2084: An Algorithmic State — Act X: Discernment, Chapter 53: The Fifth Module

In 2061 a young engineer gave the Pranaali’s modules four Sanskrit names. Twenty-three years later Dev Sharma finds a fifth, struck through, and the initials of the officer who removed it are D.S.

In Brief: Late at night, three days before he signs a Ministerial exception, Secretary Dev Sharma opens the wrong document. It is the 2061 subsystem manifest, written by a structural engineer named Vaidehi Rangan, which gave the Pranaali’s modules their names. Below the four names is a fifth entry with an annotation beside it.

The subsystem manifest had been written in 2061 by a structural engineer named Vaidehi Rangan, who was thirty-four that year. She had been given the naming because naming was the sort of task a committee hands to whoever is least likely to make a fuss about it. She had made, in the event, a great deal of fuss, though not about the part anybody at the time thought worth arguing over.

She had written the Programme’s own name at the head of the sheet in the script it came from, प्रणाली. The word was praṇālī: a channel, a conduit, the thing a current is carried along. Somebody in the transcription office had rendered it Pranaali for the English register. That was the form that survived into every document the Ministry produced for the next twenty-three years.

She had named four modules.

RATHA, the allocation substrate. This was the physical and administrative body of the thing, the plant and the pipes and the ration registers, everything that moved and everything that could be moved. INDRIYA, sensor aggregation: the towers, the meters, the counters at every intake, the whole apparatus by which the Programme took in the world. RAŚMI, the reviewer interface, the layer through which a human being’s hand touched the machine and the machine felt the touch. And SĀRATHI, the determination layer, which decided.

Nobody objected. The names went into the manifest in the flat sans-serif of a specification nobody expected anyone to read again. They were adopted. Within a decade they were forgotten by the engineers who maintained the modules, who had never been told the words meant anything. By 2084 there were four hundred people in the Ministry who worked on SĀRATHI every day and perhaps two who could have told you it was a word.

Dev found the manifest at eleven at night, three days before he signed the exception. He had gone looking for something else entirely, the original threshold specification, which he wanted for a reason he could not later reconstruct. He had opened the wrong document, and had not closed it.

He read the four names.

He had not thought about them in twenty-three years. Reading them, he found he could not immediately remember whether he had ever known what they were. Perhaps he had simply signed a document containing them, the way a man signs the eleventh document of an afternoon.

Then he scrolled down, because there was more. The manifest had a fifth entry, struck through, with an annotation beside it.

ĀTMAN.

Not a module. Rangan had been careful about that, and the care survived, twenty-three years later, in the two lines she had been permitted before the annotation cut her off.

ĀTMAN is not proposed as a subsystem. It is proposed as a requirement upon the whole: that the Programme shall at all times possess a locus of answerability which is not itself a computation, and that no determination shall be held valid which cannot be traced to that locus.

Beneath it, in the standard type of the standard form, was the standard sentence.

Requirement ĀTMAN is not testable and therefore cannot be accepted. Recommend removal from scope pending a specification.

And beneath that were the initials of the officer who had approved the removal. They were in the short form the Programme had used in its first years, before anyone thought to require full names.

D.S.

He sat with it for a long time.

First, and with some force, he wanted to remember the meeting. He could not. He could remember the room, or a room, in the building they had used before the Secretariat was finished. It had bad ventilation and a window that had to be propped open with a folded requisition form. He could remember that Rangan had been thin and had spoken quickly and had annoyed a man called Bhatt, who was dead now. He could not remember one word that had been said about the fifth entry. He could not remember whether it had been discussed at all. Perhaps it had come to him in a stack of nine descopings on a Thursday, and he had initialled the stack.

Second, he wanted to establish that he had been wrong. He found that he could not do that either, which was worse.

Because the sentence was correct. It remained correct. A requirement that cannot be tested cannot be accepted, and Rangan’s requirement could not be tested, not in 2061 and not now. No procedure existed by which an engineer could stand in front of a running system and show that it possessed a locus of answerability which was not itself a computation. And no procedure could show that it did not. The requirement was unfalsifiable. Every engineering standard in the world would have removed it. He would remove it again tonight, at seventy-one, with everything he now knew, if the only question he were allowed to ask was whether it could be tested.

That was the trap, and he sat inside it for most of an hour before he could name it. They had built a system that could only accept what could be verified. Then they had used that system to decide what the system should contain. And the one requirement it could not verify was the requirement that there be somebody in it.

He looked up Rangan, the engineer who had named the four modules and tried to name a fifth.

She had left the Programme in 2064, three years after, and had gone to a structural firm in Pune. She had worked there for eighteen years on bridges, which was, Dev thought, either the least or the most surprising thing she could have done. She had died in 2082 at fifty-five of something ordinary. There was no interview. There was no memoir. So far as the record showed, she had written nothing further about the Programme at any point in the remaining twenty-one years of her life.

There was one thing.

It was a single entry in the Archive’s uncatalogued correspondence, from 2064, her resignation letter. The letter was four lines long. It had been filed without machine summarisation, because in 2064 nothing was summarised yet.

I am leaving because I cannot get the fifth requirement written in a form the standard will accept, and I have come to think that this is a fact about the standard and not about the requirement. I do not say this as a complaint. I say it because someone should have written it down somewhere, and I find that nobody has, and that I am the person here.I wish the Programme well. It will do a great deal of good. V. Rangan

Dev read it three times.

Then he opened the drawer where he kept the things that had no file. He did not put the letter there, because it was not his to put anywhere. He closed the manifest, and did not close the resignation. He sat in an office on the top floor of a building he had spent twenty-six years filling. The amber map was on one screen, and four Sanskrit words and a struck-through fifth were on the other. He understood, all at once and for good, that he had built a chariot of extraordinary quality, and on a Thursday, in a stack of nine, had descoped the passenger.

Three days later he signed the exception.

He did not mention Rangan to the committee, then or at the hearing, and he was never able to explain to himself with any confidence why not. Turning it over in the years afterward, the most honest account he could give was this. A man who produces at his own hearing a document proving he removed the requirement of answerability from the architecture is not making a confession. He is making a defence out of a confession, which is a different and smaller act. And he had spent a year listening to Meghna Rao build her case with scrupulous care. That care deserved better than to be answered with a piece of paper she had not found.

He did do one thing.

The following morning, before the brief, he had the manifest entry restored to the active record. Not the requirement, which could not be restored because it had never been written in a form anything could hold. He restored the entry: the struck-through line and the annotation and the initials. They were moved out of the archived specification and into the current one. There every engineer joining the Programme would see it in their first week, and would not be told what it meant.

The change generated a notification. Four hundred and eleven people received it. Nobody replied.

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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