The Trouble with Women

Countdown

I sling my bag under my desk and notice with satisfaction that I've beat Julian, who sits in the cubicle next to mine. That almost never happens. I feel victorious but also let down that he's not here to soften the start of my day with some banter.

I slip MYA(™) into my ear and whisper "calendar." She takes a moment to activate; I can feel a slight warmth in my ear canal as she connects to the cloud. A lot of people have upgraded to the newer MyAssistant implant, but I'm not willing to host another digital parasite, so I stick with my nearly obsolete model.

True, she doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the cochlear device—precognition, for example—but I don't need MYA guessing what I need before I need it. Something about that feels incredibly lazy. Or dangerous. Who's to say whether she's predicting an actual need or manufacturing it?

No thanks.

Good morning, Dolly. You have a meeting with Sasha in 30 minutes. There is 1 new communication waiting for your attention, marked urgent from RebeccadotThompsonatTorontoStar. Would you like me to read it to you?

"No, thank you. I'll use my screen." I reply. Politeness again.

MYA responds by powering up my desk screen and bringing the new item to the front.

It's a simple list of names, each with an age and home address.

Anisha Dal, 34
Sandra Gilletti, 37
Faustina Dzrebec, 32
Evelyn Wan, 36
...

These are the names she wants me to check records for; to dig up their implant serial numbers so she can compare them. I'm still not sure I want to wield my little bit of power so unethically.

I am considering whether I have time for a quick tea break before I'm due in my advisor's office at 9:30 when I hear Julian slipping his jacket off and hanging it over our shared coat hooks.

I swing around in my chair and raise my eyebrows accusingly.

"Late! This isn't like you," I say with a smile in my voice.

His hand darts up in an attempt to smooth his unruly hair as his eye scans the wall of offices.

"Anyone notice?"

I laugh at his concern.

"Of course not. It's only just gone nine, you nerd."

I turn back to my screen, but he stands in the shared opening, clearly not ready to end our exchange.

"I'm late because of Missy. There was an... incident." He says over my shoulder, forcing me to turn back around. He knows I can't resist a bit of gossip.

Missy is Julian's—well, it's hard to say exactly what they are to each other. They live together like an old married couple. They may even have blundered into old married couple sex once or twice if I interpret Julian's blushes correctly, but technically, they're housemates.

Privately, Julian is gay—an orientation that's tolerated in the same way being female is tolerated but certainly not as accepted as it once was. The rights of women and the LGBT community have always been intertwined, so it was no surprise that when the swooping backlash came, restricting women's fertility, safety and access to work, gay men also lost hard-won ground.

"What happened?" I say, leaning forward with interest.

"She lost her shit about the parking again. I had to stay with her this morning until her sister came."

The parking is shorthand for a saga that plays itself out regularly (but mostly harmlessly) on Missy and Julian's narrow little street. The residents compete for limited street parking with the fierceness of Roman Gladiators, and Missy is unhealthily obsessed with what she calls "douchebag parking"—where cars pull in, leaving too much room to front or back of them, essentially taking two spots when they only needed one.

"Did she leave another sternly worded note on someone's windshield?" I ask, bemused. I enjoy stories of Missy's righteous activism, even though it's completely wasted on this minor aggravation.

Last year, she'd gone out to the street in the middle of the night and used white canvas paint to create makeshift lines on the road, measuring and marking out the street by 10-foot increments. Her painted lines received a mixed reception from the rest of the street. The worst offender continued to park his Porsche across the lines, which Missy took as a signal of open hostility. The two of them squared off over a note Missy left on his car, accusing him of being a sociopath. The city came and washed the lines off within the week anyway.

"Way worse than a note this time. She went out there this morning—in her pyjamas and slippers—and used a can of spray paint on the Porsche."

I gasp, although I am secretly delighted. "What'd she write?"

Julian puts his hands over his eyes and shakes his head.

"DOUCHEBAG. All caps. And it gets worse."

"What? HOW?" I have my hands clapped over my face now. From outside, you'd think we were enacting a 'see no evil, speak no evil' tableau.

"She signed it. Like it was one of her fucking paintings."

We look at each other, stunned. Vandalism is bad enough. Putting your name on it is... crazy.

"Did the owner see it?"

"I don't think so. Not yet. But when he does..." Julian pauses to shudder. "I called Missy's sister and said she needs to stay at her place for a bit until this blows over."

"Porsche guy will go to the police," I think out loud. "He'll need to for the insurance. He won't hurt her if that's what you're worried about."

"It's not her getting hurt I'm worried about. She's so... amped up. She's like a raging bull."

I don't say what I'm thinking, which is, of course, that something about Missy's story would be right at home in Beck's file folder. I'm about to ask Julian how old Missy is when MYA speaks softly in my ear.

5 minutes until your meeting with Sasha.

I nod my head and touch Julian's arm.

"It'll be okay. She'll be safe at her sister's."

He nods, biting his lip with worry, but returns to his side of the cubicle wall.