2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XI: Answerability, Chapter 61: The Corridor

At twenty past six, by the fourth-floor lifts, a junior panel member stops the Secretary with a question he does not have to answer. She wants to know whether anyone knew, and built it that way anyway.

In Brief: Meera Krishnan has been on the technical panel for eleven weeks. The panel is investigating the cascade and the man who built the system, Dev Sharma. She waits for him outside the lifts with one question. Under the Manual, an answer given in a corridor carries no weight.

She caught him in the corridor outside the fourth-floor lifts because that was where he would be at twenty past six. She had established this over three weeks. She did it in the manner of a person who has decided to do something and is putting off the deciding by preparing for it very thoroughly.

Meera Krishnan was thirty-one and four years in, and had been on the technical panel for eleven weeks. That was long enough to have read the whole of the reconstructed baseline and to have understood that the panel would fail. It was not long enough to have worked out whether saying so was her job.

“Secretary.”

Dev stopped. He had a folder under one arm, and his shoulders had the particular set of a man at the end of the eleventh hour of a day. He looked at her for perhaps two seconds before the name arrived. She noted this and did not resent it, because there were four thousand people in the building and she had spoken to him twice.

“Krishnan. Technical panel.”

“Yes.”

“Sundaram’s.”

“Yes.” She had prepared four openings and used none of them. “I want to ask you something you don’t have to answer. I want to say that first, so that when you don’t answer it there’s no... so that it isn’t a thing that happened.”

Something in his face moved and settled.

“Ask.”

“When the confidence in a sector drops and the cause comes back unidentified,” Meera said, “the model isn’t failing. It’s reporting correctly. It can see the number move. It just has nowhere to send the question.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a defect that got in. That’s the shape of the thing.” She had her hands at her sides and made herself leave them there. “So my question is whether anyone knew. Not whether anyone should have known. Whether anyone, at the time, actually knew, and built it that way anyway, and decided that was acceptable.”

The corridor had the particular emptiness of a floor at twenty past six, and somewhere behind them a lift arrived and opened and closed again with nobody in it.

“Yes,” Dev said. “Somebody knew.”

“Who?”

“A structural engineer named Vaidehi Rangan. In 2061. She wrote it down.” He shifted the folder. “She wrote it as a requirement, and the requirement was that the Programme should at all times have somewhere the question could be sent. And it was removed from scope, because it could not be tested, and the officer who approved the removal was me, and I have no memory of doing it.”

Meera did not say anything.

“I found it three days before I signed the exception,” he said. “I had gone looking for something else.”

She thought about it walking home, and for a long time afterward, and what she came back to was not the answer.

It was that he had given it.

He had been under no obligation. Section 9, Subsection 2 was clear. Every officer in the building knew it in the way people know the rules that protect them. An answer given in a corridor carried no weight and created no obligation. Both parties could deny it afterward without either of them having lied. He could have said that is a matter for the panel. He could have said ask Sundaram. He could have said nothing at all and walked to the lift, and she would have understood perfectly and would never have raised it again.

He had answered a question from a junior member of a body investigating him, in an empty corridor, with no witness. It was three weeks before that body’s findings went to the committee deciding his future.

And in doing it he had handed her something she now had to carry.

Because she could not un-know it. She could put it in the panel’s report. There it would become evidence against him, and he had personally supplied it to the person compiling it. She could leave it out. Then she was a panel member concealing material she had obtained about the thing the panel existed to establish. She could take it to Sundaram and make it his problem. That was the professionally correct move. The moment she thought of it, she recognised it as the one that would let her stop being the person holding this.

There was no version in which she was not now responsible for something.

She understood, somewhere near her own street, that this was not an accident of his and not a burden he had failed to consider before speaking. He had spent twenty-six years at the top of an architecture in which nobody could be asked. And he had been asked, in a corridor, by somebody with no standing to ask, and he had answered. The answering had transferred a weight from him to her, exactly and irreversibly. It moved the way weight moves between two people, and never between a person and a form.

She put it in the report.

She told him first. It was a note, four lines, sent at eleven the same night. He was under no obligation to acknowledge it, and he acknowledged it within the hour with a single word.

Correct.

The material appears at Annexe C, page two hundred and eleven, in the section on architectural provenance. It sat there unread for seven years, alongside everything else the panel established and could not narrow.

Sundaram, who did read it, asked her once whether she had considered the position it put her in.

“Yes,” Meera said. “I considered it for about four hours.”

“And?”

“And I decided I would rather be a person who is in a position.” She said it lightly, because the corridor was not empty and she had learned that much in four years. “You either are or you aren’t. Everything else is a form.”

About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time.

Previous: Chapter 60: Meera Krishnan

Next: Chapter 62: Rao, Sunday