2084: An Algorithmic State — Act VII: Intuition, Chapter 40: Rao Confronts Dev

In twenty years, Secretary Dev Sharma has marked 288 of 341 staff cases reviewed, no action indicated. His predecessor did it in six per cent. Director Meghna Rao carries the numbers into his office in a thin folder.

In Brief: Director Meghna Rao asks Secretary Dev Sharma, who wrote nearly the whole of the Pranaali’s charter, for a formal review meeting. For almost a year she has been building a pattern out of his private decisions on Ministry personnel. In his office, she sets out the numbers and what she intends to do about them.

Meghna Rao requested the meeting through the ordinary channel, in the ordinary language. She had built a career on the conviction that the ordinary channel was the only one that mattered. She did not intend to make an exception of herself the first time the stakes became personally uncomfortable to observe.

Director M. Rao requests a discretionary review meeting with Secretary D. Sharma. Time: at the Secretary’s convenience. Location: at the Secretary’s discretion. Subject: pattern review, Section 1, Subsection 9 determinations, current and preceding two years.

Dev granted it for the following afternoon, in his own private office. He was seventy-one, twenty years the Secretary, and the tea he made himself every morning stood on his desk. He had decided, reading her request, on the smallest, least costly form of respect he still had available to extend her. He would make her come to him rather than summon her to a room of his own choosing.

She came with a single folder, thinner than he had expected, and did not sit until he gestured to the chair a second time.

“I sent a voluntary disclosure request six weeks ago,” she said, without preamble, the folder closed on her lap. “You didn’t respond to it. That was within your discretion, and I am not here because you declined to respond. I’m here because your not responding was itself the last data point I needed.”

“Data point toward what, Director.”

“Toward a pattern I’ve been building for the better part of a year, Secretary, though I didn’t begin building it because of you. I began it looking at a Grade II Handler a decade ago, and it led me, eventually, to a question about determinations generally, and the question led me, four months ago, to your own record.” She opened the folder, though Dev noticed she did not need to consult it. The numbers had evidently long since been committed to memory, the way a fact becomes part of a person once they have turned it over enough times. “In twenty years as Secretary, you have personally reviewed three hundred and forty-one correlations surfaced under Section 3, Subsection 6, cases involving Ministry personnel, judged of sufficient administrative significance to require Secretariat attention rather than automatic Division referral. Of those three hundred and forty-one, you marked reviewed, no action indicated in two hundred and eighty-eight. That is a rate of eighty-four per cent, Secretary. The Secretary who held this office before you, across the five years he held it, marked the same determination in six per cent of cases.”

Dev listened to this without visible reaction, which was, even as he did it, its own kind of tell. He had spent twenty-six years learning to receive difficult numbers without flinching. In this particular room, at this particular moment, he was using that same discipline to buy himself a few seconds he badly needed.

“You’ve done careful work,” he said finally. “I would expect nothing less from your office. May I ask what you believe the pattern actually is, beneath the rate itself. A number alone doesn’t yet tell either of us very much.”

“I’ve read as many of the two hundred and eighty-eight as your office would release to me. A disproportionate number involve a Handler or officer who took some personal risk on behalf of a citizen the model had already determined against. Not corruption, in the ordinary sense, nothing that moved money, nothing that broke any law I could cite you. Simply... mercy, exercised quietly, on the citizen’s behalf, at the expense of the Handler’s own career security, and protected, afterward, by you.” She closed the folder. “I don’t think you’re a corrupt man, Secretary Sharma. That is why I have come and said it to your face, instead of filing it and letting the process take you the way it would take anyone else.”

Dev was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, it was with the care of a man choosing to answer a harder question than the one that had actually been asked.

“I wrote Subsection 9, Director. I wrote nearly the whole charter, in a decade when I believed every clause I drafted was permanent.”

“I understand the reasoning behind the clause, Secretary. I’ve read the same history you have. I think Section 1, Subsection 9 is a reasonable answer, exercised at six per cent, or ten, or even twenty. I don’t know how to call eighty-four per cent a safety valve any longer. A valve that opens four times out of five isn’t relieving pressure at the margins.”

He did not reach for 2058. She had told him she had read the same history.

“And what would you have me do with that observation, Director. Retroactively refer two hundred and eighty-eight determinations, undo two hundred and eighty-eight small mercies, on the theory that consistency, applied after the fact, is worth more than whatever those mercies actually protected?”

“No.” Rao said this simply, without triumph. “I don’t think undoing the past helps anyone, and I’m not here today to ask for that. I’m here to tell you that I intend to keep watching, formally now rather than privately, and that the next determination of this kind that crosses your desk will be reviewed by my office in real time, not four months after the fact when the pattern’s already cold. I owe you that much warning, Secretary, out of the respect I meant when I said what I said about corruption. I don’t think you’re my enemy.”

She stood, the folder still closed, having never needed to open it further than the numbers already living in her memory.

“Thank you for your time, Secretary Sharma.” She paused at the door, not turning back fully. “For what it’s worth, and I recognise it may not be worth very much, coming from the person telling you this, I hope the next one isn’t a hard case. I would rather find nothing at all, watching in real time, than find exactly what I expect to find.”

Dev sat alone for a long while after she had gone, with the tea he had made that morning gone cold in front of him.

He thought of the file that had brought her to his desk in the first place. She had never named it directly, out of a discretion of her own that he recognised and, in a strange way, respected. A Grade III Handler, Samar Varma, and a woman named Kavya Nair on the far side of the checkpoint, an eleven-crossing pattern he had chosen, weeks ago, not to refer. He knew now that the next determination of this kind, whenever it arrived, would not pass quietly across his desk as Samar Varma’s had. It would arrive already watched, already timed, already weighed by a second set of eyes that had told him plainly, without cruelty, that it intended to keep counting. He found, turning the thought over, that he did not resent her for it.

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 41: The Uncertain Model