The Three R's Pt. 01

"What sort of thing?"

"Well, nothing very illegal. Least ways, not illegal here as long as no one tells the police about it. There's a rare market over the border for ident-cards that look the part but don't have those nasty 'oh, there you are' chips in them. We can produce good enough facsimiles. Plus of course there's more conventional comforts -- like in those cases." He nodded towards the boxes of Bushmills.

"Whiskey? Unless things have got really bad in the last couple of weeks you can still get a drink."

"Have a look."

Norm opened the case nearest to him. Inside was stacked a pile of pornographic magazines.

"I think," said Danny, "that those girls in the New Order thing might consider that all a bit contrary to their 'Respect Agenda', don't you?"

"I'm not so sure. A girl like this is well deserving of respect!" Norm replied holding up a magazine with a centre spread of a girl with a chest that looked built for comfort rather than speed. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen anything similar. The date on the magazine cover was 1978. It was obviously a reprint and the colour reproduction wasn't great but he didn't imagine that would stop someone enjoying the pictures.

"I can see you and I are going to get on just fine," said Danny.

Chapter 6: Jack's Room

Jack was lucky. He had managed to get an entire room to himself in a large Edwardian house not far from Hampstead Heath. The ceiling leaked and one of the windows was cracked. He wasn't sure how long he would be able to go on paying the rent but at least he had a door that he could close to leave himself on his own. It was better than living in one of the university hostels.

As he got through the door he noticed a letter on the mat. He was pretty sure what it would say. It could wait for a while.

He kicked off his shoe and pulled out the folded up pamphlet from where he'd hidden it. He'd had it under his foot all the way back from the bar and it was looking pretty dog-eared. He put it down on the table and tried to smooth it out to get rid of the worst of the creases.

"MANifesto" the title page read in a hand-printed headline. The words "Men organising to protect their rights."

Jack decided that his first thoughts about how it had been produced had been correct. The pamphlet had probably been typed on an old- fashioned manual machine and then photocopied. You wouldn't want to do this sort of thing on a computer that might be sending whatever you typed in off to who knew where. The front page article listed all the rights that the authors felt New Order had taken away from men. The wording was simple, the messages clear. There was no attempt to stir up anger, just a calm documenting of the erosion of rights that had gone on over the last few years since New Order came to power.

Inside there was a call to action. "Three steps to reclaiming your rights" the heading said before going on to call on men to resist regulation, reject sponsorship and reverse the erosion of male rights. The last one wasn't going to be easy to achieve, Jack thought, especially since there wasn't going to be another election for four years at best. The first two steps, though, looked like something men could get behind, and take some political action. Too many men had gone along with regulations and the sponsorship scheme without really seeing what an impact they would have on their lives. Maybe some form of civil disobedience would be enough to convince New Order to roll back some of their more oppressive ideas?

He turned over another page. On one was an announcement of a rally to protest the male segregation regulations; the rules that kept men indoors after 6:00pm, forced them on to certain buses and banned them from certain streets. It was taking place on the coming Saturday in Fitzroy Square. "In the shadow of London's Phallic Symbol" the text said beside a drawing of the Post Office Tower that had been altered to exaggerate its similarity to the male reproductive organ. Jack smiled, he could imagine the drawing would annoy a lot of people in government. On the other hand it would appeal to just the audience it was intended to reach. On the opposite page was a picture. It was a pin-up, from the 1990's Jack guessed, with a busty girl displaying her assets while smiling out happily at the reader. He'd had a collection of similar pictures in his teens. "Remember when this was how women looked?" the caption read, "It's time to change the rules." It certainly wouldn't meet with the approval of anyone keen on New Order's Respect Agenda but, while Jack didn't think such images were a good idea, there was a long way from thinking that to thinking that such pictures should be banned, as they were.

Maybe he would go along to the rally, he thought. He wasn't the sort of bloke that usually went on protests. He'd never really been very politically inclined and the haranguing that some of his female fellow students handed out to anyone that expressed an opinion out of line with New Order orthodoxy hadn't encouraged him. Still, you couldn't just roll over and ignore the stuff that was going on. And it might be interesting to hear what these people had to say.

He put the pamphlet down and turned to the letter that had arrived while he was out. It was headed up with the logo of one of the engineering forms he had applied to for a work placement as part of his course. "Thank you for your application," it started encouragingly, but then went on, "I am afraid that we cannot offer a position on our student programme at this time. Although you appear in many ways an ideal candidate I am afraid that we have not yet achieved our gender ratio targets for intake on this programme and so we are unable to offer a place to candidates like yourself."

"I know what they mean by 'like yourself', its because I'm a man," Jack thought.

It was just the latest refusal he'd had. Some of the other excuses companies had used had been more oblique, some of them hadn't even bothered to reply. One had offered a place conditional on Jack wearing an "SAID suppression device while on company premises" but Jack hadn't fancied the idea of having his cock locked up just so he could get some work experience. He'd heard from other students who'd experienced something similar of the indignities of having their devices checked each day by a woman from the company's HR team. That didn't make him feel any more likely to go along with it.

