2084: An Algorithmic State — Act VI: Refusal, Chapter 35: Aisha, Deciding

The offer comes on paper, under Aisha’s door: a post in the Sector 6 room that decides whose testimony survives into the summary. The arithmetic comes out in favour. She tells nobody for sixteen days.

In Brief: Aisha lives in an unmapped subsector and argues grain counts in the courtyard with Bilal. A Grade III officer named Deshpande, whom she met once at a panel four years ago, offers her sponsorship and a records job. Provisional registration cannot be undone after ninety days.

The offer came on paper, which was how Aisha knew somebody had thought about it.

Nobody in the Grid sent paper. Paper meant a person had decided that a thing should exist somewhere no system had to be asked about it first. That person had gone to the trouble of finding a printer. Then they had either carried it across a checkpoint themselves or paid somebody to.

It had been under her door. It had been under her door, she worked out later, for most of a day. She had gone out at six and not come back until dark. Coming in, she put her foot on it and picked it up, thinking it was one of the water notices.

Sponsorship, provisional registration, a post in a records office in Sector 6. The letter called the work archival reconciliation. She recognised it from the description as the job of deciding which contradictory citizen testimonies got integrated into a summary and which did not.

She read it three times standing up, in the dark, without turning on the light.

Then she folded it and put it in the tin where she kept the things that were not anybody else’s business. She made her food, and ate it, and went to the courtyard, and argued with Bilal about the grain counts for forty minutes.

She did not tell Kavya.

This was not difficult. Aisha had been not telling Kavya things for twenty-seven years, in the specific way of two people who had met at four and fought at fourteen. After that they never had a relationship that either of them could accurately describe to a stranger. There was very little Kavya did not know about her. There were three or four things, and they were the load-bearing ones. Both of them had long ago accepted the arrangement without discussing it, which was itself the arrangement.

She did not tell Bilal, the heavyset man who ran the counting at the grain market, because Bilal would have wanted it to mean something.

She did not tell her mother, because her mother would have asked what she wanted to do, and Aisha did not know. Shabana, alone in her rooms above the shop past the tannery, had a way of waiting for an answer that made a person produce one before it was ready.

She told nobody for sixteen days.

The letter was signed by a woman named Deshpande, a Grade III at the records office. Aisha had met her once, four years earlier, at the only public thing she had ever done.

It had not been much of a public thing. A panel, in a licensed hall, on civic sentiment in peripheral subsectors. Aisha had gone because Kavya had refused and somebody from the lane had to. She sat at the end of a table of five. When it came to her, she said that she thought the model was neither kind nor cruel. The argument about whether to destroy it, she said, was being had by people who had never been fed by it.

The hall had not much liked that. She had expected them not to. What she had not expected was the woman in the fourth row, who came up afterward and asked her a question about langar records. It took twenty minutes to answer properly, and in those twenty minutes the woman did not once tell Aisha what she herself thought.

I have thought about our conversation more than once, the letter said. The reconciliation work needs someone who does not already know what the answer should be. I do not know anyone else.

That was the sentence. Aisha would have refused a flattering letter in an evening. This one took sixteen days, because it was accurate.

She ran the arithmetic properly, because she had never in her life been able to refuse anything on feeling alone and had always half despised the people who could.

Registration would give her a tier. Within four years it would give her the standing to sponsor somebody else. It would put her inside the one room in the entire architecture where the decision got made about whose testimony survived contact with the summary. And she had spent her whole adult life saying, in that courtyard, to anyone who would listen, that the erasure happened in rooms like that one. Nobody in this lane, she had said, would ever be in one.

Against it: ninety days, after which she could not undo it. A file. A thumbnail. Her mother’s file, eventually, by association. And Kavya’s face, which she could picture with unwelcome precision, doing the thing it did. Not anger, not even disappointment, just the small settling of a door easing back into its frame.

The arithmetic came out in favour.

She sat with that for four of the sixteen days. She had spent four years telling this courtyard that the honest position had no clean name. She had said it so often it had a rhythm.

And a woman in Sector 6 had remembered twenty minutes in a hall and posted her a letter, and the arithmetic came out in favour. Aisha discovered that she was not going to do it. She had known she was not going to do it since the doorway, in the dark, on the first reading.

The reason was not good.

It was that she would have been good at it. She would have gone into that records office and reconciled testimony carefully and well, better than whoever they hired instead. Every year she did it well would have been a year of evidence that the system worked, because it would have. The work would have been better done. Fewer originals would have been lost. And nobody, ever, anywhere, would have been able to tell the difference between the architecture is sound and Aisha is in the building.

She would have spent twenty years quietly proving something she did not believe, by being good at her job.

Bilal would have said it was pride, and Bilal would not have been entirely wrong.

On the sixteenth day she wrote back, three lines, and thanked the woman properly. She did not explain, because the explanation would have taken the form of an argument, and it was not one.

She walked it to the checkpoint herself and paid a boy she knew to carry it across.

Then she went to the courtyard. The installation was doing something orange it had not done before, and Kavya was at the junction box with her hands in a panel that did not need her.

“You’re late,” Kavya said, without looking up.

“I had a thing.”

“What thing.”

“Nothing,” Aisha said, and sat down on the crate that had been hers for years, and asked what she’d missed.

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 36: The Rounding