News from the Squares

by Robert Llewellyn

  ‘Oh that is sick, how does that work? The words, the words are in my eyes,’ I said turning my head away. ‘I don’t like that.’

  I felt a hand on my shoulder; it was the Professor standing beside me.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed, Gavin, it’s just the museum connecting to your kidonge. There’s no harm done, if you don’t like it move away from the exhibit.’

  I shook my head and read the very clear text I could see as if it were floating ten feet in front of me.

  ‘Early autonomous vehicles produced in 2048 by Musk Autonomy Dynamics of Abu Dhabi. Powered by 4 micro asynchronous in-wheel electric motors and lithium-air battery pack with induction charging. The vehicles were used in many cities for over thirty years.’

  Some ridiculously high definition video footage then explained how the vehicles charged from induction coils in the roadways and parking areas.

  It all seemed somehow dated and slightly redundant, the machine that had brought me to the museum with the Professor was a completely different beast and didn’t look like this battered old thing. It was like comparing a Ford Focus with a Model T, no, not even that, it was like comparing a Vauxhall Ampera with a steam car from 1895, yes, they were both cars, but that’s about it.

  We moved on, past an old church, probably just a village church from somewhere. Next to it what looked like a temple, possibly a Sikh temple, I couldn’t quite place it, certainly an Indian style building. I walked a little closer and the words appeared before my eyes. I was looking at the Guru Nanak Gurdwara from Smethwick, a Sikh temple built in Birmingham.

  The text read: ‘During the multi-thousand year period of religious illness, these buildings called “temples” were considered vitally important to the well-being of many people. Structures like this were built all over the globe. People gathered in huge numbers to engage in what they described as “praying” or “worship” which was believed to be a private conversation with an unknowable higher being.’

  I couldn’t help feeling slightly defensive for all the millions of people from history who were given solace and security by their religious beliefs. I know I didn’t share in such things but I had never thought of religious belief as an illness. It made me uneasy, it made me think the people of London cruel, insensitive and soulless.

  We moved along a few hundred meters and there was a building I recognised, the Regent’s Park Mosque. I read the description that streamed before my eyes. It was fairly damning of the Muslim faith going on to describe how different religions, even when they came from a geographically similar root as in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, often caused conflict and misunderstanding throughout the world. It described how through history such belief systems held back scientific progress and as the text suggested, most importantly, kept women oppressed and powerless. I felt myself begrudgingly agreeing with this rather generalised statement.

  ‘If you come over here you can see a timeline,’ said the Professor.

  On the opposite side of the wide walkway between all the buildings and installations, some kind of play was being performed. It was only after watching for a moment or two that I realised I wasn’t looking at actual living people, I was watching some kind of hologram thing, except it wasn’t like a hologram of Princess Leia in Star Wars, these creations looked one hundred per cent solid, they cast shadows, they had weight and seemed anchored on the ground.

  ‘This is overwhelming,’ I said. ‘What am I looking at?’

  The Professor watched the procession passing before us, I assumed these people were key figures who had wielded power and influence over the past couple of hundred years.

  ‘That is the first female Mayor of New York,’ she said pointing to a woman who walked past us and smiled, just as if she were a model on a catwalk.

  ‘That is the first female Mayor of Beijing,’ she said as a Chinese woman approached us, smiled and walked on by.

  A procession of smartly dressed mostly middle-aged women continued to approach where we stood, all races represented. Suddenly a woman approached that made my heart skip a beat.

  ‘Bloody hell! Maggie! What’s she doing here?’

  Margaret Thatcher walked past us. Not a waxwork that looked vaguely like Margaret Thatcher, it was as if I was outside 10 Downing Street in about 1981 and there she was. Utterly and chillingly lifelike.

  ‘I believe she was the first female Prime Minister of England, is that not correct?’ stated the Professor.

  ‘Yes, well she was the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the Professor and she looked around the young people standing nearby. ‘That’s often a hard concept to grasp. Would anyone like to expand on the concept?’

  ‘The United Kingdom was a political construct designed to bind all the city states together,’ said the very bright young women at the front of the group.

  ‘Well, I suppose you could call it that,’ I said. ‘Although we didn’t have the concept of city states, we had countries.’

  ‘Countries?’ asked Tudor dresser Judd.

  ‘Yes, the world was divided into separate countries, often with their own language and culture that was quite distinct from other countries. We didn’t have city states.’

  ‘It was a rather inefficient system which often led to unnecessary wars and strife,’ said the Professor flatly. She was addressing the students, not me. ‘Endless competition which was seen as progressive and an encouragement to scientific and technological development, but as we can see all around us, it often held back progress.’

  I looked around me at the spectacular human achievements on display, I wondered if she was right. The Professor was in full flow by now, ‘The development of the city state removed many of those conflicts allowing smaller groupings to work together more effectively. We’ll be going into more detail of this change in the next semester.’

