2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XVII: The Unfinished, Chapter 91: Pushpa Devi’s Licence

Aisha has signed more than nine hundred files. She fought about sixty. Four she still thinks were wrong. Then Samar, two years out, comes to her office to ask how she saved one tailor’s licence.

In Brief: Aisha, still a Handler, finds Pushpa Devi’s flagged licence through a sorting rule she built herself, and clears it with one signed sentence. Samar, who resigned two years ago, visits her office for the first time. In the canteen he asks her how she lives with the files she signs the other way.

The file reached Aisha’s desk because of a sorting rule, and the sorting rule had put it there because of a word.

Sector 4-West was not hers. She had never allocated to it, never read a file from it, could not have named a street in it. But the renewal notice attached to Pushpa Devi’s tailoring licence had a free-text field, filled in by hand by a district clerk. It carried the phrase filed a second time as requested. Aisha had spent most of a year quietly building a sorting rule. It pulled any file containing second time, again, or as requested into a queue she read on Thursday afternoons. Her theory was that a citizen who has done the same thing twice has usually not made a mistake. The theory was unstated in any document, because the theory would have generated an argument, and the sorting rule generated only a queue.

It took her forty minutes.

Thirty-one of them were reading. The licence had renewed without incident for eleven years. The 2.1-point sectoral decline had raised the review threshold across 4-West. The margin caught, among six thousand other determinations, a tailoring licence that had not itself changed in any particular. The flag was not about Pushpa Devi. Nothing in the file was about Pushpa Devi.

Nine minutes were the form.

Section 6, Subsection 4 permitted an expedited review where the reviewing office was satisfied the flag arose from classification error. The flag had not arisen from classification error. It had arisen from a threshold shift, which was a different thing, and which the subsection did not cover. But the subsection did not define classification error. The drafting note appended to it in 2069 gave an illustrative example, a determination flagged by reason of a change in the classification framework rather than in the citizen’s own circumstances. And a threshold shift was, if you were prepared to write the sentence and put your name under it, a change in the classification framework.

Aisha wrote the sentence and put her name under it.

The licence cleared the following Tuesday. Pushpa Devi received a notice, filed it with the previous eleven, and did not think about it again. She had already absorbed the fortnight’s delay the way she had absorbed a hundred other fortnights, as weather.

Samar came in February, to the office, which he had never done.

He had been two years out by then and had the look of it. She watched him find her desk among forty others. He was not diminished, she thought, but pared, the way a man looks when he has stopped spending anything on the parts of himself other people used to read. They went down to the ground-floor canteen because there was nowhere else. He asked after Shabana, her mother, and she asked after Ruhi. Then he said what he had come to say, which was that he had heard about 4-West.

“I want to understand how you did it,” he said. “That’s all. I’m not here to argue.”

“You are, a bit.”

“I might be.”

So she told him. The sorting rule, the free-text field, the drafting note from 2069, the sentence she had written and signed. It took four minutes and he listened to all of it the way he listened to everything now, which was completely.

“And the ones you sign the other way,” he said, when she had finished.

“Yes.”

“How many.”

“Since I started? A little over nine hundred.” She had the number because she had made herself have the number. “I could tell you I fought them all. I didn’t. I fought about sixty. The rest I read properly and signed, and most of those were correct, and some of them I will never know about, and four of them I still think were wrong and I signed them anyway because I was three months from a thing I needed and I made a calculation.”

Samar did not say anything for a moment.

“That’s what I couldn’t do,” he said.

“I know.”

“Let me get this right,” he said. “I’ve spent two years telling myself that leaving was the honest position. That there wasn’t a version of staying that wasn’t complicity. And I’ve built... I’ve built quite a lot on that. A ledger. A way of getting up in the morning.”

“I know what you’ve built. Kavya tells me.”

“So tell me it’s wrong.”

Aisha thought about it properly, because he had asked properly.

“I don’t think it’s wrong,” she said. “I think it’s not a position. I think you left because you couldn’t carry it, and that’s not a failure, and it’s also not a principle, and you’ve spent two years making it into one because a principle is easier to live beside than a limit.” She let that sit, because it was hard and because softening it would have been for her and not for him. “I carry it. That’s the entire difference between us. I can hold a thing I hate for nine hundred files and keep my hands steady, and you couldn’t.”

“Pushpa Devi got her licence.”

“Pushpa Devi got her licence.”

“And the woman who came after her didn’t.”

“Probably.” She did not look away. “Almost certainly, some week, someone did not, because I was reading Thursdays and not Wednesdays, or because the sorting rule catches again and not once more. I have no instrument for that. Nobody does.”

He nodded slowly, and she saw him arrive at the place she had known he would arrive at. She had arrived at it herself in her first year, and it was the only place the road went.

“Then how do you know,” he said. “Any of it. How do you know you’re not just... a person who found a way to keep the salary.”

“I don’t.”

He waited for the rest of it.

“That’s the answer, Samar. There isn’t more of it. I don’t know.” She turned her own cup, once, without noticing. “And you should know that the thing that frightens me is not the nine hundred. It’s that every year I stay, the woman who walked in here at thirty-two is further away, and I can’t measure the distance, and there is no year in which I will wake up and be told I have gone too far. It just gets further. That’s what you were right about. It was never the signing.”

He walked her to the checkpoint afterward, which was out of his way, and they did not resolve it, because it did not resolve.

At the barrier he said, “I don’t have an answer for you.”

“No,” Aisha said. “I noticed.”

She said it without any edge at all, and went back through the barrier. She went back to a desk with nine hundred files behind it and a drawer with a year of work in it that nobody would ever attribute to her.

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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