The Power

by Naomi Alderman

  Allie says: Can I own the whole world?

  The voice says, very quietly, just as it used to speak many years ago: Oh, honey. Oh, baby girl, you can’t get there from here.

  Roxy says, ‘The thing is, I’ve got an idea.’

  Allie says, ‘So do I.’

  And they look at each other and smile.

  Approximately fifteen hundred years old, a device for training in the use of the electrostatic power. The handle at the base is iron and is connected, within the wooden frame, to a metal peg, marked A on the diagram. We conjecture that a piece of paper or dry leaf could be affixed to the spike, marked B on the diagram, with the aim being for the operator to set it aflame. This would require a degree of control, presumably the skill being practised. The size suggests that the device was meant for thirteen- to fifteen-year-old girls. Discovered in Thailand.

  Archival documents relating to the electrostatic power, its origin, dispersal, and the possibility of a cure

  1. Description of the short Second World War propaganda film Protection Against Gas. The film itself has been lost.

  The film is two minutes and fifty-two seconds long. At the start, a brass band strikes up. The percussion joins in with the brass and the tune is jaunty as the title comes up on the screen. The title is: ‘Protection Against Gas’. The card is hand-inked, wavering slightly as the camera focuses on it, before a sharp cut to a group of men in white coats standing in front of a huge vat of liquid. They wave and smile at the camera.

  ‘At the Ministry of War laboratories,’ says the clipped male voiceover, ‘the back-room boys work double-shifts on their latest brain-wave.’

  The men dip a ladle into the liquid and, using a pipette, drop some of it on to testing-papers. They smile. They add a single droplet to the water bottle of a white rat in a cage with a large, black, inked X on its back. The brass band ups the tempo as the rat drinks the water.

  ‘Staying one step ahead of the enemy is the only way to keep the population safe. This rat has been given a dose of the new nerve-strengthener developed to combat gas attack.’

  Cut-away to another rat in a cage. No X on the back.

  ‘This rat has not.’

  A canister of white gas is opened in the small room containing the two cages, and the scientists, wearing breathing apparatus, retreat behind a glass wall. The untreated rat succumbs quickly, waving its forepaws in the air distressingly before it begins to twitch. We do not follow its final throes. The rat with the X on its back continues to suck at the bottle, nibble at food pellets, and even run in its exercise wheel as the smoke drifts past the cameras.

  ‘As you can see,’ says the brisk voiceover, ‘it works.’

  One of the scientists takes off his gas mask and walks, decisively, into the smoke-filled room. He waves from inside, and takes deep lungfuls.

  ‘And it’s safe for humans.’

  The scene changes to a waterworks, where a pipe is being hooked up from a small tanker-lorry into an outlet valve in the floor.

  ‘They call it Guardian Angel. The miracle cure that has kept allied forces safe from enemy attack by gas is now being given to the general population.’

  Two balding middle-aged men, one with a toothbrush moustache and wearing a dark suit, shake hands as a meter shows the liquid from the lorry slowly going down.

  ‘Just a tiny amount in the drinking water will be enough to protect an entire town. This single tank is sufficient to treat the drinking water for 500,000 people. Coventry, Hull and Cardiff will be the first to receive the water treatment. Working at this pace, the entire country will be covered within three months.’

  A mother on the street of a northern town lifts her baby out of the pram, rests it on a cloth on her shoulder and looks up, concerned, to the clear sky.

  ‘So Mother can feel secure that her baby need no longer fear nerve-gas attack. Rest easy, Mother and child.’

  The music reaches a crescendo. The screen darkens. The reel ends.

  2. Notes distributed to journalists to accompany the BBC programme The Source of Power.

  The story of Guardian Angel was forgotten shortly after the Second World War – as with so many ideas which worked flawlessly, there was no reason to re-examine it. At the time, however, Guardian Angel was a tremendous success and a propaganda victory. Tests on the general population in Britain proved that the substance accumulated in the system. Even a week spent drinking Guardian Angel-laced water would provide never-ending protection against nerve gas.

  Guardian Angel was manufactured in great vats in the heartland of the USA and in the home counties of the UK. It was transported by tanker to friendly nations: to Hawaii and to Mexico, to Norway, to South Africa and to Ethiopia. The enemy’s U-boats harried the vessels, as they did every shipment coming to or from the Allies. Inevitably, one dark night in September 1944, a tanker was sunk, with all hands, sixteen miles off the coast of Portugal, on its way to the Cape of Good Hope.

  Subsequent research has found that over the following months, in the coastal towns of Aveiro, Espinho and Porto, strange things washed ashore – fish much larger than any they’d seen before. Shoals of these unusually sized creatures had apparently hurled themselves at the beaches. The people in the villages and towns along the coast ate the fish. An analysis by a conscientious Portuguese official in 1947 revealed that Guardian Angel was detectable in the groundwater as far inland as Estrela, near the Spanish border. But his suggestion that the water table should be tested across Europe was rejected; there were no resources available for the task.

