2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XVII: The Unfinished, Chapter 92: Dev, Alone

For twenty-six years Dev Sharma knew a longer recording of his night at Gate Four existed. He never asked to see it. On a Tuesday, in plain clothes, he sits down in a low chair in the Archive and asks for all four minutes.

In Brief: Secretary Dev Sharma goes to the general Archive alone for the first time in twenty-six years. He asks for the full recording of the night at Gate Four, not the eleven seconds Samar once saw. He wants to know whether the voice is his, and whether the queue was fed.

Dev had never once, in twenty-six years, visited the Archive himself. It was on a theory he had never fully examined, that a Secretary who wrote the history did not need to go looking for it as an ordinary citizen might.

He went the week after Sector 4-West first crossed his morning brief. Walking there, he could not have said whether the two things were connected by any reasoning he could have defended to Rao, or to the committee, or even to himself. He was watching a number he could no longer act on alone. For the first time in years, it had left him genuinely uncertain what his own life’s work had actually amounted to. A man uncertain of his life’s work eventually runs out of places to look, except backward, toward the one night everything else had been built to answer for.

He went on a Tuesday, alone, without informing his own staff. His clothes were plain enough that the young officer at the reading room’s terminal did not recognise him. It was the first small mercy the visit offered him. He could sit in a low chair at an archival screen as simply an old man. He did not have to be the Secretary of a government the better part of a billion people trusted with their lives.

He requested the full record, not the fragment: the night in 2058 when he had been the Registrar at the relief depot at Gate Four. For twenty-six years he had known that a longer recording existed somewhere behind the eleven seconds Samar Varma had once watched. His own staff had mentioned it in passing, years ago. They used the careful tone of people who understood a subject was closed and did not intend to be the ones to reopen it. In all that time he had never once asked to see the rest of it. His theory was that not asking preserved a version of the story flexible enough to be whatever he needed it to be, on whatever day he needed it most. He understood now that the theory had been cowardice wearing patience’s clothes.

The recording ran four minutes in full, not eleven seconds. He watched a younger version of himself standing in the same corridor. This Dev was thinner, exhausted past any exhaustion he had felt since. He recognised the face the way you recognise a photograph of a stranger who happens to share your name. The younger man said the same sentence about the queue outside Gate Four. Then, in the minutes the Archive had never shown Samar, he said considerably more. The caption beneath it still named the speaker a Secretary of the old Ministry of Food and Civil Supplies, a rank he had never held. That summer’s broken records had promoted him, as they had misfiled so much else, and in twenty-six years nobody had needed it corrected.

I have read the schedule eleven times since yesterday evening, the younger Dev said, to someone off-camera whose reply the recording had never captured, only the silence where it should have been. I was hoping it would say something different on the twelfth. Feed them tonight, and let the paperwork catch up to what we did rather than to what we were permitted to do. I will carry whatever it costs either of us tomorrow.

The recording ended there, the corridor empty again, no answer ever given. Dev sat in the low chair for a long time afterward. He understood finally, without a shadow of the doubt he had nursed for twenty-six years, that the voice was his own. The Archive could prove nothing to him technically. But he recognised, in the exact shape of that sentence, the exact grammar of every private mercy he had gone on to grant in the decades since. It was the same plea, aimed always at the same target: a system that would not let a person simply decide, and a man who could not stop himself from deciding anyway.

He did not learn whether the queue was fed. Exactly as he had always been told, the record broke apart at that point into the general chaos of the Collapse’s worst weeks. The ration logs were incomplete. Hospital admissions from that district had been lost to a data failure. The Archive’s own notice described the loss as irrecoverable, and not, in the Archive’s judgement, worth reconstructing from secondary testimony that could not be verified. It said so with what struck him now as the same rare flicker of embarrassment he had once heard Samar mention to him in passing.

He would go the rest of his life without knowing whether the queue was fed. Walking out of the reading room, he found that he could hold it now without its collapsing him.

He walked home slowly that evening, past the rear gate where the newer dog waited, still wary, still not fully his. He sat with her longer than usual, saying nothing at all this time.

He did not tell Rao about the visit, or the recording, or what he had finally allowed himself to hear in it. It was not concealment in any sense the charter would have cause to examine, only the last private thing a man was permitted to keep entirely his own. He would go back to Sector 4-West tomorrow, and the joint review, and whatever slower version of himself the last year had built.

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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