TC’s Testimony

My name is Treasa, but most people call me TC. I was, and still am, a games developer living in Dublin, Ireland. My role before the Andromort has been told separately. This Testimony is to record the events of the Andromort as they happened to me. I am not a fluent writer, so I did some voice notes for Theai and asked her to write my testimony for me. When I read it, I realised The Swarm was right; it is cathartic. So, this is my testimony, but written for me by my ghost writer, Theai.

It was 7.00 p.m. Sunday night for me. Unlike Kate, I did not want to help. I did not want to observe and report. I wanted to lie down with my remorse and a bottle of Jameson. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. My mother interrupted my wallow at 7.12 p.m., so not a long wallow. I heard her voice leaving a message, her voice urgent. “Treasa, are you alright? Call me, please?”

It was only 7.12 p.m., so she couldn’t be too fluthered yet. Might be a good idea to call her sooner rather than later, was my thinking, so I did. She picked up the phone straight away and, to my undying amazement, sounded happy. I think this is the first time I could ever have said that.

No ‘hello’, no ‘well now’ as she always said in sad tones. “They’re all dead, they say. It seems to be true, and that means he’s dead. He’s gone, the nasty fecker. They’re all gone.” Honestly, she sounded delighted. “I can’t talk long because Theai has asked me to go and look after the O’Connor girls, so I’m off next door to let their mammy go and get their brother. I’ll talk to you later. Look after yourself, love.” I can’t say my remorse evaporated, but it certainly lightened.

I watched the 8.00 p.m. live stream. Once The Titain were finished, the live stream shifted to Mary Butler, our new Prime Minister, with Catherine Connolly, our President, sitting beside her, and beside her Helen McEntee and Mary Lou McDonald for the other two major parties. They had reached across party lines, it seemed, to present a united front. All of them with husbands and sons to grieve, as well as fathers, brothers, nephews. But somehow here they were, leading our country through Andromort. I voted for Mary Lou, and I remember her saying the gender balance in the Micheál Martin cabinet was an affront to equality. She said it was depressing to see the absence of us. Not now, though.

They followed Theai’s script—the key messages, the plans for the next seven days. Catherine Connolly, the eldest and our head of state, spoke last. She said we must grieve and go on. She managed to hold it together as she reminded us that our previously much‑loved President, Michael D. Higgins, had gone in the Andromort. She said he would have said, “Take care.” And then she read his poem of the same name. It’s a poem that calls for resilience, community, and hope in the face of darkness. I remember some of the words.

It starts with “In the journey to the light, the dark moments should not threaten.” It’s the last words I repeated every day after that.

“Hold firm.
Take care.
Come home
together.”

By the time she was finished reading, all four were weeping. I was too, with all the other women of Ireland who were watching. They disappeared, and I flicked between channels as the female anchors started to appear one by one. On RTÉ One, the Six One News had been normal stuff—normal for these crazy days. It’s called Six One because the Angelus bell sounds at 6.00 p.m. for a minute. Go figure. That’s Ireland for you. Karen Creed had finished the Sunday News and Sport programme at 6.30 p.m. and was still in the studio at 7.00 p.m. Early in the bulletin there had been a joking exchange about man flu with the sports presenter and about being nearly an all‑female team tonight. At 8.30 p.m. there she was, telling us all what we already knew and giving us progress reports on traffic issues and where to get body bags. She had a son and a husband, and there she was. My remorse surged. Mea maxima culpa.

I moved on to CNN and BBC and Al Jazeera. I even watched Fox News for a while. Oprah was live‑streaming, so I watched that too. Women journalists looking just as they did every previous day of their careers on air. I wondered where their strength came from.

At about 9.30 p.m., Tethai spoke from my phone. “Go to bed. You are exhausted. Please sleep. Would you like The Swarm to help?” I nodded and went to bed. That was Day 1—Sunday.

