2084: An Algorithmic State — Act II: Taste, Chapter 6: Across the River

Eleven years of level paving taught Samar Varma’s legs one gait. Three steps past the checkpoint the ground stops being level, and a woman selling guavas tells him to leave his face somewhere else.

In Brief: Samar Varma, a Ministry Handler from the Grid, crosses the checkpoint into the unmapped side of the river for the first time. He is looking for Kavya Nair, an artist whose file he approved. The market is loud, uneven and unwatched, and his Ministry voice and clothes frighten the people he asks.

Three steps past the checkpoint, the ground stopped being level.

That was the first thing Samar noticed, and his body did not know what to do with it.

Eleven years of level paving had taught his legs a gait he’d never thought of as a skill. It was the way a person raised entirely on flat land does not think of walking as a skill, until the land stops being flat. He stumbled twice in the first fifty metres, catching himself against nothing, and laughed once at his own stumbling. The laugh startled him. He could not remember the last time he had laughed at something that was only for himself, with no citizen sentiment feed anywhere in range to register it.

The second thing was the smell. It arrived in no order at all, which the Grid’s air had never done. That air was filtered and dated and delivered in a curve as gentle as its light. Frying oil first, the specific sweetness of something dropped in hot ghee that he would learn later to call jalebi. Under it was something charred, and under that something green and wet. After a moment he placed it as vegetation nobody had scheduled the growth of. Smoke from somewhere. A drain, briefly, gone as fast as it came. This was simply smell, arriving all at once, the way he imagined weather must once have arrived on people, before anyone predicted it.

The third thing was the sound, and the sound nearly turned him back.

It was not loud, exactly, though it was louder than anywhere he’d stood in eleven years. But it was layered. His mind had been trained on a decade of curated single-channel input. For a moment it could hear this only as noise in the bad sense, an assault, a failure of design. A radio played something with a rhythm he didn’t recognise, against another radio playing something else. Against that, two men argued over the price of something he couldn’t see, a child cried, and there was what turned out to be laughter, several kinds at once. Under all of it, arriving and receding on no schedule he could detect, came the bell of a temple he never located. Once, so faint he decided afterward he might have invented it, came the long call of an azaan from a direction the alleys bent too sharply for him to trace. None of it was calibrated to lower anyone’s blood pressure. None of it, so far as he could tell, served any purpose beyond the fact of its own occurring.

He made himself keep walking rather than stand at the edge of it. Once he was inside the market rather than facing it, it became less like an assault and more like a hundred small decisions. He had no part in them and no authority over them, and each was made by someone not thinking about him at all.

A man had chalked a board with prices that changed, visibly, while Samar read them. They were crossed through and rewritten lower, as if someone had won an argument Samar had arrived too late to witness. A girl of perhaps six sat on an upturned crate outside a shuttered shopfront, singing to herself in a language he didn’t recognise. She was entirely unconcerned with whether anyone listened. Two women passing stopped just long enough to correct one of her notes, gently, without breaking their own conversation, and then moved on. A whole transaction of teaching and being taught had taken perhaps four seconds and needed, so far as he could tell, no one’s permission. Outside a doorway strung with marigolds gone brown at the edges, someone had propped a framed image against the step, with a small brass lamp burning before it. An old woman was refilling the lamp’s oil with the unhurried attention of a gesture that had never, in two hundred repetitions, become merely a habit.

He passed a tea stall on a corner where the lane widened, still lit. A woman he didn’t yet have a name for was totalling something in a tin by the light of a bulb strung from a nail. Further on, from a doorway he didn’t stop at, came the careful repeating climb of scales on an instrument. He wouldn’t be able to name it for another three days, when he heard it again in daylight and finally asked.

Somewhere behind him a man’s voice rose above the rest for a moment: “Tell Bilal the grain count’s wrong again, tell him before Thursday.” It was directed at no one Samar could see, and answered by someone he couldn’t see either. Then it was gone, absorbed back into the layered noise before he could turn. He did not know the name. He filed it anyway. He did not yet understand that the filing was itself a habit the Ministry had built into him and not yet unbuilt.

A boy of perhaps ten ran past carrying a stack of flatbread wrapped in torn newspaper. He moved through the crowd with a fluency that was, Samar saw, a kind of expertise he entirely lacked. It was a whole grammar of navigation, built from a childhood the Grid had never required of anyone. The boy did not look at him. No one looked at him, particularly, and that was its own disorientation. For eleven years he had lived in a place where every pedestrian nodded, once, at the distance long calculation had judged correct. Here he was simply another body in a lane full of bodies, unpredicted and unpredictable to anyone but himself. He had expected to miss the safety. What he felt instead was closer to weightlessness, the specific vertigo of a man discovering that the ground he’d stood on had never actually been watching him.

He asked for Kavya Nair three times before anyone answered him honestly.

The first two times, an old instinct in his own voice made the people he asked go quiet. It was Ministry cadence, the flat clarity trained into every Handler so that citizens would understand, without ambiguity, exactly what was being asked of them. He recognised the quiet, too late, as fear. Only when he saw himself in a shopfront’s dark glass did he realise he was dressed in Ministry-issue clothing. Inside the Grid it was unremarkable. Out here it was entirely legible as official, and two separate strangers simply turned and walked into the crowd rather than answer a man who spoke like an intake form.

The third time he asked more quietly. He asked a woman selling guavas, and something small and green he didn’t recognise, from a cart lit by a single unlicensed bulb. He phrased it as he imagined a person might, clumsily, he knew, and not the way a file was phrased.

“I’m looking for someone. Kavya. She makes...” He reached for the word the file had used, then abandoned it. “Art. People know her here, I think.”

The woman looked at him a long moment, weighing something he could not name. Then she tilted her head toward a lane running off at an angle. Its mouth between two buildings was so narrow that he would not have known it for a lane. “Interactive Kavya,” she said, in a tone that made it less a name than a category. “End of that lane. If she’s not there, someone there will know where she’s gone. Everyone always knows where Kavya’s gone.” She looked at him a moment longer. “You’re from the Grid.”

It was not a question, so Samar did not answer it as one.

“You’ll want to leave your face somewhere else before you get to her,” the woman said, gently, already turning back to her fruit. “Grid faces make people nervous down that lane. Not because of you. Because of what usually comes wearing one.”

He did not go down the lane that night. He could not have said which frightened him more: being recognised, or being looked at by the one person in the city with a right to recognise him. He stood at its mouth a long time, in the same stillness he’d stood in an hour before. That had been on the other side of the checkpoint, at the edge of water whose bottom he could not see. But the water, it turned out, had another edge waiting just past the first. Whatever he’d expected the crossing to do, it had not allowed for this. A body could cross a border and still, in every way that mattered, remain standing at the edge of it.

Above the rooftops, at a distance that surprised him, he could still see the crown of Tower 9. It was dark now, its beam some hours from due. It looked smaller than it ever had from his own window. The tower had not changed. But for the first time in his life, everything around it had not been built to make it the tallest thing a person’s eye could find.

He turned, finally, and walked back toward the checkpoint, telling himself he would return in daylight, when a Grid face might draw fewer eyes.

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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