  Seeing Margaret Thatcher had a similar effect on me to seeing the picture of Tony Blair and the Queen. It brought my old life rushing back, it released waves of strong feelings, of the dizzying new reality I was living in, the nauseating truth of what I was experiencing. I started to miss Beth again, even though we disagreed on this particular topic, I missed those disagreements. Of course, Beth was a very keen supporter of Margaret Thatcher even though, as with me, she’d only been a toddler and child during the period of her stewardship. My family had loathed Thatcher so it was always a little awkward when we visited my parents and Beth praised her and expressed her admiration.

  I also remembered Beth talking to me about the role women played in society and I’d just lose interest, I simply couldn’t engage with such conversations. I didn’t have anything to say. I’d like to explain that I didn’t think women should be oppressed or sent back to the kitchen to breed and cook. Far from it, I enjoyed working with the few female engineers I came across on various projects, but now, suddenly as I stood in this incredible museum, I started to question everything.

  Six women walking arm in arm then approached us and stopped as a group. They represented a range of races, African, Indian, Asian and Caucasian. They hung on to each other and laughed, other than their clothes which all looked a bit unusual to my eyes, they could have been in a clothing store advert from 2011, they were laughing and talking and just having a ‘really good time’ like models in a magazine.

  ‘Those are the original Weaver women,’ said the Professor. I stared at their faces, these creations were so incredibly real, solid looking and yet I knew enough about them to know they had all died many years earlier.

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ I said, as many better-dressed women passed us by as part of the historical pageant before me. ‘Women took over running things about a hundred and fifty years ago?’

  Professor Etheridge seemed to wait for her students to ask, when none of them did she said,

 
‘I don’t think the term “took over” quite describes it. It was a slow process that had, I believe, started long before your era. If you look back through history, indeed, pre-historic research shows quite clearly the dominance of the woman. In pre-patrilineal cultures women were always more dominant as mothers of course. In most ancient belief systems a woman existed first, her son was a secondary being, her offspring. Women created life, this is of course before the connection between sex and childbirth was understood. The human race then went through a ten thousand year period of patriarchal dominance. The power of the father, that was until the Weaver women, and Das Mutterrecht, the mother right.’

  ‘The mother right,’ I repeated, I’d never heard this term before, not even from Beth when she was on one of her rants.

  ‘When women had control over their reproductive systems and became better educated,’ said the Professor. ‘Two very important things happened, population growth started to diminish and more and more women emerged who not only gave birth to children but also managed the world around them.’

  ‘So is that when you took over?’ I asked.

  The Professor continued: ‘Women started making strides toward power long before even you were born. Women’s suffrage was when, just after World War I? The first woman Prime Minister in the United Kingdom in 1979, the first woman to be President of the United States of America in 2016, the first woman president of China in 2022. It was partly that, but also due to the emergence of city states in the mid-twenty-first century. These were generally already run by women Mayors and as the old national institutions became more and more unwieldy, more and more men started to give up and resign.’

  ‘So the men just gave up? I’ve got to say that doesn’t sound very plausible, there were so many power crazed men in my era, men who would do anything to seize or maintain their grip on power, these blokes would rather die than give up power. In fact they often did die.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the Professor. ‘But the change was seen as more psychological than political, so many men seemed unable to maintain their power-base; their lives seemed dogged by scandal and revelations of hypocrisy. This has to be seen in context of the emerging and far more successful and popular city states, localised and more manageable democracies with longer governing periods. Once a Mayor was elected with a twenty-year electoral cycle, planning became far more long-term and less likely to be damaging to the environment or electorate. Many cities began co-operating with each other far more successfully than nation states seemed able to do. What you knew as nation states slowly broke up and hence city states mostly run by women expanded and this filled the power vacuum.’

  While the Professor explained this to me, I had moved back from the display so words and descriptions of the women before me didn’t leak into my eyeballs. Out of all the technologies I’d come across in my travels that one was the most unpleasantly intrusive.

  Even though I was now getting a potted history of how the current situation in the Squares of London had evolved, as usual it raised far more questions than it answered.

  I was aware even back in 2011 that women were rapidly becoming far more successful in their education than men. I knew that an increasing number of women were in key positions in some companies but it was still unusual, the world I grew up in had always felt utterly dominated by men. What I was being told seemed to indicate that men had kind of given up. It wasn’t so much that there was a power struggle that women had finally won. It was more that the blokes shrugged and wandered off and the women just took control because someone had to.

  We started to move past the Shard and arrived in an area filled with dull looking boxes in various shapes and sizes. As I walked near one of the nondescript objects the annoying text appeared in my vision.

  ‘Hyglops p13, first mass-produced cuisine printer.’

  ‘A cuisine printer?’ I said, turning toward the gaggle of students.

  ‘Didn’t you have these in the old days?’ said the tall Japanese girl.

  ‘Um, no. I mean I know what cuisine is and I know what a printer is, is it like, a 3d food printer?’

