2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XII: Grief, Chapter 63: The Wait

The queue outside the 12-East clinic is eighty people. On the clerk’s screen it is two hundred and six. Samar Varma has one escalation to give, and two people who need it.

In Brief: Samar Varma, who still carries his Grade III Handler credentials weeks after resigning, goes to a district clinic in 12-East to renew Kavya’s daughter Ruhi’s inhaler script. A woman in the queue sits down on the ground, struggling to breathe. The rules allow him one priority request a day, and the clerk’s screen shows two citizens who need it.

The district clinic in 12-East kept its queue outside because the room could not hold it.

Samar came because Ruhi’s inhaler script had lapsed and Kavya, her mother, was at the Bureau all day and it was a thing he could do. He had never been to this clinic. He had allocated to it perhaps three hundred times.

The queue was eighty people at nine in the morning. It moved.

He was forty minutes in when the woman four places ahead of him sat down on the ground.

Nobody made anything of it. People sat. The man beside her moved his bag to give her the shade. She was perhaps sixty, in a green cotton sari gone soft at the shoulder. She sat with her back against the wall and her knees up, and her breathing was doing a thing Samar recognised from Ruhi and from four hundred files. Her shoulders were doing the work her chest should have been doing.

Ten minutes later a younger woman in the same queue, no relation, went down on one knee beside her. She said something and got an answer, and then she stood up and went to the front.

The clerk at the front said the thing clerks say.

Samar had his credentials in his jacket. He had not brought them on purpose. He had not taken them out of the jacket in weeks.

He went to the front.

The clerk was twenty-three. She had been at the desk since six, and she did not resent him, which was worse. She turned her screen. She showed him the queue as the system held it, and it was not eighty people but two hundred and six. The ones inside and the ones on the district’s remote list were the same queue, and only the clinic’s wall made them look like two.

“Priority escalation,” Samar said. “Grade III, Exception Handler. I can push one.”

“You can request one.”

“How long.”

“Eleven minutes, if nothing’s ahead of it. There’s usually nothing ahead of it.”

She said it kindly. By every measure the Ministry kept, eleven minutes was an extraordinary number. Twenty years ago it had been four hours. There were people in this building who had worked their entire careers to make it eleven minutes, and they had earned every award the service gave.

“One,” Samar said.

“One request per officer per twenty-four hours. It’s the sixth of the month.” She was already pulling the form. “Which citizen.”

And there it was.

There were two.

One was the woman in green against the wall. The other was a man in the third row of the inside benches, whom Samar had walked past twice without seeing. He was sixty-eight and alone. His file was open on the clerk’s screen because she had been looking at it when Samar arrived. The room’s own sensor array had flagged him twenty minutes earlier for a cardiac presentation, and the model had rated it at a confidence Samar could read upside down.

The clerk did not tell him what to do. She had no authority to, and she knew the rule as well as he did. Where modelled benefit was equivalent, you took the earlier submission. The man in the third row had submitted at 07:14. The woman in green had not submitted at all, because she had come to renew a prescription and had joined a queue.

Samar looked at the two files for four seconds.

He had spent three months learning to take longer than seven seconds, and it had all been practice for a screen.

“The woman outside,” he said. “Green sari. Against the wall.”

“She’s not in the system.”

“Then put her in it.”

“That’s an intake. That’s not an escalation.” The clerk’s hands had stopped. “Sir, I can do an intake. It’s four minutes. Then the escalation is eleven. Fifteen. Or I can escalate the third row now at eleven, because he’s already in.”

Fifteen and eleven.

“Do the intake,” Samar said.

The intake took four minutes and ten seconds. The woman outside could not answer three of the fields. The man beside her answered two of them wrong and had to be corrected. And a name spelled two ways generates a duplicate check.

The escalation cleared at eleven minutes and forty seconds. The clerk apologised for it, and it was faster than the median.

The woman in green died at six minutes, against the wall, in the shade of another man’s bag.

Samar was standing four metres away. He saw the man beside her put his hand out and then not know where to put it.

The man in the third row lived. Samar learned this eight days later, from nobody, by looking, which he was not supposed to do and did.

He went back through it that night and could not find the decision. Not guilt. He knew guilt, and he had a whole apparatus for guilt by then. This was the absence of a place to put it. He could locate the moment he chose. He could not locate a version of the moment in which choosing better was available. Fifteen and eleven. If he had said the third row, the woman in green would have died at six minutes. If he had said the woman in green at once, without the intake, there would have been nothing to escalate. The four seconds he spent looking had cost nothing. The four minutes of intake had been built into the wall from the moment she walked to a clinic without filing first. She had not filed first, because a person does not, when the thing they came for is a prescription. And the thing that kills them arrives while they are standing there.

A Registrar named Dev Sharma had stood at Gate Four twenty-six years ago with two dying children and nineteen hours behind him, and he had chosen. Afterward he was told that a system would be built so nobody would ever have to choose like that again.

The system had been built. It had cost twenty-six years and a continent’s worth of consent. It had reduced the median from four hours to eleven minutes.

He wrote none of this down. He had not started the ledger yet. He would start it some months later and the first entry would be about somebody else. This woman would go into it eventually, late in its first year, under a heading he could not bring himself to give a name, because he never learned hers.

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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Next: Chapter 64: Eleven Days