We weren’t alone in this large room, there were many women standing around talking, some it would appear were talking to each other in the classic old style of communication; i.e. they stood close to each other face to face and did talking. Most were alone and also talking although not to any obvious device, they were seated around large tables covered in piles of lightweight material, that’s the best description I can give. I think these were communication or information devices of some sort but how they operated or what their purpose was I cannot verify.
‘It is all very interesting is it not,’ said Officer Velasquez as she sat opposite me on a small table. ‘We are very busy at the moment keeping order in the squares around the Senate building. It is a very busy day for us as you can see.’
Velasquez rolled out a sheet of material on the table between us and an incredibly detailed picture emerged, a view of a truly massive crowd outside an even more massive building. The view was, I assume, from somewhere above the square holding the huge crowd of people.
‘You are in this building here,’ said Velasquez pointing to a building to the left of what I assumed was the main Senate building. ‘So you can see, wandering outside could be, how should I say, very exciting.’
‘I’d rather not find out,’ I said. ‘I assume all these people believe I said those dreadful things.’
‘Many of them, yes,’ she said without emotion. ‘We thought we may have found what we need to prove what your claim is correct. The heat sensors in the Library at the Erotic Museum.’
‘The heat sensors?’
‘Yes, all buildings constructed in the last one hundred years are intelligent. I think that is how you would describe them. They are aware of the presence of a human body inside the building and they react accordingly, with temperature and lighting. In order to do that they sense the heat your body gives off, your heat signature.’
‘Okay, I can understand that, the theory anyway,’ I said.
‘Well, the building keeps a record of this data, it stores all data no matter what it is. This isn’t for us, I mean humans. It’s the way the system works, it learns and adapts to new situations. No one is interested in it normally, but as we know, these events are not normal.’
‘Right, so this heat data, what does it say?’
Officer Velasquez smiled. ‘It doesn’t say anything, the buildings aren’t magic, they don’t talk to us like in a fairy tale.’
‘Yeah, okay, I get that,’ I said, feeling for the first time, mildly tetchy at Officer Velasquez.
‘One of my officers managed to construct a recording from the sensors. They operate with a different protocol to general communication and data systems so it appears Anne Hempstead didn’t affect this data.’
‘The blocker thing?’
‘Correct, so she appears to have made a small error. We have a recording of the heat signals your body gave out, the breaths you released while you were talking. There is a clear discrepancy between the heat recordings and the words we can hear. Do you understand?’
‘Probably not, I may understand more if I see whatever it is you’re talking about. Is it possible to see this heat recording?’
Officer Velasquez nodded and brushed her delightful brown hand across the cloth-like screen between us. It transformed into a truly incomprehensible mass of data that meant absolutely nothing to me. She pointed to a stream of binary code running down a small text box to the left.
‘If I run the data through a sequence, like so,’ she did something delicate with the tips of her fingers. I knew I should have been looking at the image but I was looking at her fingers.
Once she removed her hands the image became a kind of heat map, I could just about understand what I was seeing, a very dark picture with two vaguely human shaped figures, as I watched every now and then a small cloud would emerge from the head of one of the figures.
‘That is your breath as you speak,’ said Officer Velasquez. ‘As you can see this image is open to interpretation but it suggests what you say in the audio recording from Anne Hempstead doesn’t match the heat sensor image we are looking at here.’
‘Doesn’t it? I mean, I want to believe you, but I can’t tell.’
‘We believe it does not match but it is not enough to convince the Senate.’ She tapped her fingers on the soft material on which the weird shapes were still moving. ‘This evidence could still be argued over. The original audio recording is a very reliable and convincing piece of evidence. Trying to find the methods used in its construction and distortion has to be equally reliable and convincing, you understand?’
I nodded. I didn’t want to stop her talking; essentially I didn’t want to stop her talking ever. I wanted to sit opposite Officer Velasquez and listen to her explain things way above my head for the rest of my life.
‘So just this morning while you were sleeping we got a lucky break. We have just been sent some new data.’
‘New data?’
‘Yes, although we are keeping this information to ourselves at the moment.’ She gave me a little knowing smile.
‘I didn’t think you could keep anything to yourself. I thought everyone knew everything about everyone else all the time.’
“I know you will find it a little difficult to understand,’ she said after a brief pause. ‘It is a very unusual day, there is much at stake as I think you can understand.’
‘The end of men,’ I said.
‘Precisely. This piece of data I am talking about has been extracted by a man you see.’
‘A man?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s a problem is it?’
‘Not normally, but today it could be used as an argument.’
‘Because it came from a man, as the old saying goes, “he would, wouldn’t he?”’
Officer Velasquez nodded. ‘It is very difficult today,’ she repeated. ‘Not only the fact that he is a man is a problem, he is also someone you know.’
‘Someone I know, I don’t know anyone except Nkoyo.’
‘His name is Peter Branson, you would maybe know him as Pete.’
