2084: An Algorithmic State — Act II: Taste, Chapter 9: Kavya

Samar Varma approved what Kavya Nair’s file told him to approve. Three days later he stands in her courtyard in clothes that do not fit, beside a machine that changes colour and will not say why.

In Brief: Samar returns in daylight to the narrow lane across the river and finds Kavya Nair, the artist whose file he read. In her courtyard stands an installation of scavenged metal and glass that the Cultural Contribution board refused to fund three times. Kavya wants to know why a Handler has come.

He went back in daylight, three days later, in clothes he’d bought from a stall near the checkpoint. Clothes that didn’t fit him quite correctly, which was, once he had them on, precisely why they worked, since nothing the Grid produced ever fit a body wrong. And a person dressed slightly off was, out here, dressed like everyone else.

The lane was easier to find in daylight, though no less narrow. He walked its length past a wall of hand-lettered notices he couldn’t read fast enough to understand. He passed a doorway from which came the careful, repeating climb of someone practising scales on an instrument he didn’t recognise. It was not a sitar, not quite a santoor, but something with a voice between the two. Then the lane opened, without warning, into a small courtyard. He would not have believed it could exist behind buildings that gave no sign, from outside, of holding any space at all.

The courtyard held perhaps a dozen people. None of them looked at him the way the Grid would have trained them to, with the small calculated nod of a system confident in its own crowd modelling. A woman in the far corner sat cross-legged over a length of red cloth stretched taut on a frame. She was working a needle through a border pattern that had not yet become, to his eye, a shape. But the cloth itself was heavy and bright and clearly meant for an occasion rather than an ordinary day. It told him more plainly than any explanation that somewhere in this lane someone was getting married. The getting married would involve a great deal of cloth and time, and hands not being paid by the hour to do it. Two boys were teaching each other, badly and happily, a game with a rubber ball and a wall. The wall had three separate sets of chalk-marked rules layered over one another from different summers. And at the courtyard’s centre stood a structure he could not immediately name.

It stood roughly his own height, built from what looked like scavenged panels of dulled metal and glass. The panels were angled in a way that seemed at first accidental. Then, the longer he looked, they seemed precisely calibrated to be almost but not quite symmetrical. As he crossed toward it, the surface nearest him began, softly, to change colour. It was some kind of screen, he worked out slowly, though unlike any the Ministry made. Its light seemed to come from inside the metal rather than sit on top of it. It shifted through a gradient that had nothing to do, so far as he could tell, with anything he’d done.

“It’s not responding to you,” said a voice behind him, amused in a way that suggested this was a mistake visitors made often. “Not directly. It’s responding to how many people are near it, how fast their breathing is, roughly, and what time of day it thinks it is by the light. You’re one more person than it had a minute ago. That’s all you’ve done. Don’t flatter yourself.”

He turned. The woman was younger than her file had led him to imagine. Thirty-one, the file had said, and she looked it, but the file had rendered her as a set of tiers and thresholds. Nothing in a tier had prepared him for the directness of her attention. Or for the smear of something dark (solder, maybe, or paint) along the side of one hand. It was the hand of someone who’d been working on the structure that morning and hadn’t yet found a reason to stop.

“Kavya Nair,” he said, and regretted, the instant he said it, how much it sounded like the opening line of a file.

Something in her face closed, very slightly. It was not a slam, just a small settling, the economy of a door easing back into its frame under its own weight. “That’s a Ministry way to say hello.”

“I’m not...” He stopped. Whatever he’d been about to build would have been a lie. It was the specific kind of lie he’d promised himself, crossing the checkpoint three days ago, that he would not tell. “I used to be sure I wasn’t. I’m less sure now.”

She studied him with the same unhurried attention she’d given the structure. She walked a slow half-circle around him, the way she might around a new piece of scrap she hadn’t yet decided had a use. It was the attention of someone whose whole practice was built on not assuming she already knew what she was looking at. “You’re a Grid face wearing Chowk clothes that don’t fit you, standing in a courtyard asking for a name you already knew how to pronounce correctly on the first try, which most Grid people don’t manage.” She folded her arms, not hostile, only precise. “So. Which are you. A Handler who’s come to apologise to a file, or a Handler who’s come to see if the file is a person before he decides how he feels about what he already did to her.”

He had rehearsed nothing in three days of intending to come back, and the truth arrived before any better-built answer could. “I don’t know which of those I am. I know I read your file. I know I approved what it told me to approve. I know I submitted an override afterward that changed nothing, and I know I’ve thought about your daughter’s allocation every day since, in a way I’ve never thought about a file in eleven years of reading them.”

Something changed in her. It was not softening but a recalibration, the look of a person revising an estimate rather than abandoning it. She set one hand flat against the structure’s cool metal edge, the way a person touches a table they’ve built themselves while they think. “Every Handler thinks about the ones that trouble them. For a week. Then the next four thousand arrive and the trouble becomes a story you tell at a canteen table about the time you almost cared.” She said it without particular bitterness, as a fact about how the world worked rather than an accusation aimed at him. “Why are you still thinking about mine.”

“Because your file said you told them you were asking them to feed a person, not a probability. And the system didn’t keep your actual words. It kept a summary, and then decided the summary wasn’t enough to change anything. And I can’t stop noticing that the thing it erased was the only true thing in the whole file.”

While they talked, the structure behind her had shifted to a colour he had no name for, something between the sky before rain and a bruise healing. Watching it, he saw that it had been responding the whole time not to him exactly, but to whatever was happening between them. It was some aggregate the machine measured that neither of them had chosen to show it.

“It does that,” Kavya said, following his eyes to it, and something in her posture eased a fraction. “It notices that something’s changed, shows you the noticing, and refuses to tell you what it means.” She looked back at him. “The Cultural Contribution board declined to fund it three times. High variance in audience response, they said. Couldn’t be reliably resourced.” A small, unamused smile. “They weren’t wrong. It is high variance. Some days it makes people cry. Some days they think it’s broken.”

From somewhere above them a child’s voice drifted down. It came from a window, he realised, on the second floor of the building behind the far wall. The voice was unaccompanied, working through a tune that wandered off its own melody every few bars and found its way back each time without embarrassment about having left it. It was the way a person hums who has never been told a tune belongs to somebody else and has to be reproduced correctly. Kavya’s head turned toward it before the rest of her seemed to decide to let it. For a fraction of a second, every careful precision she’d been holding in her folded arms and her level voice simply stopped mattering. Then the window went quiet, and the singer wandered on to some other private business inside the flat. Kavya’s attention came back to him with the effort of someone resuming a weight they’d set down for exactly as long as they could afford to.

She did not explain the sound. He did not ask her to.

“What does it do today?”

“I don’t know yet,” Kavya said. “Neither does it. Come back at sunset and we’ll both find out.”

She did not invite him to stay for the hours between. He stood a moment at the mouth of the lane afterward. The embroiderer still working her cloth, the boys still arguing three summers of chalk rules, Kavya already turned back to the structure with the focus of someone returning to unfinished work. And then he went.

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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Next: Chapter 10: The Noise