  Some analysis suggests that the sinking of this one ship was the critical moment. Others maintain that, once the liquid had entered the water cycle at any point, in any reservoir, in any place in the world, it would inevitably spread. Other potential sources of contamination include: a spill from a rusted container in Buenos Aires several years after the war and an explosion at a munitions dump in southern China.

  Nonetheless, the oceans of the world are connected to one another – the water cycle is endless. Although Guardian Angel had been forgotten after the Second World War, it continued to concentrate and magnify its potency in the human body. Research has now established it as the undoubted trigger, once certain concentrations had been reached, for the development of the electrostatic power in women.

  Any woman who was seven years old or younger during the Second World War may have skein buds on the points of her collarbones – although not all do; it will depend on what dose of Guardian Angel was received in early childhood, and on other genetic factors. These buds can be ‘activated’ by a controlled burst of electrostatic power by a younger woman. They are present in increasingly large proportions of women with every birth-year that passes. Women who were about thirteen or fourteen years old around the Day of the Girls almost invariably possess a full skein. Once the skein power has been activated, it cannot be taken away without tremendous danger to the woman’s life.

  It is theorized that Guardian Angel merely amplified a set of genetic possibilities already present in the human genome. It is possible that, in the past, more women possessed a skein but that this tendency was bred out over time.

  3. SMS conversation between the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, classified and released under the thirty-year rule.

  PM: Just read the report. Thoughts?

  HS: We can’t release it.

  PM: The US are set to release in a month.

  HS: Fuck’s sake. Ask them to delay.

  PM: They’re adopting ‘a policy of radical openness’. They’re evangelical about it.

  HS: As usual.

  PM: You can’t stop Americans being American.

  HS: They’re 5,000 miles from the Black Sea. I’ll talk to the Sec. of State. We need to tell them it’s a NATO matter. Releasing the report will harm the stability of fragile regimes. Regimes that could easily get their hands on chemical and biological weapons.

  PM: It’s going to leak, anyway. We need to think about how this impacts
on us.

  HS: There’s going to be pandemonium.

  PM: Because there’s no cure?

  HS: No fucking cure. It’s not a fucking crisis any more. This is the new reality.

  4. Online advertisement collection, preserved by the Internet Archive Project.

  4a) Keep safe with your Personal Defender

  The Personal Defender is safe, reliable and easy to use. The battery pack worn on your belt connects to a wrist-mounted taser.

  • This product is approved by police officers, and has been independently tested.

  • It is discreet; no one needs to know you can defend yourself but you.

  • It is ready at hand; no need to fumble in a holster or a pocket if under attack.

  • You will not find any other product as reliable and effective.

  • Complete with an additional phone-charging socket.

  Note: The Personal Defender was subsequently withdrawn, following incidents fatal to the users. It was established that a woman’s body, receiving a large electric shock, would often produce a large reflexive arc ‘bouncing back’ towards her attacker, even if she fell unconscious. The manufacturers of the Personal Defender settled a class action suit out of court with the families of seventeen men who were killed in this way.

  4b) Increase your power with this one weird trick

  Women all over the world are learning how to increase the duration and strength of their power using this secret knowledge. Our ancestors knew the secret; now, researchers at Cambridge University have discovered this one weird trick to improve performance. Expensive training programs don’t want you to know this easy way to succeed! Click here to learn the $5 trick that will put you head and shoulders above the rest.

  4c) Defensive slip-on undersocks

  The natural way to protect yourself against attack. No poison, no pellets, no powders; entirely efficient protection against electricity! Simply put these rubber socks on under your normal shoes and socks. No one need know you’re wearing them, and unlike a shoe they cannot easily be removed by an assailant. Two supplied per pack. Absorbent lining locks away foot moisture.

  SIX YEARS TO GO

  * * *

  Tunde

  Tatiana Moskalev was right, and she’d given him good information. He spent two months investigating in the hills of northern Moldova – or the country that used to be Moldova and is currently at war with the southern part of itself – carefully questioning and bribing the people he met there. Reuters footed his bill on this occasion; he told an editor he trusted about the tip he’d got, and she signed off his costs. If he found it, it would be the biggest kind of news. If he didn’t find it, he’d be able to do a portrait of this war-torn country, and that’d give them something, at least.

  But he found it. One afternoon, a man in a village near the border agreed to drive Tunde in his jeep to a place on the River Dniester with a view down into the valley. There, they saw a compound, hastily thrown up, with low-slung buildings and a central training yard. The man would not let Tunde leave the jeep, and he wouldn’t drive any closer. But they had a good enough view for Tunde to take six photographs. They showed brown-skinned men with beards in battle fatigues and black berets training with a new weapon, new armour. Their body suits were made of rubber, on their backs they wore battery-packs and in their hands they carried electric cattle-prods.