Another response had been even more objectionable, "I am afraid that in our most recent intake the presence of men has been found to be disruptive." Yeah, thought Jack, like the women taking time off their work to bully the men was a disruption that was the men's fault.

He tossed the letter into the bin. He would have to talk to his tutor about this and find out if she had any thoughts on how he could get a placement.

Jack switched on the television, hoping to take his mind off things. He was being optimistic he knew. The New Order government had leant on the BBC to put out more "gender sensitive programming" as they put it, so there was rarely much to appeal to him there. There was other stuff available but none of it was publicised -- the newspapers weren't keen on promoting stuff the government didn't like. The evening news seemed to be exclusively focused on the UK. There was a short interview with a junior government minister who was suggesting that there were discussions going on with parties across Europe with a similar agenda to New Order but other than that, it seemed like the rest of the world barely existed. The main news item was a report suggesting that men's access to certain broadcast media needed to be controlled. Work was going on to come up with a system that would require TV sets to be fitted with a reader for ident cards. Then, men could be stopped from watching certain programming; "broadcasts that might make them feel dissatisfied with their lot or as if they were being unfairly discriminated against, for example," she had said. That was just going to make broadcast TV even more irrelevant as far as Jack was concerned. He flipped through the channels. An obscure foreign station was carrying a report on a police crack down on a male rights demonstration in an English town. Jack hadn't heard anything about it or seen any mention in local media. He wondered how much resistance that there actually was to New Order.

Jack returned to the pamphlet and flipped it over to the back page. "Published by the Committee for Reversing Male Rights Erosion" it said. There wasn't an address or a phone number, still less a twitter handle or web site address. There was, though, a logo; a hand held up palm outwards as though to say "Stop!" over the letters CRMRE. Jack remembered having seen it a few times as graffiti on the Underground. Perhaps there were other people around who felt like he did after all.

Chapter 7: Catherine Alone

Catherine arrived back at her flat. She shared it with no one, valuing her independence over even the idea of a live-in male to wait on her. In spite of Government encouragement and tax breaks, she had avoided becoming a sponsor and taking a man under her supervision. As long as she could satisfy her desires at venues like the Club Regina, she saw no need to complicate her life with a live-in man.

There was mail on her door mat. There was a letter from a friend -- she knew the handwriting -- some ads for local food delivery companies and a credit card bill. One piece she discarded without opening it. She knew by the envelop it was another appeal from the Department of Sponsors Affairs, asking for women to come forward and sponsor a man. It would take more than a letter from the Minister and the offer of a few thousand in tax benefits to make that amount of bother worthwhile, she thought.

Her computer was sitting on her desk in one corner of the sitting room. She thought about logging on and checking her emails but then decided against it. Work could wait until the following morning, she decided.

Bed beckoned and soon she was asleep, revisiting in a dream-scape her encounter with Leopard Head, except that, in her dream, at her command, he could transform into a leopard or return as she desired.

She woke late and looked at the clock. She was still feeling aroused by her dream. The thoughts of transforming a man to a beast or a wild beast to a helpless man left her smiling as she stretched a hand down to burrow her fingers inside her pants for a few moments of intense pleasure.

The realities of the day asserted themselves. She put memories of her real and dreamed encounters with Leopard Head to one side as she thought about work.

At least I don't have to be in the office, she thought, pulling on a comfortable grey tee-shirt. She dragged a comb through her hair, which fell in black curtains either side of her face without much encouragement, and turned to her computer.

The meeting session was just getting under way.

"Morning, Catherine."

Her boss was online already, of course, but, Catherine noticed, she wasn't the last by any means to join the call. "Morning, Doc," Catherine responded. Doctor Aileen McConaghy's unit was part of the Government Communications Evaluation and Research Centre. The unit was based in Cheltenham but her staff did not need to travel in to the office for every meeting. Others of the team logged in until there were six of them including Catherine and Dr McConaghy.

Catherine scanned the screen. She was proud to be part of the team. These days she felt that her contribution was valued. That was a change that had come with the political changes. When she had been learning her craft she had put up with the borderline-racist stereotyping of her interest in cryptography and data analysis. "This is Catherine," one of her previous bosses -- who had never really worked out if she was of Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean or Japanese heritage - had introduced her, "very inscrutable." After New Order had come to power and declared that men weren't suitable for employment in such roles, she had enjoyed bestowing on him the same inscrutable look when she gave him the news that he wouldn't be working for the department any longer. His reaction had been anything but inscrutable, she remembered with pleasure..

"Three projects to talk about today," Aileen began. "Communications intercepts, financial data interpretation and location analysis. Sue, can you give us a heads up on your patch, please?"

"Of course." Sue Turner kicked things off "Well, you will all be aware that we are coming up to a year since the Fordswell Bombing and naturally HM Government is feeling a little concerned in case someone thinks this is a good birthday to celebrate. We've been monitoring the 'persons of interest' list watching for mentions on email and the usual media. There's been nothing of concern which means either there's nothing happening or we've missed it completely."

Aileen winced at the thought but she knew Sue was thorough and the risk of her missing something was small. "Let's hope it's the former. Janice, financials?"

