2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XIV: Creative Courage, Chapter 73: The Review

Eighty-four per cent of Dev Sharma’s reviews ended in mercy. His predecessor’s figure was six. Today he sits alone at the third table, in a chair placed the same distance from everyone else.

In Brief: Dev Sharma, the Secretary, faces the architecture oversight committee. Director Meghna Rao sets out a year of findings on his 288 discretionary determinations across twenty years. No one accuses him of gaining from them, but the committee must now decide what his quiet exceptions have done to the charter he wrote.

The hearing room held three tables.

Nine members of the architecture oversight committee at one. Meghna Rao at a second, with her own findings assembled in front of her. And Dev Sharma, alone, at the third, in a chair placed at exactly the same distance from each of the others. He noted that without comment.

Rao presented first. She did it, Dev noted, without a single word he could honestly have called unfair. Three hundred and forty-one correlations. Two hundred and eighty-eight determinations of reviewed, no action indicated. Eighty-four per cent, against six for his predecessor. She did not raise her voice at any point, and she did not need to. She had clearly spent a year arranging the numbers in their flat, careful order, and laid out that way they needed no help from rhetoric to land.

“I will be plain with the committee,” she said, closing her presentation, “about what I am and am not alleging. I have found no evidence of financial gain, favouritism toward family or personal connection, or any material benefit to the Secretary from a single one of these two hundred and eighty-eight determinations. What I have found is a pattern of discretion so far outside its charter’s own intended frequency that it has, in practice, become a second and unaccountable layer of governance, operating beside the one the charter actually describes.”

The committee’s chair was an engineer named Nagarajan, who had held her seat on the oversight body for longer than Dev could easily remember. She turned straight to him. “Secretary Sharma. The floor is yours, should you wish to use it.”

Dev had drafted no statement in advance. The charter’s provision for exactly this moment was a personal statement, entered whole, unsummarised. He had drafted that provision himself, twenty-two years ago, and in all that time he had never once expected to be the person invoking it.

“I will not dispute Director Rao’s numbers,” he said. “Eighty-four per cent is not discretion in the sense the charter describes. It became, at some point I cannot precisely date, a policy I declined to call a policy, because calling it one would have required me to examine what it actually was, and I found, across twenty years, that I preferred not to.” He paused, and the room let him. No one filled the silence, and silences were rarely allowed to sit unfilled anywhere else in his life. “I want to tell the committee why, not as a defence, but as the fullest account I am capable of giving.

“I built this so that I would never again have to stand where I stood in 2058. I then went on standing there, once a month, for twenty years, inside a clause I had written myself and told myself was a safety valve. I did not stop being the man at the gate when I finished the charter. I stopped admitting it.”

He looked at Rao for a moment, and she met the look without flinching.

“Director Rao has done this Ministry a service I did not want and cannot honestly say I do not need. I would ask the committee to consider a narrower remedy than my removal, though I recognise that request is not mine alone to grant. I would ask that every future determination of this kind be reviewed by Director Rao’s office in real time, jointly, before it takes effect, not after, as I once promised her and then, within the week, failed to honour.”

One of the younger committee members leaned forward before Dev had fully returned to his seat. She was a demographer named Fonseca, and she had said nothing through Rao’s entire presentation. “Secretary, with respect, you’ve described the mercy and the cost of the mercy very movingly, and I don’t doubt either is genuine. But I’d like a plainer answer to a plainer question. Of the two hundred and eighty-eight, how many, in your own honest accounting, were extended for a reason you could defend to this committee today, and how many were extended simply because the file in front of you happened to remind you of a night twenty-six years ago that none of us were there to judge you for?”

The question landed harder in the room than Rao’s careful numbers had managed on their own. Dev held it longer than he had held anything since he entered the hearing room.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “That is the honest answer, and I understand it is not a comfortable one to give a committee deciding my future. I did not keep a private ledger distinguishing the two, because keeping one would have required me to admit, at the time, that a distinction existed. I suspect, if pressed to guess rather than to know, that the honest split would trouble me considerably more than eighty-four per cent already does. I am not offering that guess as a defence. I am offering it because Dr Fonseca asked for a plainer answer, and the plainer answer is that I do not have the clean one she is entitled to want.”

Fonseca did not press further. Dev watched her make a note he could not read from his own table, and he saw that her not pressing was less mercy than professional restraint. She had got exactly the answer she had come looking for, and she saw no use in making him repeat it.

The committee did not rule that morning. Nagarajan thanked both parties in the flat procedural language such proceedings seemed to require, whatever had just been said inside them. Then she adjourned the hearing pending deliberation.

Rao stayed a moment at her own table after the room had begun to empty. She gathered her findings back into their folder, in the same careful order she had brought them in. She closed the folder without looking at him again, and left.

He walked out past her a few minutes later, and neither of them found anything further to say to the other.

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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