2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XVII: The Unfinished, Chapter 93: Samar’s Ledger
Samar approved Harish Oberoi’s file before the chime finished sounding. Sixty-two, a moustache going white on one side first, confidence 97.1. Years later he asks the Archive what happened to the man.
In Brief: Samar, two years out of his Handler’s job, now keeps a ledger of his own. He has never followed up on any of the four thousand files he closed in his last year. He uses the Archive access his resignation still gives him to look up one man he approved in seven seconds.
Samar had kept a ledger of his own for most of a year now. It was a habit he had taken up without ever quite admitting to Renu that she was the reason for it. It was a plain notebook, bought from the same stall near the checkpoint where he had once bought clothes that didn’t fit him correctly on purpose.
He wrote in it most nights, a line or two. It was nothing as disciplined as Renu’s thirteen years of unbroken entries. But he knew the impulse behind it now in a way he had not when she first described the habit to him. That had been at a canteen table that felt, these days, like it belonged to someone else’s life entirely. He had filled most of a year’s worth of pages with the ordinary record of an ordinary life. There were Ruhi’s small victories and small griefs, Kavya’s installation and its unnamed colours, the courtyard’s slow accumulation of days. Then, one evening, he let himself write the entry he had been circling for months without quite admitting he was circling it.
I have never once gone back to see what happened to any of them.
He had four thousand files behind him from that one year alone, and some tens of thousands across the eleven. Writing the sentence, he saw that he had built his entire resignation and testimony around a single file, Kavya’s and Ruhi’s. The other three thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine of that year had simply gone on existing, unexamined. They sat in the limbo a Handler’s attention leaves behind once it moves on to the next chime.
He requested the record the following week, using the access his resignation still entitled him to for a few years yet. He searched for a man whose name he had never known, though he had spent considerable effort, across a testimony and the years since, not thinking about him directly. It was a man of sixty-two, in Sector 4-South, with a moustache going white unevenly, one side ahead of the other. Marginal utility, declining across fifteen of sixteen modelled futures. Confidence 97.1. Approved in the time it took a chime to finish sounding, on an ordinary Tuesday morning. That morning had also been, though Samar had not known it at the time, the second morning of the asterisk the towers had set over Sector 12-East.
The man’s name had been Harish Oberoi. Samar held the name a long moment. It was the first time in his life he had let himself learn it. Yet he had held the man’s whole remaining future in his hands for the seven seconds it took to close the file.
Harish Oberoi had died eleven months after the allocation reduction, of causes the record described in the flat clinical language every record used. He died at a facility two sectors from where he had lived, with no family member listed as present. There was no drama in the file. No cascade had caught his case. No Secretary had ever seen his name, no correlation had ever flagged him, no Handler had ever crossed a checkpoint on his behalf. The reduction had simply done, over eleven quiet months, exactly what the model had projected it would do. The file had closed itself as every file eventually closed itself. It made no further comment on whether Harish Oberoi had understood one thing in his final months. A stranger’s seven seconds, eleven months before, had set the whole of what remained of his life onto the exact curve it had followed.
Samar did not cry, reading this. Closing the record, he found that some part of him had expected to, and that the absence felt like its own kind of failure. It was as though even his grief had learned, across those years, to arrive on a schedule. That schedule made sense to no one but the version of him that had once measured everything in seven-second windows.
He thought of Ruhi, safe and whole, running through a courtyard with a lamp cupped in her hands. Hers was the single file out of four thousand that had produced a testimony, a resignation, an entire second life.
Searching, he had found a document he had not been looking for. The Archive returned everything and sorted it by nothing, as it had the first time. He recognised the document, which he would not have done at twenty-nine. It was a manifest from 2061 with four Sanskrit words in it, the names the modules still carried, and a fifth struck through. Some years ago it had been moved into the active specification by a hand the record did not name.
He looked up the words this time.
Then he sat for a while with what they told him. The whole apparatus had been correctly described, before it was built, by a woman who left three years later. She left because she could not get the last line of the description written in a form the standard would accept. And he had spent eleven years inside RAŚMI without once asking whose hand was supposed to be on the other end of it.
He wrote, that night, the longest entry his ledger had held since he began it.
Harish Oberoi. Sixty-two. Moustache, white unevenly, one side ahead of the other. I approved his file in under a chime. He died eleven months later, alone, exactly as predicted. I do not know how many more of the four thousand I owe this same search. I know I cannot search them all and still have a life left over to live inside. I do not know yet how to hold both of those facts at once without either one making the other into a lie.
Kavya found him still awake near midnight, the ledger closed on the table but his hands not yet ready to leave it. She did not ask what was wrong so much as simply sit beside him, as she had learned to do over the better part of two years. She understood that some of his silences wanted company more than they wanted questions.
He told her about Harish Oberoi eventually, in pieces. She listened the way she listened to everything that mattered, without interrupting, until he reached the part about not crying and not understanding why.
“You cried for Ruhi,” she said, not as an accusation, simply as a fact laid beside another fact. “Grief doesn’t scale the way arithmetic scales. I’d rather have you sitting here honestly unable to cry than performing enough of it to cover four thousand names.”
“Does that mean I should stop looking. If I can’t carry what I find.”
“No.” She said this plainly, without softening it. “I think you should keep looking, slowly, one name at a time, for exactly as long as you can do it without it swallowing the life you’re actually living now. I don’t think Harish Oberoi needed you to grieve him properly tonight. What you can give him isn’t grief. It’s not letting him be a number twice.”
He closed the ledger, and sat for a while in the dark.
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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