2084: An Algorithmic State — Act X: Discernment, Chapter 56: The Testimony

The charter keeps one door open. A Handler’s exit statement goes into the Archive whole, never summarised by a machine. After eleven years at the same desk, Samar Varma opens the exit statement field and starts to write.

In Brief: Exception Handler Samar Varma finds a clause in the charter that guarantees a resigning Handler’s statement will be kept whole. On a Tuesday morning at the Ministry, he writes one. Two desks away sits Renu, who has filed a disclosure of her own about the review system and is waiting for any answer.

He read the resignation clause twice and stopped himself before a third reading.

The second sentence had been sitting in the charter, unused, for as long as the Archive itself had existed. Some drafter, in some early year of the Programme, perhaps Dev himself, had written a single narrow guarantee into the founding law. No citizen’s own account of leaving would ever be reduced to a summary.

The way Kavya’s plea for her daughter had been reduced. The way the context of the corridor recording, eleven seconds in the Archive of a man asking that the queue at Gate Four be fed, had been reduced. The way nearly everything Samar had learned in three months of crossing a checkpoint had turned out, in the end, to have survived only in pieces.

Reading it, he had found the one door in the entire architecture.

He opened the resignation form on a Tuesday morning, minutes after his usual arrival, in the seat he had occupied for eleven years. He did not wait for Renu or Vikram or old Prakash, the two Handlers who had sat nearest him for most of those years, to notice. He opened the exit statement field and began, for the first time in his working life, to write something no seven-second window would ever measure the value of.

My name is Samar Varma. I have served as an Exception Handler, Grade III, for eleven years. For most of that time I believed my review of citizen files constituted meaningful human judgement. I have learned, in the last three months, that my confirmations were executed by the model before I ever read the files they concerned, and that the seven seconds I was given to consider each life were, in the plainest sense, theatre. Not malicious theatre, but theatre nonetheless, performed for an audience that included, most days, only myself.

The file I closed in my fourth week of this year concerned a woman named Kavya Nair and her daughter. The petition reached me as one machine-generated sentence: “She sings before she can read. I am asking you to feed a person, not a probability.” I do not know what she actually said. The original was not retained. I have since met the child. Her name is Ruhi. She is eight.

He stopped there for a long moment. Renu had noticed him now, and was watching from two desks away with an expression he could not read. He continued.

I want to record that Secretary Devakkant Sharma exercised a private discretion on my behalf, and later on behalf of a child I love, that saved us both from consequences the charter’s ordinary procedures would otherwise have applied. I do not believe this makes the Secretary corrupt. I believe it makes him the only functioning human exception left inside a government built to require none.

I am resigning because a reviewer who cannot change an outcome, and does not say so to the citizen in front of him, is not preserving anybody’s dignity. He is borrowing it, from a system that has already spent it.

I do not know what I will do next. I know that I intend to keep crossing into Sector 12-East, without a Ministry credential to protect me should the mercy I have been shown run out, because I have learned, these last three months, that the only decisions I have ever made that were entirely my own were the ones no terminal executed six seconds before I arrived at them.

S. Varma

He submitted the resignation and the statement together at 9:14 in the morning, and the system accepted them without comment. As the charter promised, the statement was filed whole and unsummarised.

Renu came to his desk before he had finished clearing it.

“I heard you’d resigned before I saw it,” she said. “Vikram, of all people. He was almost proud of you, I think, in his own way, though I doubt he’d call it that.”

“You knew before I told anyone. You’ve known since the canteen, I think. Since before I fully knew it myself.”

“I knew the shape of it was coming.” She glanced at the cleared surface of his desk, the small absence where his few belongings had sat that morning. Something in her face had the same crack he had watched open weeks before. It was wider now, no longer held in by the belief she had chosen thirteen years ago. “I haven’t heard anything back yet. About what I filed. No acknowledgment, no summons, nothing, which I’ve decided either means it’s been quietly buried, or means it’s become part of something considerably larger than one Handler’s disclosure, and I don’t know which possibility frightens me more.”

“Does anyone else know? That it was you.”

“Not from me.” She looked at him steadily. “I’m not resigning. Not yet. I don’t have...” She stopped, started again. “I don’t have wherever it is you’re going to. I don’t think I’ve earned it, the way you seem to have. But I wanted you to hear this from me directly, today, before you left, in case anyone ever asks either of us what we knew and when we knew it. I looked. I said so, formally, with my name on it. Whatever happens next, I’d rather you remember that I told you myself, and not a summary of it.”

Samar carried his few belongings out of the Ministry an hour later, past Vikram’s desk and Prakash’s. He walked out into a Grid he had spent eleven years believing had never required him to look away from anything. He walked toward a checkpoint he no longer needed a Handler’s credential to cross.