She brushed her hand over the material on the table between us. Pete’s big grinning face appeared as if he was looking at me through a window.
‘Oh my God, Pete!’ I gasped. ‘What did he do? What a dude, what did he do?’
‘Your friend Pete managed to extract what you would call a recording from the building frame.’
‘What? What?’ by now I was utterly bamboozled.
‘Pete wanted me to tell you that he has fixed many things at the Erotic Museum, he said you’d understand. So what he managed to extract is essentially the vibration data coming from your vocal chords. Because you are a man and your voice vibrates at a fairly low level and because Pete is very experienced in building maintenance, he managed to extract vibration history from the time you were in the library in the Erotic Museum and send us the raw data. We have been working all night to clean up that complex information, clean it up enough to finally know exactly what you really said.’
She brushed the sheet again and some rather rubbish quality sound emerged, about the quality of a much-used audio cassette circa 1993. It was my voice, very obviously my voice. I sat motionless as I heard myself say.
‘I don’t know what you’re on about, all I know is I came here from 2011, there’s no way I could have planned it, as far as I’m concerned time travel is impossible, well, as far as I knew before I arrived here. I’m just a man who arrived here due to some kind of freak, meta-physics, I’m an ordinary man, I don’t believe in patriarchy or believe it’s my right to rape women, I don’t want to crush women back to the dark times, I don’t want to be the dominant master race, I don’t think women are second class citizens who should live their lives barefoot and pregnant at the kitchen sink. I’m just a
bloke from two hundred years ago who wants to go home.’
I sat in stunned silence when the sound of my voice stopped. All the way through there were weird rumblings and creaks, some of the time you could barely make out what I was saying, the background noise levels would cover moments of speech, what was very clear however was the truth, what I had actually said in that wretched library. As soon as I heard it I remembered it very clearly.
‘I am very pleased,’ said Officer Velasquez when the sound of my voice receded. ‘I am very happy.’
‘I’m very happy too,’ I said. ‘I’m also very impressed, Pete did that? I thought he just fixed doors and toilets and mended my plane.’
‘Well, to be fair to my officers, he didn’t do it but he understood how a building interacts with its occupants. He knew the sensitivity of the building’s structure and how it records everything that takes place inside its walls. It was just a case of extracting that data from the correct period. We had access to some very sophisticated machines that ran through the vibration time line data until we found the moment you spoke those lines.’
‘This is fantastic!’ I said. ‘I knew I didn’t say those things and now it makes sense. Can you please tell everyone I’m not a rapist from the dark times or a patriarchal warrior from the future?’
Officer Velasquez pulled the sheet of material we’d been looking at toward her and screwed it into a tiny ball. She stared at her clasped hands for a moment.
‘Well, it is complicated,’ she said slowly. ‘Just before I came into your room this morning I had a conversation with the Senate office. I wanted to do just as you suggest and release this information immediately. I wanted people to know that this statement you are accused of making is not true. However, the Senate are very concerned about the situation. If we release data supplied by a man, they believe it will play into the hands of the Weaver lobby. It could strengthen the Weaver position, releasing this today, before the vote could cause a very dangerous reaction.’
‘Like a conspiracy between two men who want to take over the entire female population of several billion women and just reinstate the patriarchy,’ I said. Finally, the rather unpleasant picture was falling into place in my mind.
‘Very accurate,’ said Officer Velasquez, ‘we will of course release all the information after the vote and your name will be cleared. But for the time being, we can do nothing.’
‘And when is this vote taking place?’ The knowledge of the Senate timetable came to me as if I’d known it all my life.
‘Oh, right now.’
31
The Vote
I returned to my movable room after Officer Velasquez left, along with many of the other officers. She explained to me that she had to make sure the crowds surrounding the Senate were safe and she rather touchingly assured me they didn’t police or oppress the crowds, they merely acted in an advisory capacity and were on hand to deal with people who found the hundreds of thousands of people packed in the squares overwhelming.
I watched her leave the room. I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off her as she walked away from me, there’s no point denying it, I was a little infatuated.
I didn’t have to go back to my movable room, no one made me go, no one locked the door. However, as I sat alone in the huge room with all the empty tables stretching into the distance I felt a little bit lonely, really for the first time since I’d arrived in the Squares. Plus I couldn’t see out of the windows, they were placed too high up alongside the cavernous ceiling and walking into my little room felt comforting and familiar.
I sat on the bed and surprised myself by deciding to think about women and gender and men and oppression and all the things I’d learned since I’d arrived. This is not something I’d done before, if I ever did sit and think about things it would normally have been about how high-pressure hoses need to be fitted around compression pumps in confined spaces; important if that’s the field you work in, not really earth shattering or anything to do with changes in society.
This time I actually decided to consciously think about the impact men had made on the history of the human race. It was uncomfortable at first, it felt like some kind of half-baked mental exercise and I was sure I’d be bored in a few moments. However, the thoughts tumbled over one another, the conversations, the arguments filled my head with noise as I sat in the silent little room.
