2084: An Algorithmic State — Act VII: Intuition, Chapter 39: Six Points

Model confidence across all of Twelve-East has dropped six points since the spring. No directive, no policy change. Samar carries the number across the checkpoint to Kavya, two nights after their argument.

In Brief: The morning after a bitter argument with Kavya, Samar Varma’s colleague Renu Sen shows him a number. The model’s confidence across the whole of Twelve-East has fallen six points, and nobody ordered it. Two nights later he carries the number across the checkpoint, and Kavya has to decide what it means for her courtyard, and for him.

He went back to the Ministry the next morning because there was nowhere else to go. His body performed the eleven-minutes-early arrival and the seven-second reviews with the same fluency it always had. It was entirely indifferent to the fact that some larger part of him had spent the night in a courtyard. He had been told there, honestly and without cruelty, exactly how little his own suffering weighed against what it had cost the people he claimed to love.

Renu was at her desk when he arrived. For once she did not ask him anything, which told him more than a question would have. She had seemed different these past few days, in a way Samar had noticed without yet finding an occasion to ask about directly. She was quiet in a register that was not her usual quiet, a woman turning something over who had not yet decided how much of it to say aloud. It was nearly eleven before she spoke at all, and when she did, it was not about him.

“Have you noticed the Twelve-East queue,” she said, not looking up from her screen. “Not the volume. The shape of it.”

“What shape.”

“Every recommendation I’ve closed from that sector in the last month has carried a confidence figure a few points lower than it would have carried a year ago. Not enough to trigger review. Just... thinner. As though the model’s grown less sure of everything out there, all at once, for no reason any single file explains.” She turned, finally, to look at him. Samar saw in her face something he had not seen in eleven years of sitting two desks apart. In place of her usual unhurried certainty was something closer to the discomfort he had felt himself, weeks ago, noticing an execution timestamp that came before his own confirmation. “I pulled the aggregate this morning. Sector-wide confidence in Twelve-East has dropped six points since the spring. Nobody’s announced a policy change. Nobody’s issued a directive. It’s simply... drifted, the way a number drifts when a thousand small inputs each shift by a fraction, and none of them, alone, is large enough for anyone to notice signing off on it.”

Samar said nothing. He understood, with a discomfort that sat very close to guilt, that he was one of those thousand small inputs. There were his own crossings, his own correlation, his own name sitting somewhere in a Secretariat file marked reviewed, no action indicated. All of it had almost certainly added some fraction of a fraction to the very drift Renu was now describing to him.

“Does it worry you,” he asked, careful with the question, as he had learned to be with Kavya’s silences.

“I’ve spent thirteen years telling myself the model doesn’t drift without reason,” Renu said. “I still believe that, mostly. I have to. It’s the belief that’s let me do this work without becoming Prakash, forgetting every file the moment I close it, or Vikram, moving so fast none of it ever has the chance to land.” She turned back to her screen. The conversation was not finished, only paused. “But six points, Samar, in a season, with no directive behind it, that’s not a number I know how to explain to myself anymore using the story I’ve been telling myself all this time. I pulled a log of my own, a few days ago. I didn’t tell you. I’m telling you now because I think you should know you’re not the only one who’s stopped being able to look away from it.”

Samar took this in without answering at once. Whatever had changed in Renu had not begun this morning, in front of him. It had been moving in her for days, in private. His own crack had moved in him the same way for most of three weeks before anyone but Kavya had heard a word of it. He did not ask what she had found in the log she had pulled, or what had prompted her to pull it. He sensed from her care over what to say and not say that the rest was hers, to offer or withhold on her own schedule. It was the same courtesy Kavya had once extended him over Zainab’s nephew.

“I find I don’t much like sitting with a number I can’t explain,” Renu went on. “It’s the first time in a long while I’ve understood, even slightly, why some Handlers eventually stop being Handlers.”

He walked home earlier than usual that evening. He had not yet found the courage to cross the checkpoint, and for the first time since the first crossing, he did not know whether Kavya would want him to. Walking, he thought of Renu’s four ways of surviving the job. He had just watched the crack she had chosen to name aloud finally reach a width she could no longer keep private. It was a crack no wider than six percentage points, and no less real for its narrowness.

