2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XVI: Distribution, Chapter 84: The Polite Man

A well-dressed stranger asks three people in the lane where to find the Handler who resigned over a girl named Ruhi. He never asks for her mother. Ruhi’s name sits in the Archive, searchable forever, because Samar put it there.

In Brief: A polite stranger has walked through the courtyard asking for the Handler who resigned over a girl named Ruhi. Samar’s resignation testimony in the Archive is permanently searchable, and it names Kavya’s eight-year-old daughter. That evening Kavya tells Samar what his choice, made alone, has cost her.

The man came through the courtyard on an ordinary Thursday.

He was unremarkable in every way except one. He asked three separate people where he might find the Handler who’d resigned over a girl named Ruhi, and none of the three answered him.

By every account Kavya had gathered, he had not been threatening. He was well-dressed and polite. His questions were phrased so carefully that Fatima, at the tea stall, describing it to Kavya afterward, could not say for certain who he was. He might have been a journalist, or a researcher. Or he might simply have read the Archive out of idle curiosity and decided, on a slow afternoon, to see whether the story had a street he could walk down. He was, as it happened, a journalist, and nobody in the lane would ever learn it. He had not asked for Kavya by name, only for Ruhi’s. He had left without incident when no one in the lane would tell him anything. Nothing had happened. A stranger now knew her daughter’s name well enough to come looking for the street it lived on.

Kavya heard about it from Zainab before Samar heard about it at all. By the time he arrived that evening, she had already spent four hours turning the fact over in silence. He recognised that silence the instant he saw her face, and he knew it was considerably harder than her anger in the courtyard argument months before.

“A man was asking for you today,” she said, before he’d finished crossing the threshold. “And by Ruhi’s name, which is the part I haven’t been able to put down since Zainab told me.”

“Who was he.”

“Nobody knew, not really. Well-dressed. Polite. Fatima said he asked like a man filling in a story he’d already half-written, not like a man threatening anything. This was just... curiosity, walking through my daughter’s lane, wearing a stranger’s face.” Kavya’s hands, Samar noticed, were less steady than usual. There was a small tremor, and she was visibly working to keep it out of her voice. “I don’t know, Samar, and that’s rather the whole problem, isn’t it. Your testimony has my daughter’s name in it. Permanently searchable, no summary, no expiry. I understood, when you wrote it, that this meant your own name would never again be quietly filed away. I don’t think either of us understood, or at least I don’t think I let myself understand, that it meant her name wouldn’t be either.”

Samar sat with this. Every answer available to him would sound, to her, like a defence. “I wrote her name because leaving it out would have made the testimony a summary of its own, the exact thing I was resigning to stop performing. I didn’t see a version that let me do both.”

“I believe that. I want you to hear that I believe it, before I say the rest.” Kavya’s voice had not risen. Over the months, that had become the surest sign to him that what she was saying mattered more than anything she might have shouted instead. “But you made that choice the way you’ve made every choice since the checkpoint, alone, in a room with a keyboard. Dev Sharma decided my name and my daughter’s name were worth protecting, once, without asking me. You decided her name was worth making permanently public, also without asking me. I am telling you that from where I’m standing, holding my daughter while a stranger asks a lane full of people where to find her, they cost me the same thing.”

“What would you have wanted. If I had asked.”

“I don’t know.” She said this without softening it into something easier for either of them to sit with. “I might have told you to leave her name out and found some other way to tell the truth. I might have told you to write it exactly as you wrote it. I don’t know which I would have said, Samar, and that not-knowing is precisely why I needed to be asked, and wasn’t, and I don’t think you can give me back the asking now.”

Ruhi’s voice came from the next room. She was eight, and in some small dispute with a toy that resolved itself. It was the ordinary sound of a child’s evening, continuing in total ignorance of the conversation happening a few feet away.

“I don’t have a way to fix this tonight,” he said finally. “I don’t think there’s a sentence that undoes a testimony already sitting in an Archive, searchable, exactly the way I built it to be searchable. I can tell you I’m sorry, and I am.”

“I’m not asking you to fix it.” Kavya looked at him for a long moment. Something unresolved sat plainly in her face, and she did not try to smooth it over for his comfort or her own. “I’m asking you to understand that loving you has cost me a kind of exposure I never once consented to, twice now. I don’t know yet whether I can keep choosing this, Samar. I don’t know. I’m not choosing to leave tonight either.”

She did not reach for his hand this time, and Samar did not reach for hers. The two of them sat, instead, in a silence that held considerably more of the truth between them than either had managed to say aloud. In the next room, Ruhi’s dispute with her toy resolved itself a second time.

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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