2084: An Algorithmic State — Act I: Judgement, Chapter 3: Exception Handler Grade III

Forty-one Exception Handlers on one floor, and only four ways to make peace with the job. Samar Varma chose not to choose. Then he opens an audit log that no citizen knows exists.

In Brief: At the Ministry in Delhi, Samar Varma watches his colleagues Renu, Vikram and Prakash, each with a settled way of doing the work. Renu notices that Sector 12-East is sending unusual numbers of files. Samar, uneasy since a decline from that sector, starts to look at what happens behind his review screen.

The Ministry of Continuity and Resource Equity employed, on the second floor alone, forty-one Exception Handlers. Samar had worked beside most of them long enough to know exactly how each had made peace with the job. There were, in his experience, only four ways to do it, and by his eleventh year he could usually tell within a week of meeting someone which one they’d choose.

There was Renu, two desks down, who had chosen belief. She read every file with the unhurried thoroughness of a woman convinced her attention mattered. She could tell you without checking the name of the recommendation model’s third revision and the year the review window had gone from five. She kept in her drawer a steel thermos of tea her mother made too strong and too sweet. She drank it anyway, every morning, the way a person keeps a single habit unimproved on purpose. Her work, she’d tell you at the tea counter, was the last human seam in the whole garment. Samar suspected she hadn’t invented the phrase but had certainly made it her own.

There was Vikram, by the window, a lean man with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, who had chosen speed. On his way to the tea counter Samar slowed at his desk to actually watch him, as he hadn’t thought to in years. Files opened and closed at a rate that gave the eye no time to land. Vikram’s hand was at the confirmation key before Samar’s own eye had finished the first line of the recommendation. The rhythm was so even it stopped looking like reading and started looking like breathing. Vikram caught him and did not stop.

“Ninety-nine point eight,” he said, without turning, the number he mentioned the way other men mention a personal best. “Six years. The secret, if you want it, is that the model’s usually right, and the only thing slowing anybody down is people convincing themselves their reading adds something the confidence score doesn’t already know.” He blinked at the screen, approved a file, blinked again. “No offence.”

“None taken,” Samar said, and meant it less than he would have two days ago.

There was old Prakash, three rows back, his reading glasses pushed up into white hair, who had chosen forgetting. He had built the discipline thoroughly, over seventeen years. He could close a file and, within minutes, hold no more of it than the chime that had opened it. Samar had heard it described. He watched it happen that same morning, by accident.

Prakash was reading aloud to no one, as he sometimes did. “Here’s an interesting one,” he said, of a file on his screen: a citizen in 6-West, water allocation, flagged for prior review. “Haven’t seen this before.”

“You have, though,” Renu said, not unkindly, from her own desk. “Same citizen ID came through your queue in... March, was it? You closed it in nine seconds. I remember because you told me at lunch the name sounded like a village near your grandmother’s.”

Prakash looked at the file with an expression Samar could read only as real, unforced surprise. He was a man meeting a stranger who happens to know his own address better than he does. “Did I,” he said, not a question. He read it again, as though on the second pass it might agree to have been read before. It did not. He closed it and approved it in nine seconds. They were the same nine seconds, Samar guessed, that he’d have given a file he was seeing for the first time in his life.

And there was Samar, who until two days ago had chosen the fourth way. He suspected it was the way chosen by the largest number of people in any system built to outlast the convictions of the people inside it. He had chosen not to choose. He came in. He read. He pressed the button the file wanted pressed. He went home. Without ever deciding to build it, he had built a version of himself that could do this for ever. It was a channel worn so deep by repetition that it no longer needed a river to keep running in it, only the shape the water had left behind.

The file under his current one in the queue was a manufacturing determination. He had no reason to open it early and opened it anyway, because the ownership field on the older records was still visible and he had never looked at one.

Vardhan Precision Systems. Incorporated 2061, privately held. Employee-owned since 2069. Three hundred and eighty-two workers. Forty-one machines.

Ownership: cooperative. Production: independent. Schedule: proposed by operator. Distribution: Pranaali-coordinated. Priority: adjusted, tier 2. Absorption forecast: hospitals 34%, transport cooperatives 22%, agricultural districts 19%, household 25%.

Nobody had told Vardhan what to make. Vardhan had said what it intended to make. The Pranaali had said what would happen to everyone else if it did, and in what order the output would reach whom. Samar closed it.

He had arrived that Thursday eleven minutes early, which the building noted without comment. Renu was already frowning at something, with the intensity she kept for files she believed deserved it.