He did not cross that evening. He told himself this was patience. He was giving Kavya the space her anger deserved, rather than arriving at her door within a day and expecting the argument to have resolved itself overnight. He stood at his own window instead and watched Tower 9 hold its beam for its customary four seconds. He thought this, too, might simply be the same old cowardice wearing a new and more forgivable name. A man who had spent eleven years mistaking performance for care might not yet be able to tell the difference between two things. One was giving someone room. The other was simply being afraid of what waited for him if he closed the distance.

He thought of her voice the night before, gone tired rather than sharp, and of how much more frightening the tired had been than the sharpness.

The beam went dark. Somewhere across the river, in a courtyard he was choosing, tonight, not to enter, a piece of scavenged metal and glass was cycling slowly through a colour with no name. It was admitting, as it always did, that it did not yet know what it was looking at. Samar lay watching his own ceiling long after his lighting curve expected him asleep. Neither, tonight, did he.

He crossed the checkpoint on the third evening. Two days of sitting with Renu’s number had made it plain that he was carrying something that belonged to Kavya more than it belonged to him.

The two days had not passed easily. Walking to the Ministry each morning, he had rehearsed at least four different versions of what he might say to her. Each one fell apart somewhere before he reached his desk. One was too apologetic, one too clinical. One tried, transparently, to use Renu’s number as a bridge back into her good opinion. But the number was simply a thing she deserved to know, whatever it cost or earned him. By the second evening he had settled on saying almost nothing rehearsed at all. His theory was that a woman who had spent nine years building a life out of refusing comfortable performances would recognise a rehearsed apology the moment it left his mouth. She would trust the unrehearsed version more, however clumsily it came out.

She was at the junction box when he found her, though it needed no repair. Her hands moved over wiring that was already sound. She had simply wanted something to do with them.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come back,” she said, not looking up.

“I wasn’t sure I should. I still don’t entirely know if I’m here for the right reason.” He said this honestly, standing at a careful distance that neither of them had needed to negotiate a week ago and both, tonight, seemed to understand without discussing. “I have something. I don’t know if it changes anything about what you told me two nights ago. I think you should hear it anyway.”

He told her about Renu. He told her about the six confidence points and the drift with no directive behind it. He told her about the crack he had watched open in a woman who had spent thirteen years choosing to believe the system explained itself. Kavya listened with the same stillness she gave everything that mattered. When he finished, she set down the wire she had been holding and sat back against the courtyard wall, quiet for a long moment.

“Six points,” she said finally. “Across an entire sector. Not just this courtyard, not just Fatima’s stall. All of Twelve-East.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Then it isn’t us.” Kavya said this slowly, working through it as she spoke. “I’ve spent two months assuming somebody was answering the tap, or Farah, or you. If it’s the whole sector, then nobody’s answering anything.”

“Renu said something like that. That the model doesn’t keep a record of why it’s less sure. Only that it is.”

“That frightens me more than the siege did.” Kavya looked at him. The siege was the courtyard’s name for the past two months, in which a thousand small recalculations had cut its water and emptied Fatima’s stall. Something in her face had changed since the anger of two nights ago. Not forgiveness. A truce. “I can argue with a thing that has a reason. I don’t know what you do with one that’s only got less sure.”

“I haven’t forgotten what I said two nights ago,” she said, after a silence, before he could ask. “I want you to know that. I’m not taking it back because you brought me a number. What Dev did, what it means that my name and my daughter’s file sat in a drawer marked reviewed, no action indicated because a tired old man saw something of himself in you, that’s still true, and it’s still going to sit between us, probably for as long as we’re anything to each other at all.” She turned the wire over once in her hands, an old habit, a thing to do with them while she said a harder thing plainly. “But I don’t think punishing you for it by shutting you out helps Fatima, or Farah, or my daughter. So. Thank you for the number. I still need you to carry the rest of it, same as I told you before.”

She reached over, then, and set her hand briefly over his on the ground between them. It was not the easy three-week habit of before, and it was gone again after only a few seconds. But it was a deliberate small gesture, chosen rather than simply fallen into, and the difference mattered to her more than the length of it did.

Samar nodded. It was not the reconciliation he might once have hoped for, three weeks ago, and it was not nothing.

He walked back to the checkpoint later than he had planned, past the hour Fatima’s stall usually closed, past Manzoor’s empty stool.

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 40: Rao Confronts Dev