2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XI: Answerability, Chapter 58: Personal Accountability

The morning brief arrives at 7:15 and runs to four thousand one hundred and six lines. Dev Sharma wrote the rule that it must list every one. He is seventy-one, and he means to read them all.

In Brief: Dev Sharma, the Secretary, has suspended the confidence thresholds across fourteen sectors for thirty days. Under a rule he wrote himself, every determination made during the suspension reaches him in a daily brief, line by line, with no summary. He sets out to read it.

The first brief under the suspension arrived at 7:15 and ran to four thousand one hundred and six lines.

Dev had not thought about this. That was the plain fact of it, and he made himself sit with it for a moment before he did anything else. He had spent three sleepless nights on the architecture, one long evening on the clause and eleven minutes on the act itself. At no point in any of it had he asked what the brief would look like on the morning after.

Without aggregation. He had written that too, twenty years ago, in an implementation note nobody had ever had cause to implement. Now he read the first twenty lines with his tea going cold beside him.

Sector 11-North. Household of four. Medical allocation, continuation, paediatric. Previously: threshold-deferred. Determination: approved. Sector 9. Individual, 66. Mobility allocation, renewal. Previously: threshold-deferred pending confidence recovery. Determination: approved. Sector 12-East. Household of one. Water pressure restoration, unlicensed draw historic. Determination: approved.

Three names he did not have. The brief did not carry names, because he had specified in 2064 that it should not. His grounds were that a Secretary who knew names would eventually start recognising them. He read to line four hundred before he stopped to consider that he had been at it fifty minutes and had covered a tenth of a morning.

By the second day he had a method.

He read the first hundred properly, and then he read the category headers and sampled within them. He took every eleventh line. That was arbitrary, and he knew it was arbitrary. He defended it to himself on the grounds that a systematic sample was more honest than reading whatever caught his eye.

It took ninety minutes and it covered, properly, perhaps four hundred of four thousand, and he put the rest into the afternoon and did not get to the rest.

On the fourth day a member of his own staff asked whether the Secretary would like the brief summarised. This was Bhatia, who had been with the office nine years and had never in nine years volunteered an opinion.

Dev said no.

Bhatia said, “Sir, it’s fourteen sectors.”

“I know what it is.”

“You’d have it in a page.”

“I know I would,” Dev said. “That is the difficulty.”

Bhatia went away, and came back four hours later with a page anyway, unasked. It was the first insubordinate act of his career. Dev read the page in ninety seconds and found it excellent: clear, honest, correctly weighted. A competent man had turned four thousand determinations into nine bullet points. He had not been told to and had not been paid to. He had done it because his Secretary was seventy-one and had not slept.

He thanked Bhatia, and he kept the page.

Then he went back to line four hundred and one.

He did not sleep properly during the thirty days. Around the eighth, he stopped pretending that this was going to change. The pattern settled into something he could have described from outside as pathological, and could not, from inside, find a way to stop. Brief at 7:15. First hundred properly. Sample to about twelve hundred. Office from ten. Back to the brief at four, and on until the light went. The rear gate at some hour, and the dog who had leaned against his leg there every dawn for nine years. Four hours of something next to sleep. The brief.

He lost four kilos in the month, and his physician noted it. His physician had noted a great many things over twenty years, and had long ago stopped expecting any of them to lead to anything.

The thing he had not expected, the thing that took him entirely by surprise in the second week, was that the determinations were good.

Not good in the sense of merciful, but good in the sense of correct. They were line after line of allocations that should have been made months ago and had not been. A confidence figure with no traceable cause had put a fractional weight against each of them. The fractional weights had accumulated, and the accumulation had a shape. The shape was fourteen sectors of people who had been very slightly, invisibly, unaccountably held back.

He had suspended the threshold expecting to have to defend a small number of bad outcomes. What he was actually reading was a month of a city working properly. Every line of it was, by the terms of his own signature, his.

He found this much harder to carry than the alternative would have been. A bad determination would have been a thing he could answer for. But there were four thousand good ones a day, none of which he had made and all of which were his. He had no vocabulary for that at all. It was closer to the feeling of being thanked for weather.

On the eleventh day he found the line.

Sector 14. Individual, 81. Dialysis scheduling, restoration of prior interval. Previously: adjusted to extended interval pending confidence recovery. Determination: restored.

He read it twice, and then a third time, which he had not needed to do with any line in eleven days. It was not the man from Sector 9, he checked, the sixty-six-year-old whose mobility allocation had been renewed on the first morning. This was another man, eighty-one, in a different sector, on a different kind of machine. This man’s treatment interval had been quietly stretched at some point in the season before, by an amount too small for anybody to have signed.

He had never known, and there was no reason he should have known. It had not been a decision but a fraction of a decision, distributed across an architecture, and it had reached an old man’s arm three times a week.

Dev put the brief down. Somewhere in fourteen sectors there were four thousand more of these a day, and he was reading four hundred. Both of those numbers were now, by his own hand, personally his.

By the eighteenth day he was skimming.

He noticed it happen. That was the worst part, and he made himself write it down, in a document that existed on no register. He had decided some years ago that the things he could not tell anyone should at least be told to a piece of paper.

I read the first fifty lines this morning with attention and the next hundred and fifty with something else, and I could not tell you what four of them said. My eye moved. My hand did the scrolling. I have built a career on the observation that a man given seven seconds will use them to perform reading, and I find that I have given myself ninety minutes and am doing the same thing with more of it.

The difference between me and the Handler is that nobody executed my determination six seconds before I arrived at it. There is no gap, and the gap is the entire point of what I did, and everything in these four thousand lines waited for me. And I skimmed it.

He read that back the next morning and did not change it.

At midnight the following night the suspension lapsed. The thresholds came back up, automatically, without ceremony, exactly as he had drafted them to, and the brief the next morning was forty-one lines long.

He read it in four minutes.

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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