would take back. It was a hedge, softening the finding, wanting whoever read it to like her while they read it.

She turned the terminal off.

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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