2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XVI: Distribution, Chapter 88: Renu’s Unwritten List
Renu’s network has no list and has never met in one room. It is nine Handlers in four buildings who take longer over their files. In the fourteenth month, one of them remembers a citizen ID she saw four months before.
In Brief: A year in, Renu knows nine Handlers who take longer over their files. They have never been in one room together, but every one of them knows Renu. In the fourteenth month, one Handler’s memory of a citizen ID leads Renu to an error nobody had caught.
A year in, there were nine.
Renu knew the number the way you know the number of stairs in your own building. She had never counted on purpose and could not have been wrong.
There was no list. She had been very clear with herself about that from the first conversation, and she had held to it. In the fourth month there had been a considerable temptation, when it briefly seemed that a list would make the thing manageable. She had gone as far as opening a document before shutting it again.
What there was instead was nine people in four buildings. None of them had ever been in a room together, and most of them did not know each other’s names. Every one of them knew Renu’s.
That was the flaw. She had identified it early and could see no way round it. A structure with no list has a centre, and the centre is a person, and if the centre goes the whole thing goes.
She had said this out loud exactly once, to her uncle, who had said, “Yes,” and then, after a moment, “Then you had better find somebody else who is doing it too, so that when they take you it does not all go.”
She had not found anybody. She had not, in truth, looked very hard, and she knew why, and it was not a good reason.
The conversations were not what she had expected.
In the beginning she had prepared something close to a speech: the six seconds, the architecture, the amendment, the thing she had put her name on. She used it twice and stopped using it, because both times the person had agreed with every word and nothing had happened afterward.
What worked was smaller and considerably less satisfying.
It was: you took a long time over that one.
Said at a tea counter, in passing, without weight. Roughly one Handler in four looked up. Of those, about half said something like long day, and the conversation ended, and Renu never raised it again with that person. The others said something else. It could be anything else, a detail, a name, there was a photograph. That was the whole recruitment, and it took under a minute, and there was never a second stage that felt like a second stage.
Vikram had taken a fortnight. Vikram had been the hardest and remained the most useful, because Vikram was fast and everybody trusted the fast ones. A fast man saying I sat with one for twelve seconds last week to another fast man did something Renu could not do at any speed.
What the nine actually did was almost nothing, and Renu had to keep re-explaining this to herself, particularly in bad weeks.
They did not change outcomes. There was no outcome to change. The determination was executed before any of them opened anything, and after the amendment the interface said so in plain type at the top of every file.
They took longer. That was most of it. They took nine seconds and twelve seconds. In one case, a woman on the fourth floor who had been at it twenty-four years took as long as she liked.
They knew things. When a file came through a second time, somebody in the building remembered it had come through a first time. The system did not do that and had never been asked to do it.
And once every few months, one of them noticed something and said it to another of them, and occasionally that went somewhere.
In the fourteenth month it went somewhere.
A Handler on the third floor noticed a citizen ID she had seen four months earlier under a different household composition. Renu will not name her, has never named her, will not name her in the ledger she keeps by hand at night, which no one will read. The Handler mentioned it at a tea counter, and it reached Renu in the ordinary way, which was somebody saying I don’t know if this is anything.
It was something. It took Renu nine evenings to establish what. It turned out to be an intake error at a single counter, going back twenty-two months. The error had been silently splitting certain multi-generational households into two records and allocating both at single-household rates.
Not malice. Not the model. A field mapping in an intake build from 2081 had been wrong on one specific combination of inputs. Nothing anywhere had been built to catch it, because the model does not audit its inputs. It consumes them.
She disclosed it. Formally, under the same clause she had used for the six seconds, with her name on it.
Her file was flagged for review within the week, and she was moved to a desk by the lift, where nobody stayed long and nobody stopped to talk.
It was fixed in nine weeks. Four hundred and six households in three sectors were reassessed. Nobody was told why. There was no announcement, because an announcement would have required somebody to describe the error. The description would have been for twenty-two months this Ministry allocated to some of your grandparents as though they lived alone.
She did not tell the nine.
That surprised her, in the doing of it. She had assumed, in the abstract, that the first time the thing produced a result she would want them all to know. They would have earned it, and it would hold them.
What she found instead, sitting with the notification of the fix, was different. Telling them would turn nine people who took a long time over files into a group that had achieved something. A group that has achieved something starts wanting to achieve something else. The wanting is a shape, and the shape is what gets modelled.
So she told one person, which was Vikram, because he had done the actual noticing at one remove and it was not hers to keep from him.
Vikram said, “Four hundred and six households.”
“Yes.”
“And nobody knows.”
“No.”
He turned his cup, which he had started doing at some point in the year and which Renu had never mentioned to him.
“That’s going to be the whole of it, isn’t it,” he said. “For the rest of my career. Things that get fixed and nobody knows.”
“I think so.”
“Right,” Vikram said, and finished his tea, and went back up.
Her ledger for that night is four lines and does not mention the households.
Fourteen months. Nine. Told V about the intake thing. Not the others. Uncle would say I’m building a centre and he’d be right. Haven’t found anyone else doing it and haven’t looked properly, because if there is someone I’d have to trust them, and I have got very good this year at being the only one who knows things. Working on 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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