  I looked behind the box device and saw a picture of cows in a field, the sort of image a supermarket would use to show how natural their produce was.

  ‘These were early model food printers,’ said the Professor, ‘very crude by today’s standards, but essential and lifesaving.’

  ‘Why were they lifesaving?’

  ‘Quite simply,’ said the Professor, ‘once we’d passed the eight billion mark in global population, there was no way we could feed everyone using the forms of agriculture you would have known. We had to develop new methods of producing food, especially meat.’

  ‘So you can print meat with one of these!’

  ‘Well, these old printers could produce something that looked like meat, it had many of the benefits of meat in terms of vitamins and protein but it tasted a bit like old cloth. If you follow me…’

  The Professor walked along the display of dull looking boxes until she was standing in front of a smaller unit.

  ‘This model, the p96 was the game changer. There are still many of these in use today even though they are often more than seventy years old. This machine can produce meat that is in every way better than any animal could possibly produce. More protein-dense, lower fat, more nutritious and of course, utterly delicious.’

  ‘But what do you put in it, what does it use to print meat?’

  The Professor pointed to a display next to the box, a shelf supporting a series of small plastic containers filled with liquids of different colours.

  ‘Okay, but where does the stuff inside the containers come from?’

  One of the students pointed to a display further along the wall, it looked like the interior of a large warehouse, the sort of thing Ocado, the grocery distribution service, once used to store and sort products. However, instead of plastic bottles and tins of refined food, each bay contained some kind of growing vegetation.

  ‘We use a wide array of non-edible plants as raw material,’ said the student. ‘These have all been modified to produce the maximum amount of ingredient they are best at producing. In many ways, just like an animal that converts plant food into meat products, we do the same, only bypassing the animal.’

  I stood looking at the small, innocuous box in front of me. ‘Yep, that’s pretty amazing,’ I finally agreed.

  ‘Wait ’till you see the next display,’ said Judd the Tudor dresser.

  We went around a corner and into an area that had been created to resemble a blasted desert. It was like a studio set for a movie, a kind of sandy fake desert setting and a fairly realistic looking backdrop of sun bleached clouds slowly moving across the giant screen. In the foreground lying among rocks and sand were hundreds of spent brass cartridges. To one side, a small mountain of weapons, some I recognised as assault rifles, even an ancient-looking Kalashnikov were piled up in a useless heap. Behind them were the remnants of military vehicles riddled with holes.

  ‘Do you know what those are?’ asked the tall Japanese looking girl.

  ‘What, the guns?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, guns. Did you have one back in 2011?’

  ‘What, a gun? No, of course not, I wasn’t a soldier.’

  ‘Did anyone shoot at you with a gun?’ asked Tudor Judd.

  I shook my head. ‘What’s all this about?’

  As we got closer to this large display area a word appeared before my eyes. ‘Crystalliser Field.’

  I couldn’t help rubbing my eyes again and I stood back so the wretched words didn’t appear in my field of vision.

  ‘What’s a crystalliser field?’

  The Professor nodded toward the display. A figure appeared from behind a blasted vehicle and walked toward the front of the display. Again this looked utterly real, like a real woman in a
real military fatigue outfit, she was carrying an assault rifle in one hand and a small spherical device in the other.

  ‘The inventor of the crystalliser field,’ said the Professor. ‘Rene Marion, she was a biochemist who worked in North Africa and the Middle East around 2083, she was working on crystallisation systems for water and energy storage when she discovered that she could also use the method to disable explosives. The chemical components of the explosive charges were made inert by being separated into their constituent ingredients in inert crystal form. It’s essentially a very simple process, but once she developed the ability to transmit this field over short distances, she demonstrated how effective it could be in violent disputes where these crude weapons systems were still used. With the backing of many of the world’s Mayors, she was able to develop and improve the system until by about 2095 there were no more functioning guns in the world.’

  ‘No guns, I suppose you mean no more guns that go bang and fire bullets using explosive charges as their propellants?’

  ‘Exactly correct, Gavin.’

  ‘But you presumably have other weapons systems?’

  ‘No. None. No one has weapons, the desire to own or use a weapon is now seen, like religion—’

  ‘—to be a form of mental illness,’ I said, finishing the now familiar motif. The Professor smiled at me kindly, she was impressed.

  I did have a thought at that moment, along the lines of ‘everything is a bloody mental illness to these weird freaks’, but I kept that thought to myself. At least I hoped I kept it to myself, it was becoming more apparent that the very notion of thoughts, privacy and secrecy was extremely porous in 2211. Anyway, no one reacted, I took a last glance at the piles of useless guns dropped in the fake desert setting and we moved on.

  Around the next corner the intensity of the whiteness almost hurt my eyes.

  At first I found it hard to judge scale or even sense where the floor actually was. It was a white space, with, I could just make out, hundreds of small white boxes standing in serried ranks.