2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XV: Narrative, Chapter 79: The Marriage That Wasn’t
At twenty-six, the Bureau gave Vikram and Meenal forty-one per cent, and he let her go. He married at ninety-one per cent. Fourteen years later, a dead woman’s file makes him sit for eleven extra seconds.
In Brief: Renu finds Vikram, the fastest reviewer on the Handlers’ floor, at a tea counter near the Ministry. She asks whether his twenty-two-minute Continuity of Mind session really settled the Mrs. Kalra file. Vikram tells her about Meenal, and Renu asks him to sit quietly with a few others who say true things aloud.
Renu found Vikram at the tea counter near the Ministry two evenings later.
She sat down across from him without the ceremony she had rehearsed on the walk over.
“I want to ask you something,” she said, “and I want you to know you’re allowed to tell me it’s none of my business.”
“That’s an alarming opening.”
“The file that caught you. Mrs. Kalra.” She watched something in his face go still. It was the stillness of a man who had believed a subject was fully closed and was discovering, in real time, that it was not. “You told me the Continuity of Mind session sorted it out. Twenty-two minutes. I’ve thought about that a great deal since, and I’ve never found a comfortable way to ask you what I actually want to ask, so I’m going to ask it plainly instead. Do you think it did sort it out, or do you think it simply told you a version of the story you needed to hear in order to stop looking any further?”
Vikram did not answer for a long moment. He turned his cup in his hands, which Renu had never once seen him do at his desk. There his hands moved only in the clean, fast rhythm of a man who did not waste motion.
“You’re not asking about Mrs. Kalra,” he said finally. “Not really.”
“No. I don’t think I am.”
He was quiet again. When he spoke, his voice was much less certain than the one that announced his review percentages at his desk each morning. “There was someone, before my wife. Meenal. We were twenty-six, both of us, and the Bureau gave us forty-one per cent, which even at twenty-six I understood was not a number anyone married on. I let it end. Meenal didn’t fight it either, to be fair to both of us.”
He was quiet a moment, and when he continued, his voice had gone somewhere Renu had not yet heard it go. “We sat on a bench near the old market (this was before it was redeveloped, when it still had actual stray cats living under the stalls) and she asked me, very plainly, whether I loved her. I said yes. She said, then why does a number get to decide this, and I didn’t have an answer for her that wasn’t just a more polite way of saying I was afraid. She just nodded, the way you nod at a piece of bad weather you’ve decided not to argue with, and that was the last real conversation we had. I heard, years later, secondhand, that she’d matched at seventy-something with someone in a different sector and moved. I never checked to see if it was true. I decided not knowing was safer than finding out she was happy, or finding out she wasn’t, either one.”
“I married Sushila two years later. Ninety-one per cent. Two children. A flat we’re not unhappy in. I have never once, in twelve years, had a single conversation with Sushila that made me feel the way five minutes with Meenal used to feel, and I am not telling you my marriage is unhappy. It isn’t. I made my peace with the difference by deciding, at some point I couldn’t precisely date, that the feeling itself must have been the immaturity, and the ninety-one per cent must have been the truth.”
“Do you still believe that.”
“I believed it completely, until a file with a dead woman’s photograph in it made me sit for eleven extra seconds and remember a tin of sweets I hadn’t thought about in fifteen years.” Renu knew the tin. Mrs. Kalra had kept boiled sweets in a desk drawer for the boys who came to school without breakfast. He looked at her directly now. “The Continuity of Mind session told me my grief wasn’t guilt, it was witness, and that the witnessing was enough, and I believed that too, for months. The alternative is that some part of me has spent fourteen years quietly serving a sentence I agreed to at twenty-six because a number told me forty-one per cent was a thing love could not survive.”
Renu let the silence sit for a while before she spoke again. “I declined a match myself. A few months ago. Eighty-nine per cent.”
“Why.”
“Because I’d just learned the review window Handlers like us have always trusted doesn’t measure anything either, and I found I couldn’t extend a different number, in a different part of my life, the trust I’d just finished learning the first number never deserved.” She said this plainly, without performance. “I’m not telling you to leave your marriage, Vikram. I don’t think that’s mine to suggest, and I don’t think it’s what either of us is actually talking about. I’m asking whether you’d be willing to sit with some of us, quietly, no name for it, nothing anyone could ever be asked to produce a list of, and simply say true things to each other sometimes, the way you just said this one to me, instead of letting a twenty-two-minute session decide, on your behalf, exactly how much of it you’re permitted to keep feeling.”
Vikram stayed with this a long time. It was long enough for Renu to understand that he was not pretending to think it over. He was truly weighing something, a thing that had already cost him more than their entire conversation to finally say aloud.
“I don’t know what that would look like,” he said finally. “I’ve spent six years being the fastest reviewer on the floor. I don’t know how to also be a man who admits, out loud, more than once, that Meenal still crosses his mind at odd hours.”
“Neither do I, entirely. I think that’s rather the point of doing it together instead of each of us doing it alone in a flat with the lights off.” Renu finished her tea, and stood, and did not press him for an answer he had not yet decided he owed her. “Think about it. I’m not building anything with minutes or a membership list. I’m only asking whether you’d like not to be the only person carrying this particular arithmetic, the next time a file makes you sit for eleven extra seconds.”
She left him at the counter, turning his empty cup slowly in his hands.
He did not give her an answer that evening, or the next day, and Renu did not chase it. It was nearly two weeks before he found her at her desk, uncharacteristically slow to open his first file of the morning, and said only, “Whatever it is you’re building. Count me in.” He returned to his screen as though the sentence had cost him nothing. But his hands moved a fraction less quickly than their usual ninety-nine point eight, and it had cost him a great deal more than that.
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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