2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XIII: Love, Chapter 69: The Dissolution Counter

Nikhil and Aparna were matched at ninety-two per cent and stayed a success by every Bureau measure for twelve years. The dissolution form gives him eleven reasons to choose from and four hundred characters for the true one.

In Brief: Nikhil Raut goes alone to the Union Bureau’s dissolution counter to end his twelve-year licensed union with Aparna. There was no fight, no other person and no cruelty. The form requires him to name a primary contributing factor, and the clerk tells him to take his time.

Nikhil Raut had decided in the lift exactly how much of it he was going to feel in the building.

This was a thing he did. He had done it at his father’s cremation and at a disciplinary hearing in 2079, and it worked. Or it worked in the sense that nobody in the room ever saw anything, and at some point he had stopped telling that apart from working.

The counter was at the side, away from the main hall, with a sign above it in a discreet weight of type. There was no queue. There is never a queue at that counter. He had asked, later, out of a curiosity he did not examine. He was told that the Bureau schedules dissolutions so that two of them are never in the room at once.

The whole thing took twenty-six minutes.

Ninety-two per cent.

He and Aparna had been matched at ninety-two in 2072 and had been, by every measure the Bureau kept, a success. Twelve years. No resource strain. Sentiment indices within band throughout, including the last two years (he had looked this up afterward, which he does not recommend).

There was no event. He wants that understood, and there is no one left to want it understood to. There was no other person, on either side. There was no cruelty. Aparna was, and is, one of the five or six best people he has known. If he were asked today to describe a fault in her, he could not produce one that would survive being said out loud.

What happened was that around the eighth year they had stopped saying anything to each other without already knowing the other’s response. Neither of them had noticed. By the tenth year there was nothing either of them could say that was a surprise. Nikhil had come to understand it slowly, over about fourteen months, mostly in the four minutes before sleep. He was in a room with somebody he was never going to be startled by again.

He tried, twice, to say this to her.

The first time she thought he was describing comfort and agreed with him warmly. The second time she understood exactly what he was saying and went very quiet. Then she said, “What would you like me to do about that,” and he did not have an answer, and they went to bed.

The form asked for a primary contributing factor.

There was a schedule. Eleven categories, in a dropdown, and he read all of them twice with the clerk waiting.

Resource strain. Occupational relocation. Offspring disagreement. Family interference. Health, one party. Health, both parties. Infidelity, disclosed. Infidelity, undisclosed. Behavioural incompatibility. Sentiment decline, gradual. Other.

He sat with it.

Sentiment decline, gradual was the nearest and was not true. Sentiment had not declined. He was as fond of Aparna in the twenty-sixth minute of that form as he had been in 2072, more so in some ways. The fondness was in fact the substance of the difficulty and not its absence.

Behavioural incompatibility was a lie.

Other was available, and he moved to it, and the field beneath it opened, and it was four hundred characters. He sat looking at it for so long that the clerk asked whether he was all right.

“Fine.”

“Take your time. There’s nobody after you.”

He wrote, and deleted, three times.

We ran out of things the other one didn’t already know. Too small. Somebody would read it and think he meant boredom, and it was not boredom. It was closer to the opposite, the specific airlessness of a room in which two people are permanently, mutually, entirely accounted for.

I would like, once more before I die, to be surprised by somebody I live with. True, and he could not put it on a form.

The model was right about us. That is the problem. He looked at that one for a while. It was the truest of the three. It would have gone into an aggregate somewhere and been counted, by a subsystem, as a data quality issue.

He selected Sentiment decline, gradual and pressed the confirmation.

The clerk was kind about it in a way that had clearly been trained and was also, Nikhil thought, real. It is a combination the Bureau achieves more often than anybody gives it credit for.

She told him the certificate would issue within four working days. She told him that the compatibility figure would remain on both records permanently, which he knew, and that this was not a judgement. She told him that Aparna would be notified within the hour, and asked whether he had told her himself. He said yes, three weeks ago. The clerk said, “Good. That’s better. It’s better when they know.”

Then she said, not from a script (he is certain of this, he has gone over it), “For what it’s worth, I’ve done this counter for six years and the ninety-plus ones are the hardest. People think it’s the low ones. It isn’t.”

“Why.”

“Because the low ones have something to point at,” she said, and printed him a receipt.

He walked out through the main hall.

There was a family in the corner with a Union Certificate, and a grandmother folding it into a document sleeve and touching the edge of it. There were two teenagers at a terminal doing a Preliminary Compatibility Registration. It is sanctioned from sixteen. He had done it himself at sixteen, in 2065, in a hall three sectors east, on a slow afternoon, with a friend, as a joke.

And there was a man at the glass of the Introduction Suite, standing longer than he needed to, watching two people at a low table with a screen between them.

Nikhil did not look at him properly. He has a general impression of a Ministry posture and nothing else.

He went out into the street and stood for a moment, doing the thing he had decided in the lift he would do outside and not inside. Then he went back to work, because it was twenty past two on a Wednesday.

The aggregate for that quarter recorded one dissolution in the ninety-plus band, primary contributing factor: sentiment decline, gradual.

It went into the model, correctly.

Some months later a small adjustment was made to the weighting of long-horizon sentiment stability in the matching algorithm, on the basis of a cluster of similar returns. The adjustment was sound and improved outcomes measurably. And there is no version of the record anywhere in which a man sat at a side counter for twenty-six minutes and could not fit into four hundred characters the fact that he had loved somebody entirely and had stopped being surprised by her.

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 70: A Day with Nothing in It