Catherine Chee was looking at her computer. There were project reports from her team to read and the planned work schedules for the coming week to review. That was the worst of being promoted to a supervisor’s role, she thought, you get to worry about stuff that is of no interest at all.
She tabbed across to one of the apps that sat on her desktop, telling herself that there was always a good reason for looking at tracking data, even if it was only to check that her team hadn’t missed anything.
This was why she had applied for this job, Catherine told herself. She had had a number of difficult relationships in her teenage years with men. Maybe it was because she expected to get her own way in relationships but Catherine was sure it wasn’t just that. Some men had mistaken her impassive looks for those of someone that could be mistreated; some had seen her as exotic, a trophy; some — from her own ethnic background — had thought she should behave as Chinese women traditionally behaved. None had been prepared to accept her on her own terms and none, it seemed, had been prepared to show the fidelity she felt was her right. Too many had strayed and, for Catherine, discovering their straying had been traumatic. That was what had set her to wishing there was some way to know where her man was and that had led her into becoming an expert in communications and location and to her involvement with the app developers for HoneyTrak. It was also what had led her to say “yes”, when she was approached to join the government’s communication analysis team shortly after New Order came to power.
The graphical interface gave her a visualisation of location data projected onto a map. Colour coding showed the areas where there were more men with ident cards than had been fitted with SAID-reduction devices. Some of the data wasn’t surprising. She looked at an area where very low fitted-rates were showing up as a purple blotch on the map. It was just south of the Euston Road. Easy to explain, Catherine thought. These were students at the University — very low numbers were involved in sponsorship so it wasn’t surprising that fitting rates were low too.
She used her mouse to scroll forward and backward in time, watching how the purple blotch seemed to grow during the week and shrink at weekends as students went back to their digs. As she scrolled though she spotted an anomaly; a day when a purple blotch appeared further west. She zoomed in. It was around Fitzroy Square, a few Saturdays ago, around 6:00pm. The date on the visualisation app was linked to the Department’s calendar of external events, the blotch was related to a public demonstration that had taken place in the square. That made sense. There would have been a lot of students and unsponsored males there.
She thought about it. This might be a good sample to trial the new apps on. She marked out the group with her cursor and clicked on an app labelled “Deviance Detection”. There was a lot of data to process, it took a few minutes but soon the message “conformant/consistent behaviour group identified”.
Catherine looked at the options available to her. The first, “List Conformance Characteristics”, would tell her the basis the programme was using to flag individuals as conformant, typically did they behave like others of the cohort. The one she was interested in was “New Cohort of Deviants”. That subtracted the data for the conformant groups and left those that had some behavioural attribute different to the ‘normal’. They would be the ones most likely to pose a risk, the ones most likely to warrant further exploration.
A click of the cursor and the cloud of data points on the map thinned. Catherine was surprised at how few there were left on the screen but then she thought; students, probably living in close proximity to the university, travelling back and forward to the same location, using the same shops, using the same pubs and bars. There would be a high degree of behavioural commonality. So, she thought, looking at the animation of the movements of the remaining dots, what was this little dot, doing way out on its own, taking a trip to docklands?
Chapter 13: Spray Paint
Jack Toven had picked out his place carefully. He wanted somewhere he’d not be noticed, somewhere without CCTV and somewhere that would get the attention of passengers arriving in the station.
His mouth was dry. He was conscious of the cans, stencils and posters in his coat pocket. It was early in the day — much earlier than he was usually up. Still, this way there was no curfew but the streets were still quiet.
He chose one of the tunnels leading from the railway station to the Underground and on to the Bus Station. It would see plenty of traffic as the rush hour started and the police would find it difficult to close it off if they didn’t like what he was planning to do.
He put the posters up first — four of them — all trumpeting “Resist Regulation! Reject Sponsorship! Reverse the Erosion of Male Rights!”, the same slogans used at the rally in Fitzroy Square. Then — positioning his stencils carefully in the gaps between the posters – he used the day-glo yellow spray paint to add the letters, “ECR”.
He’d asked Gerry what it meant. “Mainly,” Gerry had said, “it’s to throw the MCF off the scent. We don’t want them busting up the stuff CRMRE are doing and this will maybe have them thinking there are other groups.”
“And the letters?”
“Oh, its a bit simpler that that ‘Resist — Reject — Reverse’ stuff. It just stands for ‘End Cunt Rule’. We’ll have to see when the Government work it out.”
Jack found that interesting. He liked the idea of giving the Government something to puzzle over and he reckoned the Government would get a lot more scratchy about the insult than they ever would about something that looked like a rational argument. Insults had a way of taking hold in the public imagination.
“You don’t want me to spell it out?”
“Nah. We’ll let them guess for a while. There were half a dozen of you out this morning across town. Daisy went to the printers this morning picked up posters and helped drop the materials off. We’ll have a go at different sites on Thursday and Saturday. We’re getting some ECR stickers done too; easy just to slap on anywhere flat. If they see enough around they’ll get the idea its something significant. After a while we’ll start leaving them some clues. Who knows maybe we’ll get some men interested too.”
It felt to Jack like there was a real sense of trying to make a change. It had helped him overcome his fear of being discovered while he was putting up the posters.
The adrenalin rush from his actions lasted until he was almost back at his room in Hampstead. He bumped into Daisy on the way. “Well,” she said, when he’d told her about the posters, the graffiti and what Gerry had said, “at least you’re doing something. I think you should get a reward.” The flirtatious look that she gave him wasn’t open to misinterpretation. “I’ve got one of these,” she waved a little square packet — a condom. “Do you know somewhere we can go?”