2084: An Algorithmic State — Act I: Judgement, Chapter 5: The Placebo

For eleven days Samar Varma presses the button each file wants pressed, knowing it changes nothing. Then Renu tells him about a review window that was once five minutes long.

In Brief: Samar Varma, an Exception Handler in Delhi, now knows his seven-second review comes after the Pranaali has already acted, and he keeps working anyway. Over lunch his colleague Renu tells him what her uncle, an early Handler, once told her. That evening Samar walks toward the edge of the Grid.

For eleven days Samar came in early, read his files in the seven seconds the Ministry expected, pressed the button each file wanted pressed. And told no one that he now did all of it like a man performing a magic trick he has just learned uses no magic at all. The same gestures, the same pattern, the same flourish of the hands. Except that now he could see, every time, exactly where the coin was hidden, and found that seeing it changed nothing about where the audience’s eyes went. Including, most days, his own.

He had expected the knowledge to make the work unbearable. It did not, and it frightened him.

He’d imagined there was a line past which a person simply could not go on performing a thing he knew to be theatre. The line did not exist, or existed much further along than he’d assumed. He ate breakfast at the hour his kitchen expected. He nodded at strangers at the distance the pavement expected. On the ninth day he read Kavya Nair’s file once more and closed it again without a second override. He had learned, the first time, exactly what an override was for, and he did not have four hundred new characters that would change the answer.

On the eleventh day Renu asked him to lunch, which she had not done in perhaps two years. They sat across from each other at the canteen, under light calibrated to aid digestion, and he thought it was less an invitation than a diagnosis.

“You’ve stopped talking at your desk,” she said, without unkindness. “You used to complain about Vikram’s numbers. You haven’t complained about anything in...” She considered. “Eleven days, I think. I’ve been counting without meaning to.”

“I’ve been tired.”

“You’ve been somewhere else.” She said it as she said most things, as a fact rather than an accusation, and this too was a kind of mercy. Renu had chosen belief, and a woman who had chosen belief did not go looking for reasons to doubt a colleague. So if she’d noticed something in him despite that choice, the something had been large enough to notice even against her own comfort.

“I pulled some audit logs,” he said. He heard himself say it before he’d decided to. The words that matter most are often the ones a person discovers he was always going to say, given enough silence at a table. “Old ones. Nothing recent.”

Renu did not ask why. She looked at him for a long moment. She was weighing how much of a true thing could safely cross a canteen table where every surface, in principle, could hear them.

“My uncle was a Handler,” she said finally. “Before the Programme had a name for it. He used to say the review window was five minutes once, not seven seconds. That in the first years a Handler actually could change an outcome, because the model hadn’t yet accumulated enough data to be sure of itself, and needed the human judgement as an input, not a courtesy.”

She had never met that version of her uncle. By the time she was old enough to ask, he’d already spent a decade as the kind of Handler who did not ask back. What she knew of the younger man she had built herself, from the handful of stories he allowed himself once a year, usually after his second drink at Diwali. There was a wider desk than the Ministry issued now. There was a screen with more white space on it than screens had anymore, and five whole minutes blinking beside a file. And there was an actual clock, counting upward. The Ministry had since removed that kind of clock from every terminal in the Programme. A clock that counted up rather than down gave a Handler ideas about how much of it he had left to spend.

She turned her cup a quarter turn, an old habit, the kind a body keeps long after the reason is forgotten. “He said there was a year, he never told me which, when they shortened the window from five minutes to seven seconds, all at once, without telling anyone it had changed. Handlers kept believing they had five minutes. They just started using less of it.”

“Why would he tell you that.”

“Because I asked him once whether the button mattered, and he didn’t answer for a long time, and then he told me that story instead, which I’ve come to understand was his way of answering without technically confirming anything he wasn’t supposed to.” She looked at Samar with something that was not quite pity and not quite warning. “I’ve chosen not to pull the logs myself, Samar. Not because I don’t already know, the way you know a floor is cold before you put your foot down. Because there’s a version of this job I can do for another twenty years if I don’t put my foot down, and I’m not sure there’s a version I can do if I do.”

Samar said nothing. It was clearer to him than anything had been in eleven days. Renu was not warning him away from the logs. She was telling him, as plainly as the Ministry’s architecture allowed one person to tell another anything, that she had made her choice already. His was still, for a little while longer, his own to make.

That evening he did not go home at the scheduled hour. He walked toward the edge of the Grid, and let the walk take longer than it needed to. Some part of him wanted the Grid to have every remaining chance to talk him out of it.

The light along Lodhi Sector dimmed in its usual steps. Each streetlamp brightened a fraction as the sky lost a fraction. The two were so precisely matched that a person who had known nothing else might have believed they were one event, cause and effect impossible to tell apart. In fact it was one thing watching another very carefully and answering it. He passed the tea counter near his building. It was closing in the order it always closed: chairs, then the till, then the light above the till. Some machine had decided this sequence was the most efficient shape for an ending. He passed two children walking home from a tutoring block. Their satchels were identical, and they kept the recommended distance behind their guardian to within a few centimetres. He nodded, once, at a woman he had nodded at perhaps four hundred times and would never speak to, and she nodded back. The whole street performed itself around him with a competence so total that he had to remind himself to notice it was still happening. It was the way a person driving a very familiar road sometimes arrives with no memory of the last ten minutes of it.

He crossed the river on the old bridge a little before seven. The Grid’s paving was carried out over the water, as though the water were a matter somebody had long since settled. A little after seven he reached the checkpoint on the far bank. There the Grid’s paved perfection gave way, without ceremony, to a stretch of road the Pranaali’s maintenance schedules simply did not include. He stood a long time in the specific stillness of a man at the edge of water whose bottom he cannot see. He cannot make himself believe it is only a foot below the surface.

He had never been told the Grid’s boundary was a wall. It was not one. There was no barrier, no gate, nothing an onboarding document would ever call a restriction. Restriction implied that the Pranaali distrusted its citizens’ judgement, and the Pranaali did not deal in distrust, only prediction. It had long ago predicted, correctly, that a citizen raised inside a lifetime of curated comfort would need no wall to keep him off a road with potholes in it.

He thought of Kavya Nair’s file. She sings before she can read. I am asking you to feed a person, not a probability. A woman he had never seen had spoken it, about a child he had helped to un-feed with the press of a button that changed nothing. He thought of the beam atop Tower 9, which he had watched eleven nights ago without once looking away. He had been hoping for an absence the model had never, in his lifetime, produced.

He crossed the checkpoint at 7:40 in the evening. Logged, as everything was logged, and flagged to no one, because one crossing was not yet a pattern. The line it made went, with the night’s four thousand others, to a desk in Personnel Integrity, where a clerk named Hegde initialled the digest at 11:50 without opening it. Into a stretch of unmapped road already going dark in a way no street in the Lutyens Grid was ever permitted to go dark. And found that his legs, at least, needed no override to know what they were for.

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 6: Across the River