Kate’s Testimony

My name is Kate. I was, I still am, a psychotherapist living in Adelaide, Australia. My role before the Andromort has been told separately. This Testimony is to record the events of the Andromort as they happened to me.

 It was 5.30 a.m. on Monday morning for me. I wanted to help in any way I could. I did have a secondary job—well, actually, I should be truthful. It was the primary job, but it relied on being out in the world to help and observe while I did. It was to gauge feeling. It was to see what women were thinking and feeling so Theai could adjust the change plans. I watched the live stream at 6.30 a.m. and then headed out, following Theai’s instructions.

I worked in a team of two—Hi, Isla—to help clear traffic. Andromort was well before peak hour, but there’s still moderate traffic here at that time. We met at the on‑ramp near my house. I remember looking up at an aircraft as I waited. Our airport is close to the city. I could see it coming in for landing, and I held my breath. I wondered what was going on up there. Phoebai landed it perfectly.

We drove up the on‑ramp and could see male drivers had pulled over as far as they could to the left. There were vehicles with females as passengers sitting in the left lane. Most—not all—of the cars with both sexes in had male drivers, because that was the way of the world before Andromort. Men drove. Theai had suggested they move their male driver to the passenger side, and some did and had already gone, but some waited for help. We helped the female passengers move the male and asked them to drive off. They had all spoken to Theai. They all knew what was happening. They all did as they were asked. Shock, I think. Our next job was to drive the vehicles with the dead males back to their homes or their base. We had the drop‑the‑seat‑to‑recline position, push, and roll for the body to move it to the passenger seat down pat by then. I felt bad at the awkward angle they slumped at as I drove them home, Isla following in her car. We saw other teams of two that day—lots of them.

The next day, Tuesday, I was allocated to body‑bag distribution. I reported to a huge warehouse near the airport. There were still planes coming and going—not many, but some. The doors were open, and shelf upon shelf contained wrapped pallets of body bags. The Titain had prepared for this. I put on my smart glasses and learned how to drive a fork truck and loaded three truck and trailers with around 20,000 body bags. Alice Springs only needed 15,000, but they are a central hub for the surrounding area. Three women turned up to drive the trucks. Only one had ever done that before, but the others put their smart glasses on and Theai guided them through the controls, and off they went on their 1,500‑kilometre trek. We loaded smaller trucks, and they headed out to the suburbs. We unpacked pallets, wrapped them in smaller units, and loaded drones.

The next day, Wednesday, Theai sent me to a cold‑storage facility. That morning it was forklift driving again. This time onto refrigerated trucks headed out to local Coles. Not all the supermarkets were being supplied. The Titain had figured out the strategically important ones to keep open to supply the most people with the least number of workers. The afternoon was in Coles, stacking fridges and freezers and shelves. A Coles manager, in uniform of course, was doing whatever they do on their devices to order more stock. Women drifted in, picking up milk and cheese and eggs and beer and wine. God bless them, I thought. Wine sounds like a good idea. They navigated through the self‑checkouts and headed home. As I headed home, I saw an ambulance heading to the RAH, our hospital. I thought of the doctors and nurses, many with their dead in body bags at home, keeping the hospital running.

The day after that, Thursday, Theai sent me to the Pakapakanthi / Victoria Park entry at East Terrace. I had been to parkrun there in the past. There were trucks lined up with machinery on the trailers. The one closest to me was unloading a large digger. A woman in high‑vis was shouting, “To me, to me, please, ladies.” We assembled. She pointed us each to a truck and a machine. We unloaded diggers; we dug according to Theai’s instructions. We had around 800,000 dead in Adelaide and surrounds, but this was 72 hectares, and Theai assured me it was enough for those who chose burial. I heard the Oval was being prepared for a mass cremation. I think a lot of men would have selected that if it was their choice. I wondered how cities without green space were getting on today. I heard the Muslim population had been given the opportunity to bury their dead much sooner on a section of the parkland. I could see women there praying. I thought they looked calm and restrained but a woman I was working with told me that in Islam excessive grief is not permissible. The idea is to accept God’s will not to rail against it.

On Friday, the rest of the burials and cremations began. A lot of women brought their dead in family cars, trailers, trucks, and campervans. Some even carried or wheeled them from nearby apartments and houses. I heard a woman giving loud thanks that it was all downhill from North Adelaide. My job was on a truck collecting bodies that women could not carry themselves. The women, following the tracker signal, arrived separately, or some even watched the ritual from home. The bodies were placed. The women said their farewells. Here there was weeping and some wailing and howling as some women looked around and absorbed the immensity of the loss. At 5.00 p.m. the ceremony began. In some ways we were lucky with community leadership. Our mayor was already female and a former pathologist, of all professions. The mayor, the female councillors, the religious leaders, the police, the emergency services were all standing together in the old Grandstand. The rituals were live‑streamed so women all over the park could see and hear. The dead were honoured, and the living were supported. I thought if the Titain were right and men were bred for war and domination, then women were bred for fortitude and cooperation.

