2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XII: Grief, Chapter 67: What Zainab Kept
Ashfaq had a Grade II licence, a flat in 12-East and a match at seventy-something per cent. In the spring of 2080 a campaign he never joined ran for eleven days, and the model got better.
In Brief: Four days after her visit to Fatima’s stall, Zainab sits in Shabana’s flat above the phone-parts shop and speaks about her nephew Ashfaq for the first time. Samar is there by accident. She tells them what happened to Ashfaq after the 2080 campaign, one tier at a time.
She told it in the end because of the water.
Not at the stall, but four days after, in the flat above the phone-parts shop, at Shabana’s. She had gone there for no reason except that she had woken up unable to be in her own rooms. Shabana, Aisha’s mother, was the one person in the sector who would not ask her why she had come.
Samar was there, which was an accident. He had come to bring Shabana something from Kavya and had been fed, because there was no version in which he was not fed. Zainab had arrived twenty minutes into it and had sat down and eaten and said nothing for a long time.
Then she said, “His name was Ashfaq.”
He was her sister’s boy. Her sister had died in 2071, and after that he was hers in every way that mattered and in no way any document acknowledged. There was no document for an aunt.
He was licensed. That is the first thing she wants said, and she said it first that evening, with some force. She had spent four years listening to people in a room above the grain market talk about the margins as though everybody in them had been born there. Ashfaq had a Grade II technical licence, in fabrication, and a flat on the mapped side of 12-East. There was a woman he was going to be matched to at seventy-something per cent. He came to Zainab’s on Fridays and complained about his supervisor.
“He was doing well,” she said. “I want that said. He was doing better than I ever did. He used to bring me things I didn’t need.”
The campaign was in the spring of 2080.
It was Bilal’s, or a version of Bilal’s: coordinated noise, eleven days of it, across four sectors. Bilal was the man who ran the room above the grain market. Zainab had not taken part, and Ashfaq had not taken part. Ashfaq had barely known it was happening, and when she mentioned it he had thought it sounded like a lot of trouble for nothing.
It worked for eleven days. Then the model got better.
“That is the part nobody in that room has ever been able to hold,” Zainab said. “They think the danger of a campaign is that it fails. The danger of a campaign is that it succeeds for eleven days and then the thing it was aimed at comes back sharper. We didn’t blind it. We trained it. And when a model gets sharper it does not only get sharper about the people who were making the noise.”
The recalibration ran through the summer. In August, Ashfaq’s licence category was reassessed against a revised profile. He was found to be marginally less well suited to fabrication than the previous model had estimated, and marginally better suited to something in logistics. The finding was accurate, made by a model that was now measurably better at this than it had been in June. He was reallocated.
“That was all,” Zainab said.
Samar waited.
“That was all. It was a tier. It was one tier. He went from Grade II to Grade III and the flat went with the grade because housing was tied to it, and there was a flat available in a sector two hours out, and he took it, because what else does a person do.”
She had helped him move, and she wants that on the record too. She had gone out on the transit with three bags and made his new place decent in two days. Standing in it, she had told him that it was temporary.
“Was it?”
“There was no reason it shouldn’t have been.” Her voice did not change. “He was twenty-six. He was good. People move up. I have thought about that sentence for four years, people move up, and I would like to know who I learned it from, because it is not true and I said it to him in a room with three bags in it and he believed me.”
He came for two more Fridays. Then the transit changed and the trip became four hours there and back, and then he came monthly. The match did not happen. She never learned the details and did not ask. There had been a compatibility figure attached to his old profile and a different one attached to the new one. The woman was in the old sector, and that was as much as Zainab was ever told.
He called. Then he called less. Then there was a period of about a year in which the calls were entirely about whether he was calling enough. Zainab now recognises this as the shape a relationship takes just before it stops. She did not recognise it at the time, and would not have known what to do with it if she had.
The last time she saw him was in the winter of 2082, when he came for a day. He was thin and he was fine and he was pleasant, and she has gone over that day perhaps four hundred times.
“What did you talk about?” Samar asked.
“Nothing,” Zainab said. “That is not a figure of speech. We talked about the transit and about a cousin’s flat and about whether the shop on the corner had changed hands. I have tried to remember one thing from that day that was about him and there isn’t one. I think he had decided by then that his life was not a thing he brought here any more.”
He died in the following August, of a thing that had a name and was ordinary. It was not, in any way that could be traced or argued, connected to a tier. It was a chest infection that went the wrong way in a man who had not been to a clinic in some time.
He was twenty-nine.
She was told nine days after the funeral. There had been a funeral, and there had been people there. They were people who had known him for three years in a sector two hours out. One of them had eventually found a number, and the number was old, and it took nine days.
“That’s the thing,” Zainab said. “That is the entire thing and I have never got it across to anybody in that room. He was not killed. Nobody did anything to him. A model got better at its job, correctly, and he was moved one tier, correctly, and every single step of it was defensible, and I would lose any argument I tried to have about any part of it.”
She put her glass down.
“And I have no funeral. That is what I actually have. Everybody else who loses someone has a day. I have nine days of not knowing, and then a phone call, and then a lane full of people who were very kind to me about a boy most of them had not seen in three years and could not have described. There was nothing to do. There is still nothing to do. I have been carrying a thing for a year that has no shape and no ceremony and no name, and every time somebody in that room says nobody died I have to sit there and agree with them, because nobody did.”
Shabana got up and refilled her glass and sat back down and said nothing at all. That was not easy for Shabana, and Zainab noticed it. Samar did not say he was sorry. He worked out afterward that this had been the right thing and had not been a decision. He had simply had nothing.
After a while Zainab said, in an entirely different voice, “The tap’s holding.”
“It is.”
“Fatima had four batches on Tuesday. Four. She’ll deny it if you ask her.” She drank. “I want to be clear that I am glad about Naina’s wedding.”
She put her hand into the cloth bag she had carried up the stairs and had not opened all evening. She took out a steel tea strainer, the kind with a long handle, and set it on Shabana’s table between the glasses.
“He brought me this,” she said. “The second Friday after he got the licence. I had two already. I told him so, and he said now I had three.” She turned the handle towards the wall. “I have never used it. It has been in that bag since the water came back.”
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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