2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XV: Narrative, Chapter 80: The Anchor with No Name

At six o’clock on a Tuesday, Latika Bhandari typed “A good day to be alive in Delhi” and marked it placeholder. It was received forty billion times. Nobody knows she wrote it.

In Brief: For twenty-one years Latika Bhandari writes every word spoken by the Forecast’s rendered anchor. In 2071 she puts in a closing line she thinks is cheap, meaning to replace it. It becomes the most-heard sentence in the National Capital Region, and the style guide forbids her name.

Latika Bhandari wrote the sentence in the spring of 2071 and meant to come back to it.

She was thirty-four. She had been on the Forecast script for two years, writing every word the rendered anchor said to the city. From her predecessor she had inherited a closing formulation that was four words long and clumsy: conditions remain within tolerance. Her supervisor had told her to find something warmer for the sentiment segment. Civic sentiment had just been added to the broadcast, and nobody had yet worked out what tone it wanted.

She wrote nine candidates on a Tuesday afternoon.

The one she put in was the last on the list, and she marked it in her own notes as placeholder, revisit. It was too much, and it had a rhythm she thought was slightly cheap. And she had a better idea somewhere in the fourth candidate, which she had not been able to make work by six o’clock.

A good day to be alive in Delhi.

It went out on the Wednesday.

She did not revisit it on the Thursday, because there was a thing with the transit segment. She did not revisit it the following week either.

By the third month it had a life. People said it. She heard a man say it on a platform, ironically, to a friend. Then, five months later, she heard a woman say it without irony at all, to a child.

By the second year the sentiment segment had a shape built around it: a pause, a rendered half-smile, a beat before the closing tone. Three other people had designed that shape, and they had assumed the sentence was permanent. Unpicking the sentence would have meant unpicking their work.

By the fourth year it was the most-heard sentence in the National Capital Region.

In about 2078 Latika worked it out, using the broadcast’s own reach figures. The rendered anchor had said it aloud approximately four thousand times. In aggregate, it had been received something like forty billion times.

Placeholder, revisit.

She stayed fourteen more years.

Nobody knows this. That is not a complaint, or not entirely. The style guide is one page and section 1 is four lines. She has read it perhaps four hundred times and has never once found it dishonest. Attribution would imply an individual capable of error. That is exactly right. It is the truest sentence anybody at Broadcast ever wrote and it is about her.

She wrote every word the anchor said for twenty-one years.

Rain between 4:10 and 4:55. Ring-corridor congestion at a probability the system rates negligible. Civic sentiment, aggregated from involuntary telemetry across the sector, at 94.2. The anchor described this, as she always did, as a good day to be alive in Delhi.

The anchor. She catches herself doing it. Twenty-one years and she still says the anchor described rather than I wrote, in her own head, in her own flat, with nobody there.

The interesting work (and she wants somebody to know there was interesting work) was the anomalies.

An asterisk goes up on the Forecast. The desk on the ninth floor decides it is surfaced, and that is not her. What is hers is the tone in which it is not commented on.

There are perhaps a dozen ways to not comment on something. She has used all of them. There is the way that reads as this is beneath notice, and the way that reads as this is being handled. And there is the way that reads, if you have a particular ear, as I am being told not to comment on this. She used that one exactly twice in twenty-one years. She got away with it both times, because nobody at Broadcast above her grade has ever had that ear.

Nobody watches. She knows the number. About nine hundred pairs of eyes actually stop on a variance indicator. She has spent a career writing for nine hundred people who do not know she exists, inside a broadcast heard by everybody.

She retired in 2092 and the sentence outlived her at the desk by some years, and was still going when she died, and may be going now.

There is a version of this in which she is bitter, and it is not the true version. She has thought about it and she is fairly clear. She has had a life, and a good one. There is a woman in Sector 4 who has said a good day to be alive in Delhi to her husband every morning for thirty years. It is a joke that stopped being a joke. Latika knows about her because the woman said it on a public feed once and it went around.

That is a real thing to have made. It is not nothing.

What she has never been able to settle is the other part, which is that she did not mean it. It was ninth on a list of nine and she thought it was cheap. She put it in at six o’clock on a Tuesday because the fourth candidate would not come right. Forty billion receptions later, there is no mechanism anywhere by which that fact can be attached to it.

She has told two people in her life. One was her sister, who did not understand why it troubled her. The other was a man at a party in 2085 who did not believe her.

Near the end she wrote it out on a piece of paper, the fourth candidate, the one she could not make work in 2071. She wanted to see whether it had ever been any good.

It had not. She had been right about it at thirty-four. It was too long and the rhythm collapsed in the second clause, and there was nothing there.

She looked at it for a while. Then, underneath it, in the same hand, she wrote the sentence she had actually used. She looked at the two of them together on a sheet of paper, on a table, in a flat in Vasant Vihar, at midnight.

Then she folded the paper in half and put it in a drawer, where it was found in due course by a nephew, who could not think of any reason to keep it.

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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