2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XVII: The Unfinished, Chapter 94: The Gate Left Open

Dev Sharma wakes at 4:50, eleven minutes before his house expects him. For nine months the rear gate’s latch has been fully closed. This morning the dog does not go to her bowl.

In Brief: Sector 4-West has risen to 2.4 points and the joint review is still deliberating. At dawn Dev carries food to the rear gate, where the younger dog has spent weeks with her nose at the gap under the hinge. He stands with his hand on the latch.

Dev woke at 4:50, as he had for more than twenty years now, eleven minutes before his household systems expected him to. He made his own tea, standing at the small stove in the anteroom. He measured by feel, the way his wife had taught him decades before either of them could have imagined the life the measuring would eventually accompany.

Sector 4-West sat at 2.4 points now, up from 2.1, and the joint review was still deliberating. Director Meghna Rao’s office and his own moved through the new, slower machinery they had built together. They moved with a care that read, some mornings, as wisdom, and other mornings as grief. He had stopped expecting either of them to resolve it quickly. He had not stopped checking the brief each morning, in full. It was the one discipline of his career he suspected he would keep until the last morning he was able to.

This morning the line had moved.

Sector 4-West: confidence decline, 2.6 points, up from 2.4, distributed across 6,391 discrete determinations. No traceable dominant cause. Licence renewals held pending additional review: 212. Joint review (Rao, M. / Sharma, D.): deliberation continues. No unilateral action authorised.

He read it twice, as he read everything in the brief, and then once more for the renewals. Two hundred and twelve licences, each one a fortnight’s delay for somebody whose name the line did not carry. The last sentence was new. Rao’s office had added it, and he had asked for it himself, in the hearing room, and this was the first morning he had seen it printed.

He carried the younger dog’s food to the rear gate as he always did, and found her waiting. She was not at her usual spot pressed against the fence, but a few feet further along. Her nose was lifted toward the gap beneath the gate’s lower hinge. The morning air came through there, carrying whatever the wind had gathered from the unmapped streets beyond the Grid’s edge. He had noticed this restlessness in her for weeks now. She had a way of standing at the boundary of her small permitted world. It reminded him, more than he was entirely comfortable admitting, of a version of himself he had spent twenty-six years trying not to become again.

It had started, as best he could recall, sometime after the wind shifted toward autumn. The mornings arrived with a different smell than the compound’s own carefully filtered air ever produced. There was woodsmoke, frying oil, and the particular mineral tang of a market he had never once visited and could not have named the streets of. In the weeks since, she had taken to sitting for long stretches with her nose an inch from the gate’s lower gap. She sat motionless, patient in a way that had nothing to do with waiting for food. It had everything to do with a body listening to something on the other side of a boundary it had never been permitted to cross. Some mornings Dev had watched this from his window, his tea going cold. Each time he had told himself that he was only watching a dog being a dog. And each time he had known that he was watching something closer to a question he did not yet have the nerve to answer.

He set the bowl down. She did not move to it immediately, which she had never once done before in the nine months since she had wandered in.

The gate’s latch had never once, in nine months, been anything but fully closed. Dev stood with his hand on it now, an old man in the grey hour before a Grid morning officially began. He was about to do something his entire career had trained him not to do. He would leave a boundary open, not by oversight, not by the kind of accident a system could eventually learn to correct for, but by a decision. It would be made plainly, by one person, for reasons he did not fully intend to write down anywhere a committee might one day ask him to explain.

He did not close the latch fully.

He told himself, walking back toward the main house, that this was carelessness, the kind an old man’s hands were entitled to on a morning when his mind was elsewhere. It was not carelessness. Some part of him had been standing at that gate for nine months, watching a dog lean her nose into a gap in a fence. This particular grey morning, it had finally decided that a boundary he had built to protect something was no longer only his to keep closed on her behalf.

He did not look back to see whether she used it.

He drank the rest of his tea standing at the kitchen window. The compound was quiet in the particular way it was quiet only at this hour, before the Grid’s own systems began their day’s calibrations. He listened for a sound that did not come.

Behind him, in the widening grey light, the gate stood exactly as he’d left it, not open, not closed, but simply unlatched.

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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