2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XIV: Creative Courage, Chapter 75: The Ruling

Twenty years of one man’s mercy, answered in a document of two pages. Dev Sharma reads it at his desk at four in the afternoon, and the sentence he keeps going back to is a number.

In Brief: Fourteen weeks after the hearing, the oversight committee rules on Dev Sharma’s use of discretion as Secretary. Its decision fits on two pages. Dev and Meghna Rao, the director who brought the case, each read it alone in their own offices, two floors apart.

The oversight committee ruled on a Tuesday, fourteen weeks after the hearing, in a document of two pages.

It did not remove him.

It did not clear him either, not in the sense that would have let the eighty-four per cent be filed away as history. It found that the Secretary’s use of Section 1, Subsection 9 had at all times fallen within the provision’s plain wording. The provision set no ceiling, and the absence of a ceiling was the charter’s defect and not the Secretary’s.

In the same paragraph, it found that the pattern had operated in practice as a second and unaccountable layer of governance beside the one the charter describes. It was a pattern of discretion at eighty-four per cent, against a predecessor’s six, sustained across twenty years and disclosed to nobody.

It issued a formal censure. This was a permanent note in his own record. His charter had always allowed a Secretary to attach that kind of note to a Handler’s file. Now, for the first time in the Programme’s history, one was attached to a Secretary’s.

As he had himself proposed, it mandated that Personnel Integrity review every future determination under the provision jointly, in real time, before it took effect.

The vote was seven to two.

The two were recorded by name. One of them, a demographer, attached a note of twenty lines. It stated that the committee had answered the question it was competent to answer and had declined the question that mattered. The demographer asked that the note be entered without machine summarisation. It was.

Dev Sharma read it at his desk at four in the afternoon, alone. The sentence he found himself coming back to was not the censure, which he had expected. Nor was it the joint review, which he had drafted the first version of himself fourteen weeks earlier. It was the vote. Seven of nine people had looked at the whole of his life’s practice and produced a note in a file. It arrived in him not as relief and not as punishment, but as the flattest thing he had ever felt.

Meghna Rao read it in her own office two floors below, and closed it. Then she went back to a sector two points more uncertain than it had been the week before.

Neither of them ever learned what the other had done that afternoon.

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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