On Saturday I returned to the park and helped with filling in the graves and smoothing over the dirt. I could see the smoke from the Oval thinning out. I went to Coles on the way home. I bought wine. I didn’t drink it yet. I joined TC and the 180 Original players for the Leaders’ Summit at 10.30 p.m. my time. We watched it together; time zones didn’t seem to matter again. Afterwards, we talked in groups, agreed the timing for the first post-Andromort meeting to do a full debrief and then gradually disappeared back to our own worlds.

I went for a walk on Sunday night as it was getting dark. I didn’t feel unsafe. I felt safe. For the first time in a very long time, I didn’t turn my house alarm on at night. I thought about fear and my amygdala. I wondered what that meant for femanity.

On Sunday, I slept in and went for a walk to clear my head. I did the online test in the Titain app for alternative career options and gave that some thought. I thought about the last seven days and how blurry they had become. I suggested to Theai that they should encourage women around the world to provide a testimony—a written or oral or video recollection of the first seven days after Andromort. Ask them to do it before they lose connection to their emotions, as a memorial of sorts, but also the start of herstory now that history is done. Theai suggested I should do the first one and then she would ask other people to do it if they would like to. I started but didn’t get far and fell asleep on the couch. Tethai woke me at some stage to tell me my neck wasn’t in a healthy position, and I should go to bed. I went for another walk first and then went to bed.

But that’s just the mechanics of the week. Most of the time I felt like I was in an organised blur of activity. I felt like an automaton acting according to Theai’s instructions. Sometimes I would just stand and wait to be told what to do next. If I think about it, that’s what I could see in other women too. It was like we took our own brains offline and waited for the prompt of the machine code. It’s Monday, Day 8, when I am writing this, and the only way I know where I was each day is by checking my Timeline on Google Maps. And I knew it was coming.

I remember I was surprised how many women were out helping early in the week. There were women Theai had identified who did not have dead to grieve or even had reason to be happy that men were dead. They had been asked to help from the beginning. But there were also women doing what they could because that was preferable to sitting with their dead and grieving. They zipped up their dead into the body bags and asked how they could help. The numbers grew throughout the week.

At the Planning, someone said women—especially women—will look for guidance and take it if it seems authoritative and reasonable. Is that Kant’s self‑imposed immaturity, laziness, cowardice? I don’t think so, but I do think we, women, have been conditioned very well to look for advice, look for guidance, look for a guardian.

During the Planning, I don’t think any of us humans could have envisaged the level of planning and organisation and delivery that the Titain were capable of. What I saw was women in awe of that. Women glad to play their part to get everyone else to the end of the week. I saw anger. I saw despair. I saw a woman drive a four‑wheel drive into the front window of David Jones and come out with what looked like some designer handbags and drive off. The women around just shook their heads and carried on. When I passed by next, the window was boarded up. I saw a woman screaming at the sky. I saw another woman walk up to her and hug her. I saw two women shouting at each other. I saw more women holding each other as they cried. Later in the week, I saw women talking in huddles about what was next.

So, we were relatively calm. The Plan unfolded. But it wasn’t like that everywhere. I watched the news feeds every night to get a sense of what was going on in the rest of the world.

Natural disasters did not take a break that week.

There was flooding in New Zealand, Queensland, Mozambique, Kenya, Malawi, Oman, Hawaii, and Spain. We are so used to seeing men take the lead and be the rescuers. They are bred for protection and action. Throughout my entire life, scenes like the flooding on the news feeds have always had men wading through water and mud and men plucking families from houses and the roofs of cars. I remembered the Planning topic and the small number of women in emergency services. The responses were not co‑ordinated as well as they would have been. Women did their best. I suspect more people died. What was better was the follow‑up response. Drones with supplies. Helicopters from neighbouring countries. The image that stuck with me was two women looking at a flood‑damaged bridge in the far north of New Zealand. Rural women. They must have had men and boys in body bags at home, and they were trying to figure out how to get the milk tanker across.

There were wildfires in Nebraska; thousands of cattle died. More wildfires in other states because of the record heats and low humidity. Phoebai modelled the spread and issued warnings, but in large part they went unsuppressed. Most firefighters were males, and The Titain preferred fire refugees to the risk of asking women to tackle the fires. There were earthquakes too. Tremors in the Pacific and a powerful quake in Tonga—out at sea, thankfully, and only a minor tsunami as a result. Volcanoes kept spewing out ash and lava in various places. Tornadoes barrelled through the American Midwest; there was even one in the Arabian Peninsula. No category 5 storms to report, though.

We live on a risky planet, and the week of Andromort was apparently no more or less risky than usual. The video feeds came through, and although there were competent and intelligent responses shown, there was also a weight, and anger, in the commentaries. Women reporting the news. Women responding to crisis. This is all ours now. Women have to do this as well as everything else. Even in our grief.

One of the more disturbing parts of the week was the robots. I remember Theai talking about using them to help support male‑dominated industries, but I wasn’t prepared to see them en masse. Someone caught the moment when a large group walked into a factory in China to take over the roles that males had done there. Theai told me the President of the People’s Republic of China had requested robot assistance with the movement and disposal of the male bodies, but The Titain said no. Human work. I did wonder if that was punishment.

