2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XIV: Creative Courage, Chapter 76: Renu’s Choice

No adverse finding. Renu Sen could go back to her desk tomorrow as though none of it had happened, and no one above her would ever raise it. That is not what she came to ask.

In Brief: The first determination under the committee’s joint review reaches Dev Sharma’s terminal and waits. Two floors down, Handler Renu Sen sits in Director Meghna Rao’s office to hear the result of the disclosure she made earlier this season. Rao tells Renu her verdict in person. Renu must decide what she will do next, and that evening she calls her uncle.

The first one came on a Thursday, eleven days after the ruling.

A correlation flag on a woman in 4-West, a widow of sixty-eight, forty-one days behind on a Contribution she had last met in March. Dev knew the file. He had signed it in 2077, alone, reviewed, no action indicated, and the model had let her be for seven years. Now it had found her again.

He read it twice. He wrote the determination as he had written two hundred and eighty-eight before it, four words. His hand went to enter it and found that the field would not take it. A second line sat beneath the first. PENDING CONCURRENCE: PERSONNEL INTEGRITY. 10:52:17.

He waited. In twenty years at that desk he had not waited for anything. He drank the tea that had gone cold and read the file a third time and found nothing in it he had not found in 2077. At 2:40 p.m. the field changed. CONCURRENCE RECORDED. M. RAO. No note was attached. The determination went into the record with two names on it instead of one, and under them a log line that said how long it had taken.

Meghna Rao’s office held less than Renu had expected of a woman who had spent a year deciding the shape of other people’s careers. A desk kept clear by some discipline of its own, no photograph, no small object that told a visitor anything about the life lived around the work.

“I wanted to tell you this in person rather than let a notification do it,” Rao said, once Renu had sat. “Your disclosure has been assessed. No adverse finding. I’ve entered a note in the record specifically distinguishing what you did from the pattern I was examining elsewhere, because I did not think it fair to let the two blur together simply because they arrived on my desk the same season.” She paused. “I will say this badly, Handler Sen, because my discipline doesn’t make it easy. I wanted you to hear that distinction from me directly, since you were the one who taught it to me, this year, without either of us intending that you would.”

Renu had not expected gratitude from this meeting. Receiving it, she found she did not entirely know what to do with it. She asked instead about what she had disclosed, the six seconds in which the model acted before a Handler had opened the file. “What happens to the pattern itself. The six-second gap.”

“That’s a separate finding, moving through a separate process, slower than either of us would like. I can tell you that it will not be quietly absorbed. Too many people know of it now for that.” Rao considered her for a moment. “What happens to you is rather more open. You’re cleared. You could return to your desk tomorrow as though none of this occurred, and no one above you would ever raise it. I don’t imagine, watching you sit there, that this is actually what you’re here to ask me.”

“No.” Renu had turned the question over for days. She had turned it in the ledger, on calls with her uncle, in the particular silence of a flat that had held far more thinking than sleeping this past month. “I don’t want to resign. I’ve watched Samar do that, and I understand why it was the right shape for him. It isn’t the right shape for me. I don’t think leaving teaches anyone left behind anything they couldn’t already see for themselves, and I think there’s work still to do inside the thing, now that I’ve said what I said about it publicly and survived the saying.”

“What work.”

Renu had not fully put the answer together until she heard herself begin to give it. “I want to find the other ones who’ve started noticing, and let them know they aren’t the only one. Nothing with a name. Nothing anybody could ask me for a copy of.”

“You already have a name in mind.”

Renu had not expected the question. Answering it, she found that she did in fact already have one. It was Vikram, the Handler at the next desk, who closed his files at ninety-nine point eight per cent and had never once been slow. “Vikram. He had a file catch him a few months ago, a teacher from his childhood, marginal utility, declining. He used the Continuity of Mind service afterward and told me it helped, and I believed him, and I’ve thought since that the helping and the forgetting might have been closer to the same thing than either of us wanted to say out loud at the time. I don’t know if he’s ready to hear that from me. I think I’d rather ask him plainly than assume the answer for him.”

Rao was quiet for a long moment.

“I could tell you that’s precisely the kind of unaccountable pattern my office exists to catch,” Rao said finally. “I find that I don’t especially want to catch it. I’ll tell you honestly that if it ever produces harm, favouritism, a citizen wronged because some private network decided, unaccountably, that they deserved otherwise, I will treat it exactly as I’ve treated everything else that’s crossed this desk.”

Renu called her uncle that evening, before she had fully decided to, as she had called him before submitting the disclosure weeks before.

“I’m staying,” she told her uncle. “Not to keep doing what I’ve always done. To do something smaller than Samar did and slower than what your generation tried with the noise campaigns. I want to find people like us, Uncle. Quietly. One at a time. The way you should have found someone, thirty years ago, instead of carrying it alone until it went quiet in you.”

There was a long pause on the line, long enough that Renu wondered if the connection had dropped.

“I don’t know if I would have listened, thirty years ago, if someone had found me the way you’re describing,” he said finally. “I’d like to think I would have. I’ve spent enough of my life not knowing to have learned not to trust my own certainty about what I would have done differently.” Another pause, shorter. “Find them anyway, Renu. Even if I wouldn’t have listened. Someone else might.”

She kept the phone silent in her hand for a while after he had rung off. She thought of Vikram’s steady hands moving through files at ninety-nine point eight per cent, and of a photograph of a woman with a tin of sweets. She thought of twenty-two minutes that had made him feel better, and had told him, gently, to stop looking any further than the feeling. She did not know yet how she would begin the conversation, or whether he would want to have it at all.

She wrote, that night, the shortest entry her ledger had held in months. Cleared. Staying. Not the same as before. Uncle says find them anyway. I intend to.

About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time.

Previous: Chapter 75: The Ruling

Next: Chapter 77: Bilal