  It was only six photographs, but it was enough. Tunde had made world news. ‘AWADI-ATIF TRAINS SECRET ARMY’ was the Reuters headline. Others shouted: ‘THE BOYS ARE BACK’. And ‘LOOK WHO’S SHOCKING’. There were anxious debates in newsrooms and on morning shows about the implications of these new weapons: Could they work? Would they win? Tunde hadn’t managed to photograph King Awadi-Atif himself, but the conclusion that he was working with the Moldovan Defence Forces was unavoidable. The situation had begun to stabilize in many countries, but this news kicked it off again. Perhaps the men were coming back, with their weapons and armour.

  In Delhi, the riot went on for weeks.

  It began in the places under the motorway bridges, where the poor people live in blanket tents or houses constructed from cardboard and tape. This is the place men come when they want a woman they can use without law or licence, discard without censure. The power has been passed from palm to palm here for three years now. And the many death-bearing hands of women have a name here: Kali, the eternal. Kali, who destroys to bring fresh growth. Kali, intoxicated by the blood of the slain. Kali, who puts out the stars with her thumb and forefinger. Terror is her name and death is her breathing in and out. Her arrival in this world has been long expected. Any adjustment in understanding had come easily to the women under the motorway bridges of the megacity.

  The government sent in the army. The women of Delhi discovered a new trick. A jet of water, directed at the attacking forces, could be electrified. The women put their hands into the spouts and sent death from their fingers, like the Goddess walking the earth. The government cut off the water supply to the slum neighbourhoods, in the highest heat of the summer, when the streets stink of rot and the pregnant dogs wander, panting, in search of shelter from the sun. The world’s media filmed the poor begging for water, praying for a single drop. And on the third day, the heavens opened and sent an unseasonal rainstorm, hectic and thorough as a scouring brush, washing the smell from the streets and collecting in puddles and pools. When the soldiers return, they are standing in the wet or touching wet rails, or their vehicles are trailing some loose wire into the wet, and when the women light up the roadways, people die quite suddenly, falling to the ground frothing, as though Kali herself had struck them down.

  The temples to Kali are full of worshippers. There are soldiers who join with the rioters. And Tunde is there, too, with his cameras and his CNN pass.

  In the hotel filled with foreign journalists, people know him. He’s seen some of these reporters before, in other places where justice is at last being meted out – although it’s not considered good form to say so. Officially, in the West, the thing is still a ‘crisis’, with all the word implies: exceptional, deplorable, temporary. The team from Allgemeine Zeitung greet him by name, congratulate him – with a slightly envious tone – on the scoop of the six photographs of Awadi-Atif’s forces. He’s met the more senior editors and producers from CNN, even a team from the Daily Times of Nigeria, who ask him where he’s been hiding and how they could have missed him. Tunde has his own YouTube channel now, broadcasting footage from around the world. His face begins each broadcast. He is the one who goes to the most dangerous places to bring the images no one else will show. He celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday on a plane. One of the air stewards recognized his face and brought him champagne.

  In Delhi, he follows behind a pack of women rampaging through Janpath market. There was a time that a woman could not walk alone here, not if she were under seventy, and not with certainty even then. There had been protests for many years, and placards, and shouted slogans. These things rise up and afterwards it is as if it had never been. Now the women are making what they call ‘a show of force’, in solidarity with those who were killed under the bridges and starved of water.

  Tunde interviews a woman in the crowd. She had been here for the protests three years earlier; yes, she had held up her banner and shouted and signed her petitions. ‘It was like being part of a wave of water,’ she says. ‘A wave of spray from the ocean feels powerful, but it is only there for a moment, the sun dries the puddles and the water is gone. Then you feel maybe it never happened. That is how it was with us. The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.’

  He knows exactly where this part will fit in his book. The history of political movements. The struggle that moved so slowly until this great change happened. He’s putting together an argument.

  There is little violence against people; mostly they are turning over stalls.

  ‘Now the
y will know,’ shouts one woman into Tunde’s camera, ‘that they are the ones who should not walk out of their houses alone at night. They are the ones who should be afraid.’

  There is a brief scuffle when four men with knives appear in the crowd, but this is quickly dealt with, leaving the men with twitching arms but no permanent injuries. He has started to suspect there will be nothing new here today, nothing that hasn’t been seen before, when the word comes through the crowd that the army have formed a barricade up ahead, across Windsor Place. They are trying to protect the foreign hotels. They’re advancing slowly, armed with rubber bullets, and shoes with thick, insulating soles. They want to make a demonstration here. A show of force to let the world see how a properly trained army deals with a rabble like this.