⚒️ The Price of Being a Woman

by Joel Glover

“I'd like to welcome to our conversation St-Jacques Desailly, who as I'm sure every Wire Watcher knows is the Chief Execution Officer for Cavendish Interstellar Refining. If the rumours I'm hearing are accurate, he's got good news for anyone with CIR stock in their portfolios!”

A lifetime of smiling at older men, waiting for their approval, has prepared Carpenter for her role. With her prairie-wide blue eyes and all-natural bovine lashes most people who met her came to the unfair conclusion she was an arrow short of a quiver. Her resume did little to alter this narrative. The aristocratic euro-snobs and nepo-baby journalists sneered merrily at the words “Agricultural and Mechanical” in the name of her alma mater; to them all she could ever be was a farm girl from the faded hegemonic interior; a product of an impoverished theocracy, too stupid to know the lines she repeated were lies. 

She never understood why wittingly perpetuating a mistruth was considered the mark of sophistication, but she was happy enough to take the silver pieces and let the illusion persist.

Just as long as she never had to go home.

“That's really great!”

She was a meme, a gif, a sticker, an emoticon. 

The same shills and flacks who derided her were yet to grasp the potency that penetrating the zeitgeist gave her. They might not want to be synonymous with the kind of “reporting” she was willing to debase herself for, but they would never be synonymous with anything. They were doomed to irrelevance, to playing courtier and jester to the wealthy, forever at the mercy of capricious whim.

Not her though.

“Of course it isn't all good news, is it?”

Sitting at the other end of the video line, St-Jacques Desailly shakes his head sadly. The expression was the result of extensive testing of various facial cues in the AI environment; this version received the most favourable scoring.

“No, Miss Smyth. The road to margin never runs true, we say here at C.I.R., and this quarter is no exception. Due to unforeseen tectonic activity we’ve been forced to write off the facility at Novel Jupiter. Fortunately we discovered richer seams on Herakles 417 and Staunton-Rabeni which will more than replace the expected losses to capacity.”

He smiled, here, projecting the cool and calm the markets expect from a Cavendish C-Suite Exec. 

“That's wonderful to hear, congratulations Monsieur Desailly! I can't wait to hear how you do in the next quarter. So, for now, Wire Watchers, that's all: stay safe out there!”

Her predecessor was the originator of the limp sign off. She hated it, but didn't object to the royalties that came from the dolls—sold by the network—that repeated the phrase when squeezed in the middle. She tried not to think about the videos of the dolls being hacked and reprogrammed, trained on hours of her recorded speech to voice the most vile perversions. That was just the price of being a woman in the public arena. 

“Miss Smyth, there's a message for you.”

Her assistant Sandro was moderately useless at any task that did not require him to look good or be his uncle's nephew. This included taking messages. 

She waited. 

“I don't think it's right though, it says it's about your husband?”

“I don't have a husband.” 

Sandro flapped ineffectively at her, an effete butterfly in a tailored djellaba and hand-crafted Swiss watch that cost more than her car. The gosh darned thing was crusted with more carats of diamond on its face than her jewellery box would even contain.

He was easy to ignore. 

She never took her show makeup off until she was home. There were too many autograph hunters, too many selfie snappers, too many muckrakers combing through surveillance drone footage looking for an unflattering picture to use in a gossip column. 

The other advantage of keeping her professional face on was the time saving. She could finish recording a segment and be in the elevators ten minutes later, heading back to her apartment. Her sanctuary. 

“Carpenter! Stop right there!”

His voice, that familiar accent wrapped around a hatefully commanding tone, put a half to her movement like she was a bass he'd hooked.

“Girl, aincha gonna say hello to your husband?”

Everyone was watching. A whole foyer full of people who, only moments ago, would have proclaimed themselves incredibly just, transformed instantly to spectators at her humiliation. 

“I don't have a husband. I divorced you when I left.”

Even this admission, made in the public square, was going to feed the yackety yack feeds for months. 

“There's no divorce in the eye of the Lord.”

“Well there is in the eye of the law, Humble!”

Years of unvoiced frustration and resentment add a shrillness to her voice she doesn't find pleasant. 

He shakes his head. 

He was not her choice, but even so, her father had done his best by her, in his view. Humble was a hard working, God-fearing man—proud in his faith. He was as good looking as the day is long, and only raised his hands to her once. 

“Suffer not an adulteress to live,” he proclaimed self-righteously. 

She didn't even see the gun in his hand.