2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XII: Grief, Chapter 65: What His Daughter Saw

Chitra has sat beside her father’s dialysis machine fourteen hundred times. On the one evening the lights did something, she was reading him a classified about a sewing machine.

In Brief: For thirteen years Chitra has read the newspaper to her father, Prem Nath Sagar, during his dialysis sessions in Sector 9. One evening the power dips and the backup is slow. The incident report calls it a transient interruption, cause under review, and Chitra has two versions of what happened.

There is a version of this that Chitra tells and a version she does not.

The one she tells is short. She has told it perhaps thirty times, at work and to her husband’s family. Once, badly, she told it to a room of people at a training day she should not have been at. It goes: the power dipped, the backup took longer than it should have, the nurse was very fast, my father was fine, they never did tell us why.

Everybody nods at that. It is a good story. It has a nurse in it and it comes out right.

The one she does not tell starts two hours earlier, with a newspaper.

She read to him every session. The paper was always two days old, because it came into the block on a Thursday and his sessions were Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. She had worked out in the first year that he did not care what was in it.

He liked the sound. He had said so once, in about the third year, apologetically, as though he were admitting to wasting her time: you know I am not really listening. And Chitra had said she knew, and had gone on reading, and they had never discussed it again in nine years.

That evening she was doing the classifieds. She had started on the classifieds somewhere in the fifth year because they made him laugh. She read them in the voice of a man extremely serious about a bicycle. She was in the middle of one about a sewing machine when the machine’s alarm changed pitch.

She was not looking at the machine.

She has never found a way to say it that does not sound like she is asking to be forgiven for something. Nine years of sessions. Perhaps fourteen hundred times in that chair beside that machine. She had stopped watching the lights somewhere in the second year, the way you stop hearing a fridge. And on the one evening in nine years that the lights did something, she was looking at her father’s face and reading him a classified about a sewing machine.

So what she has is his face.

The alarm changed pitch partway through its own first note. She has never heard that sound before or since. She can produce it, on request, with her voice, and she has, twice, for people who asked, and has regretted both times.

And her father’s face did nothing for about three seconds.

Then it did something.

Sister Baig has told her, since, that the colour change she remembers is not physiologically consistent with the duration of the interruption. She said it kindly. She said that in the time involved the perfusion would not have altered visibly. What Chitra saw, she said, was very probably fear, his and hers, and the light in that room, which was bad.

Chitra has thought about this a great deal. She accepts it. She believes Sister Baig, who has no reason to lie to her and who was, that evening, extremely good.

She also knows what she saw.

Over some years she has found a way of holding both. Whatever her father’s mouth actually did in the sixth or seventh second, she was watching it. The watching is the thing that happened to her. No correction of the underlying facts has ever made the slightest difference to the watching.

The backup engaged. She does not remember the sound of it engaging, which she has always found strange.

What she remembers next is the nurse’s hand on the back of her chair. Not on her, on the chair. She remembers the nurse saying something to her father in a completely ordinary voice about the machine being a nuisance, and her father saying something back.

Eleven seconds. She counted them afterward, from the alarm, which is a thing you can do if you know the shape of the sound.

He said, weeks later, that he had not had time to be frightened.

She said, “No.”

“You were frightened.”

“A bit.”

“You are a bad liar and you have always been a bad liar,” her father said, “and I am going to allow it,” and went back to the paper, which she was holding, and which she read to him for another four years.

He is eighty-five now.

He does not know that the interruption is in an incident report. He does not know that the report went to a junior officer who forwarded it without knowing what she was handing over. Or that it was read in an office by Dev Sharma, the Secretary. Before he had finished the first paragraph, Dev understood that he had personally approved the fix that caused it, within the hour it was proposed.

Chitra does not know any of that either. Nobody has ever told either of them anything beyond cause under review. Cause under review has been the answer for four years. It will be the answer permanently, because there is no mechanism anywhere in the architecture for closing a review nobody has an interest in closing.

What she has instead is a habit.

She reads to him on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, from a paper two days old. Somewhere in the first ten minutes of every session, her eyes go to the small steady lights on the machine. She does not do it on purpose, not every time, but she does it reliably, four years running. Her eyes stay on the lights for a second and a half before they come back.

He has never noticed. She is fairly sure he has never noticed.

She has stopped doing the classifieds.

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 66: What the Water Tasted Like