The Trouble with Women

Epilogue

REVOLUTION

HISTORY DOESN'T TURN on a dime. A change of course takes ages to manifest. Most often, real change comes too late. We drag our feet. We clutch our pearls. We press our hands together in a pantomime of worry that allows us to think ourselves on the right side of the problem without making a single, personal sacrifice.

And that's what was required: sacrifice.

Without it, nothing could have changed.

We in the Resistance felt, and justifiably so, there was no time left for foot dragging and pearl clutching. Our runway was getting shorter by the moment. If we hadn't taken action — serious action — straight away, there would have been no coming back.

When the government came for our last sacred space, they drew a battleline that we could not ignore.

When awareness-raising and peaceful protest failed, and we saw the limits to which the empowered were willing to go to keep us subjugated and underclassed, we understood that we would have to go to war.

In war, some fall. You can't expect everyone to make it out alive.

That's where the decisions were difficult. We are mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters: life-givers and life-protectors. We're not, by our nature, a warring gender. One could argue that our innate passivism — our endless empathy — is what got us into the mess in the first place. Would men ever have let things get so far if it were their freedom at stake? Unlikely. At the first, small cut, they would have raged, stood up, denounced, declined.

But women, we persist in hoping for the best outcome against all evidence. In the same way humans fear the devastation of climate change but persist in behaving exactly as we always have, assuming someone else will keep the scary outcomes at bay. We must learn to take personal responsibility — as a species and as a gender — and make the personal sacrifices required for change.

And so we did. In fact, we did more than that.

We moved the battle lines.

The Revolut was the flashpoint we needed. It also gave us the way.

We were fortunate to have deep connections inside the Trewellyn Lab. Simon Trewellyn is a good man; a man who championed the rights of women even when most men, battle wearied, had turned away from our struggle—a lost cause.

It was the Trewellyn Lab that saw the opportunity afforded to us by the first wave implants.

The security of its digital signal was so easily compromised it was almost laughable. It proved how little care the system had taken to protect us. If it hadn't been the Resistance who found the way in, it could have been someone truly evil.

All that was required was to intercept the digital pulses of the Revolut — the intermittent signal that was used to block the natural rhythms of ovulation — and to swap them out with a darker pattern, one aimed at disrupting the host's anterior insular cortex: their centre of empathy.

The cochlear MyAssistant(™) implant was the perfect net for catching and replacing the Revolut's original signal. We didn't need to 'hack' the implant — they would have noticed and shut that down too quickly. Instead, we hid the 'bad actor' inside the most popular personal device of the time. It was impossible to trace unless you knew where to look.

The effects, once they took hold, were remarkable. Some women took longer than others to give in to the sudden drought of empathy. Social conditioning is a strong impulse itself. But eventually, without an active centre of empathy, the host becomes remorseless, selfish, unheeding of consequence. It was a terrifying, real-time social experiment. We were fascinated by the way women changed.

Even more fascinating to observe was the placebo effect on women whose signals we had not disrupted. A tidal dam, battered by decades of erosion, simply dissolved and oceans of pent-up rage came lashing across the breakwater.

That, we couldn't have planned for. It was a gift.

Rebecca Thompson's masterful piece of independent documentary journalism, "The Trouble with Women," won a Peabody that year — the first time an award of that status had been given to a female writer in decades. Her work revealed the connection between the implant and women's aberrant behaviour, but rather than fingering the Trewellyn Lab, she pointed to the government's failure to protect the health of women, big pharma's insidious pursuit of profit over their duty of care and the unfairness of the systems which had cornered women into accepting the second-class status that denied their freedom to earn, to be safe and to make decisions for their own personal care.

She dedicated her story to the many women who had been impacted by a lifetime of subjugation and systematic abuse. She called them un-criminals and spoke passionately for their release, for their restoration and for their forgiveness. 

When the truth came to light, and our calculated sacrifices were laid out for the world to see, many voices called us monsters. Traitors to women. But they weren't seeing the bigger picture.

By changing women, we made it clear that our gender would not be going gently into the future they'd penned for us. That was our aim. We showed that the version of us the world preferred — soft breasted, cherry-scented, diaphanous and willing — was nothing but an erotic fiction.

The reality of Woman is gritty, hairy and hard-centred. We are drenched in blood from birth. Every month, nature does its best to remind us that we are fearsome, feral things. No matter how much lavender hygiene spray the world tries to cover our scent with. We are powerful.

All we did was remind the world of what had always been true.