2084: An Algorithmic State — Act VI: Refusal, Chapter 33: The Terminal at the End of the Queue

Nine hours into the queue, on her son-in-law’s cracked phone, Sarala reaches Clause 19.4 of the charter. Its last four words describe exactly what she once did to her mother’s words at a counter.

In Brief: In October 2059, Sarala, fifty-four, stands eleven hours in a queue at the Kotla ground to vote on whether the Continuity Programme should go on under its charter. Her mother died in August of something the clinic could not name. While the queue stands still, she reads all forty pages.

Sarala had been in the queue nine hours when she started reading the charter.

She started reading it because the queue had stopped moving and there was nothing else on the phone.

That was the whole of it. She would tell it that way for the rest of her life, to the handful of people who ever asked, and none of them would believe her. By then the not-pressing had become a thing people wanted to have had a reason.

She was fifty-four, and the phone was her son-in-law’s, cracked in three places across the top corner. The charter was forty pages, and the screen showed about a hundred and forty words at a time.

The queue ran from the Kotla ground gate, along the wall, twice around the athletics track and back to a row of nine booths under a tarpaulin. The track had not had athletics on it since the summer before. There were water points every two hundred metres. It was more water than any of them had seen in a public place in fourteen months. Everybody remarked on it, and nobody found it suspicious. By October 2059, a government that could put out water was a government that could do something.

Ahead of her, a man was explaining to his wife that the vote was a formality. Behind her, two students from the polytechnic were arguing about whether it was legally a referendum at all. Somewhere further back, a group had started a song and had abandoned it twice.

Sarala read.

The first twelve pages were about continuity of supply, and she read them properly, because supply was why she was standing there. Her mother had died in August of something the clinic had not had the reagent to name. Her father had stopped talking in September. Her brother had a job doing something at the depot that he would not describe and that paid in rice.

The charter said: uninterrupted distribution. It said: predictive allocation in advance of shortfall. She read one sentence twice, because that sentence was doing something the rest of the document was not. It said, no household shall again be required to petition for a resource whose need is already known.

She had petitioned. She went in June, and again in July, to a counter where a man wrote things down by hand. In August she went to the same counter, and the same man had a screen and no longer wrote anything.

She wanted the sentence to be true. Standing in a queue at the Kotla ground, she noted that wanting it to be true was not the same as it being true. She had no way at all to tell the difference from where she stood, and neither did anyone else in the line. This was probably fine.

Pages twelve to twenty-eight were the model. She skipped most of it, and there were diagrams the phone rendered as grey rectangles.

Page thirty-one was intake.

Clause 19.4. Submissions made in languages other than the four scheduled administrative languages shall be accepted at all intake points and shall be retained in summary form.

She read it, and moved on, and got four lines further before she came back.

Retained in summary form.

She was in the queue, and the queue was not moving, and there was nothing to do but think about it. She thought about it for a long time, long enough that the man ahead of her got through his explanation to his wife twice more. Long enough that the students behind her moved from law to something else.

Her mother had spoken Bhojpuri at home and something else with her own mother, and had never in her life produced a written sentence in any of them. In June, at the counter, Sarala did the talking, because Sarala had the schooling. She translated her mother into the four scheduled languages herself. She stood at a counter and turned my mother cannot keep anything down and has not been able to for nine days and is frightened, and I am telling you this because you can see her but you cannot see that she is frightened into patient reports persistent vomiting, duration 9 days.

She had done it. Nobody had made her. It had been the correct thing to do, because it was the form of words the counter could take. She had been proud, standing there, of being the one in her family who could do it.

Retained in summary form.

She sat down on the ground, which you could do, because the queue was not moving. She read the clause again on a cracked phone and thought: they have written down the thing I did.

Not as a failure. It was in intake, not in a section about limitations. It sat between a clause about counter hours and a clause about identity verification, in the same flat tone as both. It was a design decision, taken on purpose, by people who had considered it and found it acceptable.

Somebody had sat in a room and decided that the original was not worth the storage.

She got to the booth at ten past eight in the evening, eleven hours after she joined.

The booth was a folding table, a terminal, and a woman of about fifty in a Continuity Programme tabard. The woman had clearly been there since morning. She said, without looking up, “Tag.”

Sarala gave her the tag.

“Screen in front of you. Two buttons. Press one.”

The terminal said:

Do you consent to the continuation of the Continuity Programme under its governing charter, as reviewed and available for public inspection?

Underneath, side by side, in the same size type:

[ CONSENT ] [ DECLINE ]

Afterward, she could not work out what she had expected. Something. A weight to it, a different colour, a confirmation, a second screen asking whether she was sure. There was none of that. The two words sat there like the two ends of a switch. DECLINE had a very slightly wider gap on its right, where the layout had not been adjusted after something else was removed. That gap was the only evidence anywhere on the screen that a human being had ever thought about that button at all.

“Any time you like,” the woman said.

“What happens if I press the second one?”

The woman looked up for the first time. She was not hostile, but tired in the specific way of a person who had answered a question forty times and had not, until now, been asked this one.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody’s told us. I’ve been on this booth since six this morning.”

“How many have?”

“Pressed the second one?” The woman thought about it. “Two. Both this morning. One was a mistake. He came back and asked could he change it and I said I don’t know that either.”

Sarala looked at the screen.

She was not thinking about history. She was tired and her legs hurt, and she had eaten a packet of something at four. And she was thinking about a woman in a room deciding that the original was not worth the storage. The thought came with a clarity that surprised her, and it never entirely left her afterward.

She pressed DECLINE.

There was no sound. The screen said Response recorded and then, after two seconds, went back to the question for the next person.

“Right,” the woman said. “Tag.”

Sarala gave her the tag back. The woman scanned it and handed it over and said, “Mind the step going out, they’ve not fixed it.” Sarala said thank you and went down the two steps and out through the Kotla ground gate. The night outside was, in every particular she could detect, exactly the same night she had come in on.

Nobody came.

She could never get anyone to understand it afterward, including her own daughter.

No one came to the flat. No officer, no notice, no knock. In November she was still on the ration register, and in December she was still on the ration register.

In January the registration renewal came and she filled it in and sent it and it did not come back.

She queried it in February and was told the query had been logged. She queried it in March and was told the query had been logged. In April she went in person to a counter three sectors over. A young man there explained to her, with real patience and no ill will whatsoever, that renewal was automatic for consenting citizens and manual for the small number of others. Manual processing was subject to available capacity, he said, and available capacity was currently allocated to the consenting queue. This was not a penalty, he said, and he could see she was frustrated.

He was not wrong about any of it. She checked later, when she could, and every sentence he said was true.

In May her daughter came to the flat with the child on her hip and a card from the clinic. The card had a box for the household registration number, and the box was empty. The clinic had not refused the second injection. It had given her a date in September and a form, and the form asked for the number that was not on the card. Her daughter put the card on the table and did not say anything about it. She asked instead whether there was tea. Sarala made the tea. The child was eleven months old and was given the cracked phone to hold, and held it. Nobody said the word registration all afternoon. When they left, the card went back into the bag, and the date in September went with it.

By June the housing allocation was tied to registration. By August she and Vinod, her husband, a quiet man who carried the boxes himself, had moved out past where the maps stopped bothering. By the following spring her daughter had brought the child out after them. By then it had stopped being a thing that had happened to her, and started being where she lived.

She kept the phone, her son-in-law’s, with the crack across the corner. It did not work after 2064 and she kept it anyway, in a biscuit box, and never in the rest of her life explained to anybody why.

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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