The Power(42)
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Note: The Personal Defender was subsequently withdrawn, following incidents fatal to the users.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.