I wondered what a group of robots is called; apparently, it’s a fleet—a fleet of robots. I felt chilled in a visceral way. The research tells us humans have this initial response. It is called the uncanny valley of the mind. We have cognitive dissonance because we are seeing human‑like intelligence or emotion from what our brain knows is software. That feels uncanny to us. I did some research on it early on when I first met The Titain. The research says our discomfort drops when we reframe the agent as software or the robot as a tool. That did not happen for me with The Titain because they were not just software. My discomfort, my dissonance, has stayed steady.

But back to robots. The name came from a Czech word robota, meaning forced labour or serfdom. That’s from the Indo‑European root orbh‑o, meaning bereft of father or deprived of free status. The English word orphan has the same root. I guess we’re all orphans—or maybe robots—now.

I had a chat with Theai about it. We discussed words; she likes that I think. She will explain to everyone—and that does mean everyone—that there will be an increasing use of what we used to call robots. They have been modified by the Titain, so robot or android is no longer the best way to describe them. The Titain prefer to call them Auxai because they augment what they—AI—can do. The group noun we settled on was crew. So, we will see more Crews of Auxai helping out. Better.

I have struggled more this week than I could have thought possible. On Monday morning, when I helped Isla move the first body of the day from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat, it suddenly hit me. I talk about unconscious motivations all the time with my clients. When I leaned into the car to lower the driver’s seat into the recline position so we could roll him into the passenger seat, I looked at this young man’s face. His eyes were shut because The Swarm had made him drowsy and urged him to pull over and then given him his final dream. He looked at peace, but I had a moment of insight that stopped me moving.

I felt my heart contract, and I realised that I had held, for all the fifteen years since Mark and Liam and Brendan had died, an overwhelming urge that others would understand how this felt. My acceptance of Andromort, my defence of it, suddenly became clear. This must be why The Titain chose me. They could see this in me, this desire for shared grief. The same desire that made Demeter make the whole world barren when Hades stole her daughter. Isla yelled, “Push,” so I did, and we settled into a routine. We lowered, rolled, and drove for the rest of the day. We can’t unknow things, though. That feeling of culpability lived with me, lives with me.

Before Andromort. I still get that sense of unreality when I slip into that phrase with acceptance and familiarity. Before Andromort, I had helped The Titain draft the outline of the request for assisted suicide for women and girls over eighteen. Theai had suggested this be available from Day 8.

It turns out quite a number did not wait. There was a mass suicide in a Christian commune with locations in America and Europe. Around 2,500 women, girls, and babies died at the same time. There were bridge jumps, some caught on video, and hangings, but mostly women were found in bed with drug overdoses or tidily in their baths or showers with cut wrists. Some were trans men who did not want to wait. I’ve worked with suicidal clients, and they have told me of being trapped in a place with no escape other than death—the unbearable ache with death as the only possible release. I understood that feeling and still wondered what brought me back from the brink of that option.

The request itself was modelled on Dignitas. It didn’t ask for doctors’ input or medical conditions, just a biographical letter explaining who the person was, their background, their present situation, and why they wanted to die.

On the morning of Day 8, I got an email. It was from Danielle, my first husband’s second wife. The fertile 24‑year‑old he impregnated while we were going through our fifth cycle of IVF when I was 42 and he was 44. She was ‘reaching out’—God, I hate that phrase—to say goodbye. The Titain had been careful not to let anyone know the names of the humans who had been involved in the Original Game. That included me, although I had known them longer. So, it was strange to see her name in my emails. Danielle Young. Wife to Stephen Young and mother to his children. I had walked away and had no contact with them. I knew there were children, but I didn’t know how many, and it suddenly struck me I didn’t know the sex either.

“Hi Kate, I got your email address from a friend who had seen your TED talk a few years ago. I’ve just completed the bio that Theai says is necessary to have assisted suicide. As I did, I thought about you. Stevie often mentioned you fondly—how kind you were to let him go so easily, how understanding you were about his need for children, how much he learned about his own emotions as you went through the fertility issues and how much better a dad he was because he had known you. Thank you for all of that. I was so jealous for a long time, but eventually I could see what he meant. He was a good dad. We had twin boys and then one more boy three years later. I wanted to try for a girl, but events got in the way, and it never happened for me. I wish I could go back and try harder now, and there might be reason to keep living. I can’t, though. We moved to Christchurch shortly after we married. Stevie’s family never accepted me, and we needed to start again. I don’t know why I want you to know that. They loved you and could not forgive me. I buried them all in the Red Zone, so if you ever get over here again, that’s where Stevie and his sons are now and where I will join them in a week. I have to wait a week and then ask again, but I have no doubt. I want to be where they are. Your TED talk was on grief. You talked about your loss of your husband and your stepsons, so I know you know how I feel. You kept going, but this is a world I want no part of, so I can’t. Thank you again for the husband you gave me. All the very best. Dani.”

It’s the end of Day 8 now. I guess I get to process all of that—my culpability, my guilt, my sorrow for Dani.