2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XVII: The Unfinished, Chapter 89: What Ruhi Remembers
At six, Ruhi was carried across a checkpoint at dawn and named in a Handler’s testimony. At twenty-two she reads it for the first time, with a ninety-one per cent match from the Union Bureau still unanswered.
In Brief: Ruhi, the child at the centre of Samar’s testimony, is now twenty-two. She goes to the Archive to read the full record of what her mother, Samar and her great-grandmother refused. A Union Bureau notice matching her with a man named Devesh is waiting for her answer.
Ruhi was twenty-two when she finally read the testimony properly.
She read it in the same low chair, at the same archival terminal Samar had once described to her years ago.
She had known the shape of it her whole life. A man had once given up his job over her. Her name sat somewhere in a government record that neither of her parents fully controlled. For one bad week, when she was perhaps six, this fact had brought a stranger into the lane asking questions. Her mother still would not discuss that week in any detail, even now. She had not read the actual words until this year. There was no occasion she could point to, beyond having finally reached the age the charter required.
I want to record that I have met the child in question. Her name is Ruhi. She is six years old.
She stayed with that sentence longer than she had expected to. She was in it at six, sung about, argued over, carried across a checkpoint at dawn, and she remembered none of it.
What she actually remembered was smaller, and stranger, and less obviously important. She remembered the specific weight of a cup of water tasting, for one particular afternoon, unlike any water before or since. She could no longer say for certain whether the memory was real, or whether it had been built slowly out of hearing the story told so many times. She remembered a red cloth strung overhead at a wedding, and falling asleep on a bench no one thought to move her from. She remembered Samar’s hand and her mother’s hand, one in each of hers, swinging. The rhythm had nothing to do with anything except the three of them walking somewhere ordinary on an ordinary evening. She did not remember the fever at all, not really. There was only a confused, feverish impression of ceilings and voices. It was nothing like the crisis the adults still sometimes mentioned in careful, lowered tones when they thought she was not fully listening.
She remembered, most clearly of everything, a tune. She had apparently hummed it before she could properly talk, and she still caught herself humming it sometimes, unbidden, at odd hours. She had never once been able to find its source in any song she had heard since. Over the years she had come to suspect she had simply made it.
The Union Bureau’s notification had arrived three weeks earlier, unrequested. It came in the same small, persistent corner of her own terminal that had once, she knew now, delivered a similar notice to Samar. That notice was about a compatibility score he had never fully explained to her until she was old enough to ask properly. Ninety-one per cent, with a man named Devesh she had met twice. The second time, he had asked her what the tune was, which nobody outside the courtyard had ever thought to do. She had not been able to tell him, and he had seemed to find that satisfactory.
He had taken a pen from his shirt pocket, the kind with a cap, and asked her to hum it once more. She hummed it, badly, at a canteen table with the Bureau’s own printed notice lying between them. He turned the notice over and wrote on the back of it, five or six marks she could not read, and his hand did not hurry. Then he folded the paper once and pushed it across to her.
“For when you find it,” he said.
She kept it folded inside the cover of her terminal, and had not unfolded it since.
Her mother and Samar had never married, in the end, not in any form the Union Bureau or the qazi two lanes over would have recognised. Ruhi had asked about this only once, at sixteen. In answer her mother had given her a long look that told her more than any explanation would have. They had simply gone on, year after year, in the shape they had found early on and never formally revised. Samar’s name never once appeared on any document beside her mother’s. The two of them were a fact of Ruhi’s life so constant that sometime in her teens she had stopped thinking of it as unusual at all. Samar worked now for a small, unregistered clinic two sectors over. It was the kind of work that paid little and answered to no confidence threshold. He came home most evenings smelling of antiseptic and someone else’s fear, and these days he was entirely unbothered by how long anything took.
She had not yet answered the Bureau’s notification. She sat in the Archive with her own six-year-old self open on the screen in front of her. She had come here first because, before answering anything, she wanted to read in full the story she had only ever been given in careful, protective fragments. She wanted to know exactly what her mother had refused, and what Samar had given up. She wanted to know what a great-grandmother she had never met had declined, alone, at a terminal with a queue twelve hours long behind her. Then she would decide for herself what ninety-one per cent was actually worth weighing against.
She closed the testimony. She did not yet know what she would tell the Bureau.
An elderly man sat in the corner on her way out, headphones over both ears, watching something on a screen too far away for her to see. He was weeping without any of the sounds of weeping. She did not ask what he was watching. Walking past him, she wondered whether he had been coming for years, or had only just started. The Archive itself would never tell her, and had never been built to.
She walked home the long way, past the courtyard where the installation still stood, still cycling through its patient, unexplained colours. A cup of water, a red cloth, two hands swinging hers between them, a tune with no source. She had not answered the Bureau by the time she got home, and did not answer it that night either.
About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time.
Previous: Chapter 88: Renu’s Unwritten List
Comments