2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XVII: The Unfinished, Chapter 90: The Crack Elsewhere

Sector 4-West has lost 2.1 points of confidence across 6,214 determinations, and no one can say why. The first person to feel it is Pushpa Devi, whose tailoring licence has renewed cleanly for eleven years.

In Brief: Months after the amendment that curbed his powers, Secretary Dev Sharma sees a small, untraceable decline in Sector 4-West, the same shape as the one in 12-East. Under the new rules he must work through Director Meghna Rao. In the same sector, a tailor named Pushpa Devi finds her licence renewal flagged for review.

Dev read the morning brief in full, as he had every morning for twenty years. On an otherwise unremarkable Thursday some months after the amendment’s ratification, he found a line in Sector 4-West’s aggregate. His eye caught it as it had once caught a similar line about a sector he had not, at the time, known would come to occupy the whole of his final years in office.

Sector 4-West: confidence decline, 2.1 points, distributed across 6,214 discrete determinations. No traceable dominant cause. Consistent with architecture, Section 3, Subsection 1.

Two points. Smaller than 12-East’s six had been, in the first weeks of the cascade that had spread to fourteen sectors. He stayed with the line a long time. Reading it, he understood that he was looking at the identical shape of a thing he had once spent three sleepless nights failing to name. It was arriving now in a part of the city he had never once had personal cause to think about. It was arriving to citizens whose names he did not know, and whose files he had no discretion left to quietly protect, even if he had wanted to.

In Sector 4-West that same morning, a woman named Pushpa Devi filed a routine renewal for her small tailoring licence. She had filed this paperwork without incident for eleven years running. This time she received, for the first time, a notice flagging the renewal for additional review. It was nothing dramatic. She would not think twice about it beyond the small, private irritation of a fortnight’s delay. Every citizen absorbed that kind of thing now and then, and rarely thought to connect it to anything larger than an overworked office somewhere. She filed the paperwork a second time, as the notice requested. She had no way of knowing that her delay was the very first visible edge of the 2.1 points sitting in Dev Sharma’s morning brief. Her stalled licence and a Secretary’s sleepless night were twenty kilometres and every possible distance of power apart. In the model’s own architecture they had already become the same fact, long before either of them had any way of knowing it.

He did not query the model directly this time. The committee had imposed a mandatory co-review, and it required him to route the concern through Meghna Rao’s office before he took any action of his own. He had proposed the requirement himself, in the hearing room, as the only remedy he could honestly offer. Sitting with the brief, he found that proposing a thing and living inside its actual friction were not quite the same experience.

He called Rao that afternoon, for the first time since the ruling. Her voice, answering, carried a wariness. She had not expected to hear from him again outside the formal channel they were both now obligated to use.

“Sector 4-West,” he said, without preamble. “Two points, distributed, no traceable cause. I wanted you to see it before it became something either of us would have to explain not having caught early.”

There was a pause on the line, and in it Rao was doing the same arithmetic he was. The amendment they had built together, after everything that had happened in 12-East, addressed the disclosure of a gap, not the gap’s actual origin. Nothing in the charter’s new text gave either of them a faster way to intervene.

“I’ll open a joint review this afternoon,” Rao said finally. “A joint review is slower than your old discretion was, by design. That was the entire point of what we built. I don’t know if two points becomes six the way Twelve-East’s six became fourteen sectors before anyone stopped it.”

“Do you regret it. The amendment.”

“No.” She said this without hesitation. The certainty of it meant she had already turned this exact question over many times before he ever asked it aloud. “I regret that fixing the thing I was actually assigned to fix, an unaccountable Secretary, has done nothing at all to fix the thing underneath it. We built a very good answer to a question about oversight, Secretary Sharma, and I am no longer certain oversight was ever the actual disease.”

Dev did not sleep well that night. It was an old and familiar unrest by now. Before dawn he found himself at the rear gate. The old dog, who had eaten from his hands at this gate for nine years, was gone now. She had been buried last winter, in a corner of the compound he had chosen himself, without any paperwork attached to that decision either. A newer one was in her place, younger and warier. She had wandered in within the week and had not yet decided to fully trust him. But she tolerated his company at this hour, and he had come to accept that as the only kind of trust he had any right left to expect from anything.

“Sector 4-West,” he told it, because there was no one else awake in the whole of the Grid to tell.

The censure in his file had done exactly what it was designed to do. It had made him slower, and more careful, and more honestly answerable to a process larger than his own conscience. And it had bought Pushpa Devi’s stalled licence not one hour back.

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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