2084: An Algorithmic State — Act V: Moral Imagination, Chapter 32: What He Owed Her

Weeks ago the Secretary read Kavya’s name, and her daughter’s file, and marked them reviewed, no action indicated. Samar brings her the news that same night. He thinks it is good news.

In Brief: Samar keeps a promise and tells Kavya about his meeting with Secretary Dev Sharma, who quietly chose not to refer the file on his crossings. In the courtyard in Sector 12-East, Kavya learns that the most powerful man in the Ministry has known her name for weeks.

He told her that night, because he had promised himself something the very first evening in this courtyard. He would not become a man who kept things from her the way the system kept things from everyone. And, walking toward her with the meeting still sitting in his chest, the promise had just become considerably harder to keep than it had been when he’d made it.

Kavya listened without interrupting, with the particular stillness she gave the junction box and the installation. It was how she met any piece of arithmetic whose shape she suspected she already knew before it was fully explained to her. Then he reached the part about the correlation: his own name, her name, marked reviewed, no action indicated by the Secretary’s own hand. She went very quiet, in a way that was worse than anger would have been.

“He knows my name,” she said finally.

“Yes.”

“He has known my name for weeks. Long enough to decide, personally, not to refer it.” She was not looking at him now, looking instead at the installation, dark, steady on its re-routed tap. “Do you understand what that means, Samar. Not for you. For me. For Farah.” Farah, eighteen, whose four hours in the Grid with her brother were the other half of the Secretary’s correlation. Her voice had not risen, but something in it had gone very precise, the way it went precise over the wiring. “He sat with our names for weeks. He made a choice about them. And he would have told nobody, ever, if he hadn’t decided this afternoon that you had earned hearing it.”

“He didn’t frame it as a favour to you specifically. He said...”

“I don’t care how he framed it.” She turned to look at him then, and Samar saw, for the first time since the checkpoint, something in her that was not patience. “What I didn’t know, until tonight, is that the hand had already touched my daughter’s file, my own name, this courtyard, and decided, quietly, to let all of it continue existing. Not because it was owed to us, not because any of us had a right to it, but because a man twenty-six years into his own grief looked at your file and saw something in it that reminded him of himself.”

“I didn’t ask for it,” Samar said. He was aware even as he said it how small a defence it was. A beat later he was aware of something rising in him that was not defence at all, but something closer to its opposite. “What was I supposed to do, refuse it? Tell him to refer us, so it lands on you as well, so the arithmetic comes out even?”

The silence that followed was longer than any that had passed between them before. Standing inside it, he knew he had just said a true thing in the worst possible way to say it. A truth delivered like a blow does not stop being a blow simply because it is also true.

“No,” Kavya said finally, quietly, “there isn’t a version. You’re right about that much.” She did not soften as she said it. “That doesn’t make it easier to sit across from you and know that a man decided you were worth protecting the moment he saw enough of himself in your file, and has never, in my nine years in this courtyard, looked at anything of mine and seen anything at all. I’m not asking you to have refused it, Samar. I don’t think refusing a mercy is a thing that’s actually available to anyone. I’m telling you that I get to be angry about the shape of a world where it was available to you without your even asking, and I would like, tonight, for you not to also need me to make the anger comfortable for you while I’m having it.”

“That’s fair,” he said, and fair was a smaller word than the moment needed, and he did not currently have a larger one. He reached for her hand, a habit of some weeks by now, unthinking. She let him take it for perhaps two seconds and then drew it back, gently, without making any show of it. Somehow that made it land harder than if she’d pulled away sharply.

“Not tonight,” she said, of the hand, of the whole easy grammar they’d built between them these past weeks. “I’m not punishing you. I just don’t have it in me tonight to hold your hand and be angry at the world you come from at the same time. I’ve tried. I can’t make my body do both.”

“I’d like to be alone with it,” she said, after a while, in a voice that had gone tired rather than sharp, which frightened him more than the sharpness had. “Not forever. Tonight.”

He did not argue with this, though every Handler’s instinct in him wanted to stay until the conversation resolved into something he could carry home already settled. Walking back to the checkpoint alone, he saw that this particular unsettledness was not his to fix by staying. Leaving when she asked him to was, perhaps, the first thing he had done all evening that actually answered what she’d needed rather than what he had.

He did not know, crossing back into the Grid’s curated quiet, whether she would be at the courtyard the next evening, or the one after. He walked home under a sky the towers had already decided would stay clear until morning.

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 33: The Terminal at the End of the Queue