2084: An Algorithmic State — Epilogue: The Dog

A dog walks five kilometres of the most closely modelled ground on earth and nobody puts anything down for her. Past the checkpoint, a fruit seller drops half a spoiled guava beside her cart wheel without looking.

In Brief: At dawn the younger dog walks out through the rear gate Dev Sharma left unlatched. Because she is in no registry, the Grid’s Prediction Towers do not see her. She crosses the Lutyens Grid and the checkpoint into the lanes beyond, with no one sending her anywhere.

The rear gate of a Secretary’s compound, the Lutyens Grid, Delhi. A morning in 2085.

The dog walked through the gate a little after dawn, unhurried, the way she walked everywhere, and did not know, walking, that she had crossed anything at all.

She did not know that the gate had been left unlatched on purpose, by a man who would not look back to see whether she used it. She did not know that this was the first time in nine months anyone had given her the choosing of her own direction. She knew only that the gap was wider than it had been. On the other side of it the wind was carrying something the compound’s swept air had never once held.

She did not know she was the second. There had been another before her, greyer and slower and better at this. That one had come to the same gate and eaten from the same hands for nine years. The first dog was now in a corner of the compound, under a stone the man had chosen himself, without paperwork attached to that decision either. She did not know that the man had stood at the gate for six days after the first one stopped coming, with a bowl he did not put down. She had appeared at the end of the sixth day. For a long moment he had been unable to decide whether what he felt was relief or a kind of insult. She knew the bowl. She had never needed to know anything else about him.

She crossed the wide, silent stretch of the Lutyens Grid first. She passed a Prediction Tower that took no notice of her. Nine months of one man’s quiet omission meant she existed nowhere in any registry a tower’s calculations could draw upon. She was a gap in the model precisely her own shape, moving through streets built to anticipate every variable except the one that had never been entered. She simply walked.

She was not going anywhere. She went east because the wind was easier that way, and then south because a lorry came, and then east again. She stopped twice. Once was at a service door where the smell was promising and nothing came of it. Once was under a stairwell for the better part of an hour, for no reason at all. Nobody in the Grid put anything down for her. It was not unkindness. A bowl set out on a Lutyens pavement would have been an unregistered provision of foodstuffs to an unclassified recipient. Nobody who lived there had grown up watching anyone’s mother do it, and so the thought did not arrive in any of them to be refused.

She reached the checkpoint by mid-morning. There the paving gave way, without ceremony, to a road the Ministry’s maintenance schedules did not include. She did not pause there the way a body raised inside the Grid’s curated comfort might have paused. She had never been taught that the checkpoint was a boundary, only that it was a place where the ground changed texture beneath her feet.

She crossed it anyway.

In the lane beyond, a woman selling fruit from a cart glanced up, then went back to her weighing, and then reached down without looking and put half a spoiled guava on the ground beside the wheel, the way a person does a thing their hands learned before their opinions did. A little further on, a boy of perhaps ten was carrying a stack of flatbread wrapped in paper. He slowed his fluent passage through the crowd just long enough to look at her with open delight. Then he tore a corner off the top piece, dropped it and continued on, unremarkable, one more small unpredicted thing among a great many others. He would be short one corner of bread at home and would say a bird got it, and the lie would cost nobody anything.

She had walked five kilometres of the most comprehensively modelled square mileage on earth without anyone offering her a thing, and three hundred metres of a lane the model had given up on, and had eaten twice.

She reached the courtyard in 12-East sometime after noon. A structure of scavenged metal and glass stood there, cycling slowly through a colour that had no name. It was responding to nothing anyone in the courtyard had directly asked it to respond to. She stopped because there was water at the base of it, in a shallow tin somebody kept filled for no stated reason. She stopped, too, because she was tired, and because the shade was on this side.

A child of about eight, who still hummed some afternoons a tune with no source anyone had ever traced, saw the dog drinking and laughed. She went to the dog without asking anyone’s permission, because no one had ever once taught her that some things required it.

Kavya, a few feet away, looked up from the panel she was not really repairing and went still, the way she went still over anything that mattered. She said nothing at all. She watched her daughter’s hand go out flat and slow, the way she had been shown once and had not needed showing twice. She watched the dog’s head come up to meet it. The two of them were entirely unknown to each other, and neither wanted anything from the other that had to be applied for.

Nothing was returning to anything. No one had sent her. No one had arranged the water, or the guava, or the corner of bread, or the child. No ledger anywhere would ever hold the four of them on the same page. She had simply gone out of a gate somebody left open, and kept going until somebody fed her, and the place where somebody fed her was here.

She put her head down against the child’s outstretched hand, and stayed there for as long as the hand asked her to.

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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