2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XI: Answerability, Chapter 57: Four Thousand

On the back of a Bureau envelope, Samar Varma adds up eleven years of confirmations. The number is not four thousand. Then he opens one file at random, and choosing it takes nineteen minutes.

In Brief: Two weeks after he resigns, former Handler Samar Varma works out how many determinations he confirmed in eleven years. The closed record is open to any citizen who asks. He requests one file, a woman in Sector 12-East, and reads all of it. Then he requests another.

He worked it out on the second night after he stopped being a Handler, at the kitchen table, on the back of a Bureau envelope. Because there was no reason to and nothing else to do with his hands.

Eleven years. Two hundred and twenty working days a year, give or take the strike years. Call it eighty a week at the pace they wanted and a hundred at the pace he had actually kept for the first eight.

The number he got was not four thousand. It was some tens of thousands, and he sat back from it and understood that four thousand was the figure for one year, the year he had been thinking of. It was the year Kavya’s file had crossed his desk.

He had said four thousand to himself all year the way a man says a number he can survive.

He could search the closed record. That was the thing.

Samar Varma, eleven years a Handler, was two weeks out of the service and his credentials were revoked. But the closed record was open to any citizen on request, and had been since 2064. Dev Sharma had insisted on it against advice in his first year as Secretary. He had never been able to explain to anyone, including himself, why it had mattered so much to him that it should be.

Anyone could look. Almost nobody did.

He requested one file.

He picked it at random, and that took him nineteen minutes. There is no such thing as picking at random when you know what the fields mean. He had to keep discarding the ones his eye had chosen for a reason.

A woman. Sector 12-East, which he had not intended and did not like. Reallocation, tier three to tier four, water and cooking fuel, confidence 96.2. Closed on a Thursday in his fourth year, at a time of day that the record gave as 15:41:06.

He had confirmed it. His identifier was on it.

He read the whole file, which took him fifty minutes, and there was nothing wrong with it. Nothing at all. Every figure in it was correct, and the determination followed from the figures. The tier change was within band, and a person had looked at it, and the person had been him.

At the end of the fifty minutes he knew her name and her building, and that she had two sons. She had died in 2081, five years later, of something the record described in the flat clinical language every record used.

He did not know whether the tier change had done anything to her at all.

He requested a second file the following week and got the same thing.

A man this time, in 4-West, fifty-eight. Cooking fuel, tier two to tier three, confidence 93.8, closed on a Monday in his seventh year at 11:02:17. His identifier was on it. Every figure was correct. One thing was different. The man was alive. The record gave a new building, two streets from the old one, and the year he had moved, 2083. It did not say why. Samar read it twice for the sentence that would join the tier change to the move. There was no such sentence.

He kept going.

About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time. Previous: Chapter 56: The Testimony Next: Chapter 58: Personal Accountability