2084: An Algorithmic State — Act V: Moral Imagination, Chapter 31: The Invitation

In eleven years Samar has never been within two floors of the Secretary. The summons says 15:00, Private Office, not disciplinary. Dev Sharma has read his file. All of it.

In Brief: Secretary Dev Sharma summons Handler Samar Varma to his private office. Dev knows about Samar’s eleven crossings into Sector 12-East and about Kavya Nair. The same morning, Director Rao’s Personnel Integrity Division has quietly asked Dev to disclose how often he uses his own discretion.

The request had arrived on Dev’s own terminal that morning, before Samar’s summons had even been drafted. Its language was so carefully unthreatening that he had read past it twice before understanding it as anything other than routine.

Personnel Integrity Division requests voluntary disclosure of discretionary determinations (Section 1, Subsection 9) exceeding sector-average frequency for the current quarter, for internal benchmarking purposes only. No response required by statute. Disclosure is at Secretary’s discretion.

He had recognised the shape of it immediately. He had drafted a hundred requests in similar language himself, in a different decade, for reasons that had always seemed purely administrative at the time. It asked nothing. It accused nothing. It simply noted, in the gentlest possible phrasing, that someone in the office of Meghna Rao, the Director who ran Personnel Integrity, had begun counting. The counting had reached a stage where the Division judged that Dev himself should be aware it was occurring.

He did not disclose. This, too, was his discretion to exercise, and he exercised it. He had now made the same choice twice, once for a Handler he had never met, and once for himself. The two choices were, in every way that mattered, the same choice wearing two different names.

He met Samar Varma at fifteen hundred hours with it still sitting on his terminal, unanswered.

The summons arrived on his terminal in the same clean sans-serif as everything else. Samar read it twice. On the second pass he understood that its very blandness was, itself, the most alarming thing about it.

Secretary D. Sharma requests a discretionary review meeting with Handler S. Varma, Exception Handling Grade III. Time: 15:00. Location: Secretariat, Private Office. Attendance is not disciplinary. No response required beyond confirmation of attendance.

He had worked eleven years in a Ministry whose entire hierarchy he could have drawn from memory. In that time he had never been within two floors of the Secretary himself. The Secretary’s name appeared on every document Samar had ever closed. For practical purposes the man existed as far away as the Prediction Towers, a fact everyone accepted rather than a person anyone expected to meet.

He did not tell Kavya. He told himself this was caution. Walking to the Secretariat at 14:51, he knew it was closer to a fear he could not yet name. It was not fear that he would be punished, exactly, though that fear was present too. It was a subtler dread that whatever was about to happen in that office would ask something of him he had not yet finished deciding how to give.

Dev Sharma’s private office held almost nothing Samar would have predicted of the man who had built the government of eight hundred and sixty-four million lives. A single window. A shelf with perhaps a dozen books, worn at their spines. No terminal was visible on the desk itself. Samar assumed one existed somewhere, folded away the way everything in Dev’s life seemed folded away from the surface a visitor was permitted to see.

“Sit,” Dev said, not unkindly, gesturing at the chair across from him without rising. He was smaller than Samar had expected, and older, in the specific way a photograph ages a public figure less than a room does. “I’ve read your file, Handler Varma. All of it. I want you to understand, before we begin, that this is not a disciplinary review, whatever the summons implied it might be. I’ve made a determination on the correlation already. I made it some weeks ago.”

Samar felt something in his chest go very still. “Which correlation, Secretary.”

“Don’t,” Dev said, gently, “do that. You know precisely which correlation. Eleven crossings into Sector 12-East, outside rostered hours, following a rejected override on a file you’d handled personally, concerning a woman named Kavya Nair.” He said the name without weight, without accusation. It was the flat tone of a man reciting a fact he had made his peace with some time ago, and had not needed to revisit since. “I marked it reviewed, no action indicated. That determination stands. You are not in danger from this office today, Samar, and I would ask you to actually hear that sentence rather than simply waiting for the version of it that turns out to be a trick.”

Samar took a long moment with this. Slowly he understood that he had been given a mercy he had never known about. Now it was being described to him after the fact, in a room with no terminal visible, by a man whose reasons for it Samar could not begin to guess.

“Why,” he said finally. “Why not refer it.”

Dev was quiet for a moment, and when he answered, it was not directly. “I built a government whose central innovation is that no one ever again has to carry the whole weight of a decision that costs somebody their life. I believe it saved this city. I have never stopped believing it.”

“And I carried it. By crossing.”

“You carried it badly, inefficiently, and at real risk to yourself, which is very likely the only kind of carrying that was ever actually worth anything.” Dev looked at him with something that was not quite approval and not quite warning. “I am seventy-one years old, Handler Varma. I fed a queue outside a gate once, twenty-six years ago, and I have never in the years since been able to confirm whether that queue was fed by morning, because the record from that summer is broken in the places where it would have told me.”

He did not ask Samar to stop crossing. He did not ask him to confess anything further, or to name Kavya’s role in the margins, or to account for anything else.

“I’m not going to instruct you in anything,” Dev said, standing, the movement itself the only signal the meeting was ending, since nothing in the room had announced it directly. “I wanted to see the file’s face, Handler Varma. I do that, sometimes, with correlations I choose not to refer.” He extended a hand, an old formal gesture Samar had not been offered by anyone in the Ministry in years. “Go back to your desk. Go back to your crossings, if that is what you’ve decided to keep doing. I would only ask that you understand, walking out of this office, that the mercy you were given today was mine to give and no one else’s, and that I have built no system, in twenty-six years, capable of guaranteeing it will be there the next time.”

He did not say that the guarantee had already begun to feel less certain than he was letting Samar hear in his voice. There was no way to say it without explaining Rao’s own request, sitting unanswered on his terminal upstairs. He kept that arithmetic for himself, as he kept most things for himself, and shook the younger man’s hand, and let him go.

Samar walked back to the second floor with the sentence sitting in his chest exactly where the compatibility figure had once sat.

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 32: What He Owed Her