"Nothing to suggest any anniversary activity in terms of local cash movement, certainly. At least not between any of the groups we know about. There are the regular relatively low value spikes of money movement that are associated with people smuggling. The Male Control Force get the data once we've checked it out. They follow up the ones they can but in all fairness they're resource limited and unless we pick up a pattern of something major going on, I think they will just focus on the careless ones. My team are carrying on trying to see if there are nodes of transmission that might lead us to trafficking groups but there's little point in going after individual absconders. MCF seem to think the country is better of without them."

"I don't think that's what Florence Daniels at the Home Office would say. Still, as you say, it's the MCF's call, not ours. Catherine?"

Catherine's specialism was location data. Using the information collected by various government and private systems that could provide details of the whereabouts of 'persons of interest' -- these days invariably men -- Catherine's team of analysts could conjure up movement tracks and possible connection points, places where groups of individuals have been co-located and places that individuals may have visited in succession. "Apart from the regular stuff we've got two projects on the go. We're upgrading the ident card location data analysis to take advantage of the new cards. The improved chips mean that location can be detected passively -- that is without a man actually having to present the card to a reader. That's good and bad. We'll obviously have much more data that we can work with but, on the down side, we'll obviously have much more data that we can work with." She smiled. "We're going to run some simulations to see what the impact will be on processing requirements, Doc, but we will definitely need some bigger boxes up there in the Cotswolds."

Aileen had anticipated the problems. Inevitably the more data you collected the bigger the haystack got and the better you had to get at finding needles. That needed more and more computing power -- boxes - in the GCHQ's data centre in Cheltenham or where ever it was. Doctor McConaghy was used to the steadily increasing demand for processing capacity but, as long as her team delivered results, she hadn't had much difficulty in getting the resources she wanted.

"And the other project?"

"That's more interesting. Some real challenges. As you know the Government's program of funding the fitting of SAID reduction devices to sponsored males has been a success where it has been tried." Catherine noticed some of her colleagues grinning at the mention of 'SAID reduction devices'. Jargon was common place in the job but the devices designed to reduce Sexually-driven Attention Inadequacy Disorder were more commonly (and more accurately) referred to as chastity devices or cock cages. Men that had been fitted with them were known as FORCELS; the force-ably celibate. Some of the more extreme members of the New Order party had been calling for it to be made universally compulsory.

"Do we have data on the uptake for SAID device funding?" Aileen asked.

"It's around 65% in the areas where its been tried. Mostly inner city districts, some suburban. DOSA are hoping to get to 75% FORCELS over time."

"OK. Well, we'll have to see how they get on. How are things going now that the new devices?"

The most recent innovation in the design of SAID devices was to include electronic components to report on location and whether the wearer was experiencing an erection. "Very encouraging so far. They are giving us good data on the location of those that have been fitted, obviously. The GPS seems to work well. Longer term by aggregating data from individuals we will also be able to get an indication of areas where men don't appear to have been fitted. If we correlate location data on ident card holders with data from the devices we can spot sites where there are high numbers of un-caged men. That will mean DOSA can target promotion campaigns or incentives to increase take up on a local basis. Initial indications are that the tracking data is accurate to about 5 metres -- that's better than we can achieve with the ident cards. The Arousal Detection data looks promising too. It's hard to know how accurate it is but we are certainly getting data that corresponds to the original expectations."

Aileen McConaghy was encouraged. She had been one of those on the Government's Male Activity Monitoring by Biometric Observation committee who had pressed to include an arousal detection and reporting feature in the specification of government approved male chastity units. As a result of MAMBO's decisions, the team at GCHQ would get data on the location, time, duration and intensity of any instance of male arousal. Ultimately being able to analyse that data should provide a whole host of benefits. "Anything specific of interest?"

"Number Ten might be amused to hear the Prime Minister's last TV broadcast was accompanied by a statistically significant arousal event in 10% of those fitted. That's a much more reliable indicator of male attitudes to government policy announcements than any opinion poll."

"I'm not sure if that's an indicator of male attitudes to government announcements or a measure of the number of perves in the audience. I seem to recall the PM was looking particularly stern and we know that goes down well with a certain group of men don't we?"

"True. Still it was interesting data, I thought."

"I think I will phrase it carefully when I tell Number 10, though. The last thing we need is members of the cabinet competing to see who can get the biggest stiffy rate by saying something controversial on the Today programme."

Catherine smiled. While it was true that the New Order government had been more unified than many of its predecessors, she had noticed that some ministers seemed only too happy to appeal to the stringently anti-male element in the party and the country at large. She could quite imagine Aileen's suggestion happening.

The rest of the meeting consisted of Aileen updating them on some new HR policies and plans for improving the data links between their systems and those of the MCF. It was a good start to the week, thought Catherine. The admin stuff was out of the way. Now she could get on with useful work.

Chapter 8: Supermarket

The cupboard in Jack's kitchen presented a depressing site for anyone hoping for a meal. Jack looked at the few packets and cans hoping for inspiration. It didn't come. He would need some food today, even if it was just some bread, eggs and milk. He couldn't afford to be eating in the college canteen all week so at least some basic supplies would be needed.