From my point of view, the impact of boys and men was fairly finely balanced; I truly believe men had done amazing things in our history, they’d made incredible discoveries, built machines and systems that had clearly helped the human race to develop. They had dreamed amazing dreams that had sometimes come to fruition. I found I truly believed most men had done their best to curb their baser instincts, they had tried to live well, help others, sometimes sacrificed themselves to protect the weak and all that stuff. But they had also murdered, raped, belittled and crushed the spirits of women for thousands of years.
That much I could understand, while at the same time hearing the wails of men who felt hard done by, whose mothers and fathers had let them down; I felt the cry of men who had been brutalised by war and poverty, struggle and hunger; men who had been cheated by women and teased and belittled by their greater emotional strength. None of it was cut and dried but there were so many examples of truly appalling traditions, absurd rulings and brutality carried out by men, sanctioned by men, enforced by men on women, that the balance started to tip in my mind.
It seemed that the women of 2211 could easily reproduce without need of men, they had the technology to do so and I could see their point. I didn’t think it was a good idea, don’t get me wrong, but I could see their point.
‘Hey, it’s the man from the cloud,’ said a voice behind me. I turned and saw a young man standing in the doorway next to one of the officers who had escorted me from the Senate house the night before.
‘I would like to shake your hand señor,’ he said. I stood up and walked toward him, he had a wonderful dark complexion and a thick mop of black hair and I noticed, even with his smoothly fitting once piece that he was very powerfully built. We shook hands and I felt a rush of reassuring pleasure flow through me. This man, who I instantly knew was Tadeu Bolus, had just handed me a serious dollop of bits.
‘Wow, thank you very much, Tadeu,’ I said. ‘I don’t quite know what I’ve done to deserve this.’
Tadeu turned to the officer standing behind him.
‘How is it he doesn’t know?’ he asked, although I’m pretty sure he said it in Portuguese as his lips didn’t quite match what I was hearing. This also informed me that I must have been more relaxed. When I had been not-quite-arrested the night before, I was so terrified I couldn’t comprehend a word anyone was saying.
‘We have been a little busy making sure the crowds are safe,’ said the officer, this time I knew for sure that I was hearing a translation as I caught a bit of Portuguese before her words were translated, and I could tell by her manner that there was a lot more sarcasm in her delivery than the translation gave credit for.
The beaming Tadeu turned to me. ‘The Senate has rejected the proposal, it was close but the vote has been won,’ he said, he then embraced me in a powerful hug. I can tell you I felt very awkward and English as this happened.
‘The Weavers are furious!’ he said with a big grin after he released me. ‘They are claiming that some of the Senators have been threatened by you. It has all become very silly. Anyway, forget about them, I have been around all my friends and we made a collection for you just to say thank you.’
I only had the vaguest notion of what he was on about, clearly the vote to permanently remove men from the planet had been rejected and for some reason that meant who ever Tadeu’s friends were, they’d chipped in somehow and given me some bits.
‘That’s, well, that’s very kind and really unnecessary,’ I sai
d. ‘I wish I knew what was going on, what about the recording? Does anyone know I didn’t really say those dreadful things?’
‘Yes, we all know,’ said Tadeu, ‘the truth is spreading like a fire through dry grass. You are a hero for many people, you are a hero for me señor, you are a hero for all men.’
I sat back down on my seat. I didn’t really know what to make of any of it. I didn’t feel comfortable with the whole hero thing. I think it’s because I don’t like upsetting people, and even though the two examples of the Weaver women I’d met hadn’t exactly been pleasant, I could see their point.
Tadeu stood looking at me as if he was expecting me to say something. The problem was, I didn’t have anything to say. I was therefore very grateful when I saw Nkoyo and Officer Velasquez run into the big room behind him, they too had grins on their faces.
‘I got here as soon as I could,’ said Nkoyo who ran up to me and also gave me a hug. It was quite uncomfortable, she was a good bit taller than me and she had very strong arms.
‘Oh thanks,’ I said, my head squished sideways into Nkoyo’s shoulder. ‘So, it’s all okay then?’
‘It’s more than okay, it’s fantastic news, Gavin!’ She released me from her crushing hug and held my shoulders at arm’s-length, which, considering she had such long arms meant that I was quite far away. ‘The build-up to this vote over the last three years has been very disruptive but the result is incontrovertible, the Weaver proposals have been rejected by a big enough majority for them to be forever marginalised.’
Officer Velasquez stood beside Nkoyo, her smile was of course, fairly enchanting. ‘We are all very happy,’ she said. ‘Although I don’t have a man in my life, I would be very sad if there were no men on the world.’
I felt my face give me away, I was trying not even to think that I was wanting to say if she needed a man in her life she could always give me a call. I glanced at Nkoyo who had clearly picked up on this rather embarrassing train of thought.
News from the Squares Page 30
