2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XVI: Distribution, Chapter 87: Kavya, Unfunded
A stranger from Sector 6 offers Kavya three years of licensed, metered power for the light in her courtyard. The board wants six months of recorded outputs in return. Kavya hears it as a request to end the work.
In Brief: Kavya’s light structure in the courtyard runs off a tap that gets throttled, and it has never been recorded. Deshpande, a woman from Sector 6 who has worked in records and knows two people on the Cultural Contribution board, brings an offer of funding. It comes with one condition.
The fourth approach came from a woman who had actually seen it.
That was new. Kavya had been declined three times by people working from a submission form. She had come to think of the Cultural Contribution board as a room with no windows. And here, on a Tuesday evening in the courtyard, was a woman of about fifty in unremarkable clothes. She was the Grade III from the Sector 6 records office who had sponsored Aisha’s registration years before. She had crossed a checkpoint on her own time, twice, and had stood at the back on both occasions and said nothing.
“I came in the spring as well,” she said. “You were arguing with someone about a tap.”
“That’s most evenings.”
“It went green about ten minutes after I got here, and then it did something at the top edge that I couldn’t account for, and I’ve been thinking about it since March.” The woman put out her hand. “Deshpande. Sector 6. I’m not on the board. I know two people who are.”
The offer was real and it was better than anything Kavya had ever been offered, which was not a high bar and did not need to be.
A three-year resourcing line. Materials, and power. Licensed power, metered, at a rate that would have made the whole junction-box arrangement a memory. A room, if she wanted one, though Deshpande had the sense not to press that. Standing to submit further work without going through intake.
And one condition, which Deshpande put on the table herself in the first ten minutes, before Kavya had asked, and which Kavya thought better of her for.
“They need documentation.”
“What kind.”
“The kind that lets a board defend a line in a budget.” Deshpande did not soften it. “Recorded outputs. What it does, over a period, in a form somebody who has never stood here can look at. Six months of it would be enough. They’re not asking you to change the work.”
“No,” Kavya said. “They’re asking me to end it.”
She did not say that unkindly and Deshpande did not take it that way. They went round it for two hours. It was the way two people go round a thing when both have already worked out the shape and neither wants to be the one to say it first.
The piece responded to how many people were near it, how fast they were breathing, roughly, and what time of day it thought it was by the light. It did not know anything. It noticed that something had changed, showed you the noticing, and refused to tell you what it meant.
The whole art was one sentence long.
“Six months of recorded outputs,” she said, “is a data set. You know that. You’ve worked in records.”
“I have.”
“Somebody will look at it. Not maliciously. Somebody perfectly decent will look at six months of outputs and find the correlation between crowd size and hue, because it’s there, because I built it, and then there will be a paragraph somewhere that says the work maps ambient occupancy to a colour gradient, and that paragraph will be entirely accurate.” Kavya turned a piece of wire over in her hands. “And it will be the end of it. Not because anybody stopped it. Because after that, everybody who comes to the courtyard will be watching a thing they have been told what it is.”
There was one record already, in the Archive, with Ruhi’s name in it, and a polite man had come down the lane with it. She was not going to write a second.
“You could not release the data.”
“They’d be funding a thing whose evidence they weren’t allowed to see. How long would that survive a change of chair?”
Deshpande did not answer, which was the answer.
“May I say the hard version,” Deshpande said, later.
“Please.”
“You’re going to say no, and you’re going to be right, and there is a cost, and I don’t think you’ve named it.” She looked at the structure. It had gone to something between the sky before rain and a bruise healing. It did this about once a fortnight, and Kavya had never once been able to predict it. “This runs off a tap that got throttled a year ago and will get throttled again. You are thirty-two. It is a scavenged assembly and you are the only person who can repair it. When your hands go, or when the tap goes and you haven’t the money that month, it stops, and there is no record anywhere that it existed, and in twenty years there will be four people in a lane who remember a light in a courtyard.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve thought about that.”
“I’ve thought about very little else since March,” Kavya said, “which I imagine is roughly when you started.”
She did not decide that evening.
She walked to the checkpoint with Samar afterward and told him the whole of it, and he listened without interrupting. When she had finished, he did the thing she had come, over a year, to be able to predict. He did not tell her what to do.
“What would you take,” he said eventually. “If you could take a piece of it.”
“The power. Only the power.” She had clearly already done this arithmetic. “A metered licensed line and nothing else. No documentation, no board, no submission standing. And they won’t do it, because a licensed line to an unregistered person in an unmapped subsector needs a justification, and the only justification available is the work, and the moment the work is the justification you’re back at the documentation.”
“So the answer’s no.”
“The answer’s no,” Kavya said. “It was no on the first evening. I’ve spent a fortnight looking for a version where it’s yes because I have a daughter and because I would like, once, to have said yes to something.”
She sent Deshpande three lines and thanked her properly.
Deshpande wrote back, three days later, on paper, which Kavya kept: I expected it and I am sorry about it and I would like to come again in the spring, not for the board.
She came in the spring. She has come most years since. She stands at the back and says nothing and goes home, and has never once mentioned the offer again. Once, in the third year, she brought a length of copper wire of a gauge that was extremely difficult to obtain in the margins. She put it down by the junction box without saying anything about it.
The piece is still there.
It has been re-routed four times, each time by Kavya, on a tap that will be throttled again, cut at the junction when the sector’s draw runs high.
There is no record of it anywhere. It has never been photographed by anyone whose photograph survived, it has never been submitted, it has never been scored, and its outputs have never once been written down.
On a Thursday evening in the autumn it goes to a colour it has never gone to before, in front of nine people, and nobody records it, and it does not happen again.
About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time.
Previous: Chapter 86: Aisha, Inside
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