Nothing happened for six weeks.

Renu had prepared for several things and not for that. She had prepared for a summons. In a bad hour on the second night, she had prepared for a formal notice of separation. In a better hour, she had prepared for a request for her methodology. She had in fact put the methodology together in a document she could send within the hour if anyone asked.

Nobody asked.

She came in seven minutes early, and she read her files, and she pressed the buttons the files wanted pressed, and the chime sounded and she answered it and the chime sounded again.

Day 4. Nothing. Vikram asked if I’d been unwell. Said no.

Day 9. Nothing.

Day 15. Nothing. Realised today I have started checking the terminal before I take my coat off. Stopped doing it tomorrow.

Day 16. Did it again.

Her mother called on the Tuesdays and the Fridays. Renu talked to her about a cousin’s engagement for twenty minutes at a stretch and did not mention it.

This was harder than it had been. There was a version of her mother that could have been told. That version had raised her. Once, when Renu was fourteen, she had gone into a school and taken a headmaster apart for nine minutes, in a low voice she never once raised. But that version was somewhere behind the current one. The current one was sixty-eight and had a bad hip and two calls a week and a very clear idea of what her daughter’s life was. Renu had found that she could not put a thing this size into that call without redesigning the whole arrangement.

So she said the work was fine, and it was, and that she was tired, and she was. Both of those were true and neither of them was the sentence.

Day 22. Told Ma I was tired. True. Not the point. Every week I don’t say it, saying it later gets more expensive.

Her uncle asked outright on the fourth Thursday.

“Have they answered you.”

“No.”

“Good.”

“That is not the reaction I expected.”

“It is the reaction of a man who has watched this building for forty years.” A dry cough, a pause. “Fast is bad, Renu. Fast means somebody senior decided within a day that it was nothing, or that it was you. Slow means it went to somebody who did not know what to do with it, and who gave it to somebody else, and that is the only way a thing of that size ever gets anywhere.”

“Or it’s in a drawer.”

“Or it’s in a drawer,” he agreed. “I am not going to lie to you about the drawer.”

The waiting had a texture she had not anticipated, which was that it was boring.

She had expected fear, and there was some, in the particular hour between putting the ledger down and going to sleep. What there mostly was, though, was the ordinary shape of a Tuesday. She got up, she went in, she sat two desks from the desk Samar had emptied. She was one row from a man who had not noticed anything and three rows from a man who noticed nothing on principle.

She had made the largest decision of her working life, and for six weeks its consequence was that she had to keep having Tuesdays.

Day 29. It is not dramatic. Nobody tells you that. You do the thing and then you go on being a person who has to buy vegetables.

In the fifth week she took the file out again. It was her own copy, at home, on paper, because she had printed it, which was probably foolish. She read it looking for the flaw, and she found none. Instead she found three sentences she would now write differently, none of which changed anything. And she found one clause she had softened without noticing at the time, and which she would not soften now. She sat with that for an evening. It was the closest she came, in six weeks, to wishing she had not done it, and not because she doubted the finding. She could see, plainly, on paper, in her own careful phrasing, a woman who had been trying to make a true thing survivable.

Day 33. I hedged in paragraph two. Not the facts. The tone. I wanted whoever read it to like me while they read it. I would take that back.

She started walking home the long way in the sixth week, past the Archive, which she had never entered. She did not go in. She had it in her head that going in would be a kind of statement. In the sixth week of a silence, she was not in a position to make statements. But she stopped outside it twice and looked at the windows. They opened, and she had never noticed that they opened, and Samar had mentioned it once at a canteen table in a way she had not thought about since.

On the second occasion an elderly man came out with headphones round his neck and held the door. Renu said, “No, thank you,” and he said, “Right you are,” and went off up the street. She stood there a moment longer and then went home. She wrote a line and made her tea in the wrong order, tea first, entry after, for the first time in thirteen years. She noticed she had done it, and did not go back and fix it.

Day 41. Poured before I wrote. Didn’t notice till after. Leaving it.

The answer, when it came, did not come in the sixth week. It came in the seventh, from a Director whose name Renu did not recognise. It was a message of four lines that requested a meeting through the ordinary channel, in the ordinary language, at a time convenient to the Handler.

Renu read it standing at her desk with her coat still on. Then she took her coat off and hung it up and sat down and opened her first file of the morning, because the chime had sounded while she was reading. And there was a citizen somewhere waiting to learn what she had decided about their life.

About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time. Previous: Chapter 55: Rao’s Answer Next: Chapter 57: Four Thousand