2084: An Algorithmic State — Act X: Discernment, Chapter 52: Forty-One Kitchens

A grain notice reaches 4,200 households with the words dependency patterns requiring monitoring. Forty-one of them read the whole thing. Ganga Devi Yadav reads it twice and puts it in the stove.

In Brief: A grain distribution notice goes out to 4,200 households in the southern quarter, and most people ignore it. In 6-South, a mother named Ganga Devi Yadav, a former clerk named Yusuf Ali Ansari and a retired nurse named Rukmini Pillai each stop at one phrase. Each of them must decide whether to file the weekly consumption log.

The grain notice went out on a Monday and said, among other things, dependency patterns requiring monitoring.

Nobody had written that phrase to be cruel. A subsystem had assembled it from a template, out of a set of approved administrative formulations. One of those had entered the corpus in 2069 from a public health document about something else entirely. This was established later, by a person whose job it was to establish such things, and who told nobody because nobody asked.

It went to four thousand two hundred households in the southern quarter.

Most of them did not read past the first line. Fatima, who kept the chai stall in the lane, did not. She had a policy about notices that changed nothing, and it had served her well for years.

Forty-one of them read the whole thing.

Ganga Devi Yadav, 6-South, Monday, about nine in the morning.

She read it standing up, at the shelf where she kept the notices. She read dependency patterns requiring monitoring twice, and what she thought was not political and had nothing to do with the Programme.

What she thought was: my son will see this.

He was twenty-six and lived with her and had not found licensed work in two years. In the last few months he had begun to leave the flat at hours that suggested he did not want to be watched leaving it. The notice was going to be on the shelf. He was going to come in, and he was going to read the word dependency on a piece of paper the government had sent his mother.

She put it in the stove.

Then she stood there for a while and thought about the consumption log, which was due Friday. It was four questions and took her under a minute, and she had filed it every week for nine years.

She did not file it that week. She could not have told you why in a way that would have satisfied anybody. It was not a protest, and she would have been embarrassed to have it called one. It was closer to the feeling of not answering a door.

Yusuf Ali Ansari, 6-South, Monday, about two in the afternoon.

He read it in the shop with the door open. He read it the way he read everything, which was carefully. He had been a clerk for thirty-one years before the department dissolved, and he had never lost the habit of reading a document for what it was actually admitting.

Dependency patterns requiring monitoring.

He turned it over. He looked at the back, which was blank. He looked at the reference number and the section citation, which was Section 8, Subsection 5. Then he did something almost nobody in the sector had the training or the interest to do. He looked up Section 8, Subsection 5.

It was about the gradual implementation of allocation adjustments, over a period sufficient to avoid triggering acute-distress sentiment indicators.

He read that twice as well.

Then he sat behind his counter for some time and thought about a phrase, sufficient to avoid triggering. Somebody had worked out how slowly you have to take a thing from a person for the person not to make a noise about it. Somebody had written it down, and put a number on it. And the number was in a public document he had just read on a Monday afternoon in a shop.

He filed nothing that Friday. He filed nothing the Friday after that either. Then he went back to filing, because his wife asked him to. He could not explain it well enough to her, and he was sixty-three and did not want a difficulty.

Rukmini Pillai, 6-South, Monday evening.

She did not read the notice at all. Her daughter read it out to her over the phone as a joke, in the middle of a conversation about something else. Listen to what they’ve sent you, Amma, dependency patterns. And she laughed.

Rukmini did not laugh.

She had been a nurse for forty years. For twenty of those forty she had been the person who wrote the words on the notes at the end of a bed. She knew exactly what a phrase like that was for and exactly which register it belonged to. She had spent a large part of her working life fighting a version of it.

“Don’t file the log,” she said.

“What?”

“This week. Don’t file it. Tell your brother.”

Her daughter was thirty-eight and did not agree, and she filed hers on Friday as usual. She told her brother anyway, because that was the arrangement in that family. Her brother, who was in a different sector, did not file his.

There were thirty-eight others, for thirty-eight reasons.

Nobody discussed it with anybody except Rukmini Pillai, who discussed it with two people, one of whom disagreed.

There was no meeting. There was no plan. There was not, in any of the forty-one kitchens, a single person who believed they were doing something that would show up anywhere.

Nine days later the confidence figure for the southern quarter dropped for a week. One of Bilal’s people went looking for a reason he could take credit for at a meeting. He found forty-one households, and could not make them into anything.

He told the room upstairs. The room upstairs argued about it for an evening and reached no conclusion, because there was no conclusion available. Forty-one people had done a thing in the same week for forty-one reasons. The only thing the reasons had in common was that somebody in a room in 2069 had written a phrase for a document about something else.

Kavya told it to Samar in a courtyard, months later.

She got the number right and everything else approximately, which was the only way anybody could have.

Ganga Devi Yadav filed her log the following Friday and every Friday after. Her son found licensed work in the autumn. She has never thought about that Monday again.

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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