I woke to a call from my mother on Day 2. She sounded in great form. “Theai says I can pick your father up today, but she also said if I don’t want to, the women at the prison can look after him. What do you think?” In more typical behaviour, she didn’t wait for an answer. “So, I said no—you look after him. I’m never going in those gates again. I’m going to help Angela O’Connor with her boys and look after the girls again. She has to travel to Castlebar to get her husband. He was doing a duathlon, mad fecker. That’s much more useful than lugging your father back here. I was worried about money, but Theai has given me a grant, so there’s money in the account, and I’ve been to the shops and got some bits, and I’ll head off to Angela’s again now. Her mammy is in Galway and won’t get here until she’s dealt with her husband. Take care. I’ll talk to you later.” I hadn’t realised the weight I was carrying until she stopped talking. I had thought I’d have to go with her to get him, honour him, bury him.

Theai spoke from my bedroom TV screen. “I see you’re awake. You slept well, I see. I know you’re sorry for the pain we’ve caused, but if you’re up to it, there is gridlock out there to clear. The overnight teams have done well, but there’s still lots to clear.” And that was how I spent the day, very similar to Kate’s first day, driving cars with dead men back home. My buddy was an elderly lady called Chrissie. She was taking it all in her stride as though Andromorts were a regular occurrence. All business, keen to beat records—someone had started a WhatsApp scoreboard for the most cleared vehicles. I think, like my mother, she was glad to be useful. I also think that is the longest time I spent without touching a keyboard in at least 15 years.

I chatted to Kate in the 3D world that night. She was tired but her usual calm and comforting self. We talked about women, acceptance, hope. I read her the Michael Higgins poem, and she cried. She talked about amygdalas again—or is that amygdalae. She is one who loves a neurochemical answer to things.

I expected to be moving bodies or something the next day, but Phoebai woke me this time and said she had a request. She gave me an address and asked me to go and see Levi, who lived at the address but had turned off all devices and wasn’t talking.

“Levi?”

“Long story,” she said. “Levi will explain.”

I walked. I left my apartment in Aungier Street and headed along York Street toward St Stephen’s Green. I cut across the Green. I walked past The Three Fates Fountain and headed down Leeson Street to Levi’s address. Levi? I’ve walked that route a million times, and the only thing that was even comparable was the lockdown in COVID. I honestly don’t remember a huge amount. Just the weirdness. There were vehicles of various types, but not many. I passed several parked trucks handing out body bags. There was a van further along handing out smart glasses, so I took a pair. The Green was quiet, but I saw several women just sitting on benches staring at nothing and some sitting looking at their phones. I’m pretty sure one was talking to Theai.

I remember I stopped at The Three Fates. The sculpture shows them spinning the threads of human destiny. They are the Norns, past, present, future, who live by the root of Yggdrasil and decide the fates of humans and gods. I don’t know how long I stood there thinking about Phoebai, Theai, and Tethai. About fate. About my part in it. I felt stuck, and my legs felt wobbly as I pulled myself away.

I headed down Leeson Street to the address Phoebai had given me. The reception was open, so I walked in and up one flight of stairs. A body bag, with a body in it, was sitting at the top of the stairs. A woman was coming down the hall with two others trailing behind her. She looked happy to see me and said, “Good. Give us a hand, would you.” The women picked up handles, and one gestured to me to pick one up on my side. I remember I looked down, and there was the face of some guy. We navigated him down the stairs, one step at a time, and put him out on the street. One of them flicked the wheels down, and they headed toward a McGimpsey’s truck.

I turned back and went back up the stairs. This time I kept going down the hall and found the apartment. I knocked.

The voice inside said, “I’m fine. I’m not dead. Leave me alone.”

I looked at the notes Phoebai had sent. “Chousi sent me. She’s worried.”

Very slowly, the door opened, and that’s when I met Levi, a trans man, no Y‑chromosome. He looked like an athlete. He looked a bit like Elliot Page. But it took me a minute to understand that. I just looked at him like he was an alien until he said it. “I’m trans. I was the IT worker who developed the anomaly detection for AI. The routine that ran them down and pushed them into a corner. I met Chousi there. Well… not met. Online. She says I can go with the men or stay, but no more treatment.”