“Sector 12-East,” she said, without looking up, in the tone she used when she wanted a colleague to volunteer information rather than be asked for it. “Your queue’s had four from there this week. Mine’s had six.”

“Is that unusual?”

“It’s unusual that I noticed.” She turned her screen slightly, an old habit from before the Ministry had made the gesture meaningless. There was nothing on it a hidden camera didn’t already have. “Twelve-East doesn’t generate volume like this. It’s mapped, barely, but it’s mapped. The volume normally comes from the unmapped subsectors: the Chowk side, the margins. Twelve-East is supposed to be quiet.”

Samar thought of the asterisk. He had not mentioned it to anyone, and standing at her desk, he found that he didn’t intend to start. He couldn’t have named his reasons if asked. The nearest was that the asterisk had begun to feel like his in a way none of his other four thousand files ever had.

“Maybe the model’s rebalancing something,” he said. It was the answer the Ministry trained you to give, and he heard himself give it with a faint discomfort he hadn’t felt in years. He was a man repeating a sentence he’d said too many times to remember whether he’d ever believed it.

Renu shrugged, the shrug of someone who has decided a puzzle isn’t, this week, worth the cost of solving, and went back to her file.

His own queue was thin, six files before eleven, a light day. He read each one with an attention he recognised, uneasily, as new. The files were no different. But for the first time since his second year, he began to notice the seven-second window as a thing that happened to him rather than a thing he passed through. It was a room he’d crossed a thousand times without once looking up to find it had a ceiling.

The fourth file was a man, sixty-two, requesting continuation of a mobility allocation his file called marginal utility, declining. Confidence 96.1. Samar had his hand halfway to the key before the phrase caught, somewhere behind his eyes. Not the man. The words. Marginal utility, declining. They were the same three, word for word, that had closed a different man’s file two mornings before: different sector, different allocation, same three words in the same order. This was no coincidence of language but a template. Somewhere in the model a category held this exact phrase. It waited to be attached to whichever life next qualified, the way a stamp waits in a drawer for the next form that needs it.

He approved it anyway. There was, this morning as every morning, nothing else to do with a file once you’d noticed a thing about it the file itself hadn’t asked you to notice.

An hour later he did something he had never done in eleven years. He opened the audit log.

Every Handler had access, in principle. The onboarding materials called it a transparency measure: a record of the full sequence of system actions on any file, available to any citizen who formally requested it. Samar had never heard of a citizen doing so. In part this was because the request required knowing the log existed, and its existence was mentioned nowhere a citizen would look.

He pulled the log for the file he’d just closed: the sixty-two-year-old, marginal utility, declining.

Recommendation generated: 09:14:02. Recommendation confirmed by Human Reviewer S. Varma: 09:14:09. Allocation adjustment executed: 09:14:03.

He read the third line twice. Executed: 09:14:03.

Six seconds before he had pressed anything. The system had not waited for his confirmation to act. It had acted, and then waited, with the particular patience of a form that needs your signature to file itself correctly, not your agreement to be true.

He sat with it, as he had sat the day before with a sentence about a gate that may or may not have been fed by morning. A version of himself from three days ago would have found a reasonable explanation. A caching artefact, a display lag, some technical footnote that would dissolve the moment he asked the right person. For most of an hour he let that version do the work. Clocks drifted. The allocation servers and the review terminals kept their own time. Six seconds between two machines said nothing about the order in which anything had happened. Even while he believed it, he noticed how badly he wanted to.

He pulled three more logs before lunch, at random, from files months old that he barely remembered. In every one, the execution timestamp came before the confirmation. It was not by much: six seconds, four, once nine. It was never the same interval twice, which no drifting clock would manage. But it was always in the same direction. A decision already made had been dressed afterward in the seconds of a man reading it.

He did not pull Kavya Nair’s file. He told himself this was caution. A file two days old, one he’d had reason to look at twice, was likelier to be flagged for unusual access than four picked at random from a year ago. That was true. It was also not the whole of it. He was not yet ready to learn that the daughter’s reassignment, too, had been decided before he ever opened the file. Decided before the eleven, then fourteen seconds he’d let it sit. Decided before whatever he’d done with his lingering had mattered to anyone at all, including him.

At 12:58 the chime sounded for his seventh file. He closed the audit log, opened the file, read it, and pressed the button it wanted pressed, in seven seconds, as always. Except that now he knew exactly what those seven seconds were for.

Outside his window, Tower 9 stood the colour of wet slate against a sky the system had scheduled to clear by two.

About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time.

Previous: Chapter 2: The Archive

Next: Chapter 4: The Invisible Signature