Nine per cent off Fatima’s sugar. Then Kavya’s tap goes dry mid-rinse, with soap in her daughter’s eyes. The notice says scheduled maintenance. No crew ever comes.

Eleven crossings in twenty-two days, all outside rostered hours. Eleven days before the first, the same Handler argued for a child and lost. The correlation reaches Dev Sharma’s desk with his morning tea.

Meghna Rao’s father was passed over three times for men with worse marks and better uncles. Now she guards the Pranaali’s consistency, and a small flag on Samar Varma’s file carries a 31%.

Farah and Iqbal, eighteen and twenty-one, walk into the Grid in clothes a size too loose and spend four hours doing nothing at all. At the terminal kiosk, Iqbal has been told to type nothing.

Fifteen people sit on cushions above the grain market, under one bare bulb. Four years ago they flooded the model with noise for eleven days. Afterward its confidence rose from 78% to 84%.

At nineteen, a slide with two error rates taught Renu Sen to stop consulting her own instinct. Thirteen years later the Bureau matches her with Arjun at 89%, and she cannot find a single fault in him.

Priya and Rohan meet at the Union Bureau with a 94% match. Samar Varma, carrying a 31% of his own, watches them through the glass while a screen tells them what to talk about.

The Ministry rates Samar Varma and Kavya Nair 31% compatible. The highest-variance factor is trust in the Pranaali. Since the Programme began, no score below 40% has ever been approved.

Behind the grain market there is no scoreboard, no sensor and no licence. Samar Varma, eleven years a Handler, is handed a bat and told he does not have to play it correctly.

Manzoor is seventy and walks a route nobody in the lane knows is a route: Fatima’s stall, the Agarwals’ shutter, a widow upstairs who needs nothing. Twenty-nine doors, every morning, between two glasses of tea.

For fifteen years Aisha has told strangers how a grain convoy saved her mother. Her mother was twenty-three that night, not nineteen. She does not remember any headlights. She remembers diesel.

The terminal heard every word the dhobi said and reduced it to a line: Refer to Sector Utilities, Tier 2. Chhaya missed six seconds of it, and she wants them back. In her second drawer is a pad of paper slips kept since 2071.

Chhaya Deshmukh has not typed a word at work in nine years. Her job is to be looked at while a machine listens. Twenty-two grievance categories, four sentiment values, and no field for an old man’s father.

In 2058 a routing pilot ran sixteen futures for one evening’s grain and sent a convoy down the wrong lane. Aisha’s mother was three doors from home. Aisha has defended the machine ever since.

Devakkant Sharma runs the only government the world has left. Every morning he wakes eleven minutes before his own house expects him, makes his tea by hand, and feeds a dog he has never registered.

In October 2059 Kavya’s grandmother stood twelve hours in the Referendum queue, read all forty pages of the charter on a cracked phone, and pressed Decline. Within the month she lost her ration registration.

For six years the power tap under Kavya’s courtyard sat below the threshold. On the night a Grid Handler stays two hours, the light inside the junction box is green. Nothing is broken. It has been throttled from outside.

In July 2057 a child died ninety metres from the drug that would have saved her, because the log was a book in a locked drawer. Sanyal has not lost a child to a supply failure in twenty-two years.

Forty-one households stopped filing their weekly consumption logs in the same week, and none of them had talked to the others. This month Samar saw the first asterisk on the Forecast’s confidence figures in four years.

Samar Varma approved what Kavya Nair’s file told him to approve. Three days later he stands in her courtyard in clothes that do not fit, beside a machine that changes colour and will not say why.