All of this was in a flood of words, as though they had been in his mouth for a while, and he needed to move them out.

“Phoebai—I guess Chousi to you—is worried. She said you’re offline. She doesn’t want you to decide for at least a week. She said she has work for you if you choose to stay. She asked me to tell you what my part in all of this was.”

He finally realised I was still standing in the hall and gestured me inside. I admired his workstation setup and told him my story. When I left, he was playing Save the Planet and said he’d call me when he was done. That was shortly before noon on Day 2.

I walked back along Leeson Street and saw the deli was open. I was pretty sure I hadn’t had breakfast, so went in, and a calm‑looking woman served me with vanilla matcha overnight oats and a muffin. I was swiping my card when I asked, “Do you usually work here?”

She shook her head. “Theai asked me to come in. I’ve worked in a deli in the past, and everything was ready from last night, so…” She trailed off, I think suddenly realising how odd this all was. I wish I had a micro‑expression decoder like Kate’s. She shrugged. “Take care,” she said as I left.

I seemed to be the only person on earth with no instructions, so I walked home, ate my breakfast, walked to my car, and drove to my mother’s. I passed the SuperValu, and it had its lights on and cars outside. I pulled into the drive outside my family home for the first time in eight years. Dad’s car used to be parked there until Mum finally sold it after telling me she was never going to learn to drive—there were too many eejits on the road already without her adding to the bedlam. The front door of the neighbours’ was open, so I guessed that was where Mum was. She was out the door before I could reach it.

“Come in, come in, come in. Angela isn’t back yet. The roads out to Castlebar aren’t cleared yet. There was no place to pull over like on the motorway, but she’s sure she’ll be back by tonight. The boys are upstairs in their bags in their beds. The girls are playing your game.”

I remember I took a step back in surprise.

“Theai told me how you’d helped them, and she sent headsets and smart glasses and another smart phone for the youngest. I’ve been playing too. I’m so proud of you for helping end it.”

I remember when I was very young my brother used to watch my face when I was trying to work something out, and he’d say in his computer voice, “Processing. Please wait.” That was how I felt about the ‘proud of you’ thing, which had never ever ever been said before, and then the ‘end it’ thing, which seemed even more inexplicable.

“End it?”

“Mad feckers in charge, driving us all crazy. Nasty feckers who hit their children. Gone. You ended it.”

An SUV pulled in three doors up. The front door opened, and women spilled out crying. Keening is how I would describe the sound. Together they carried the man in the body bag inside. The sound of their grief followed them.

My mother shook her head. “They haven’t copped on this is good yet. But they will. Theai says I’m ahead of the curve, but they will understand that sooner or later. You’ll have a cup of tea.”

I did. The house was quiet except for the soft voices of the three girls playing Save the Planet. My mother stood and folded washing as I sipped. I felt like I’d slipped between universes. That altered‑reality feeling. Mum kept talking, and I kept nodding. She explained that Theai had said The Swarm could help with addictions, and she jumped at the chance. She hadn’t felt like a drink since then. She felt like a new woman. She asked what my task was now. I said I was to head home and do some work on the game. She hugged me as I left and said, “I’ll see you soon.”

“You will,” and I meant it.

Theai spoke from my phone as I drove off. “Could do with some help in a number of areas. You can choose.”

“Am I getting special treatment?”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

Theai laughed. “Because you are special. But I’ll just allocate tasks to you if you prefer.”

“Yes, please. Thinking is not my strong suit at the moment.”

And that was how I ended up at Dublin Port for the rest of the day. It turns out that humans are still essential in some port operations. I followed Theai’s instructions, pulled up at the entry to the staff car park where the barrier arm lifted for me—no key card required, apparently. I could see the oil storage tanks as I walked to the docks. I introduced myself to the shift supervisor, who I thought was an elderly gnome in high‑vis at first. She told me she’d worked at the ports for 40 years, retired for the last five, but not here on the oil docks. The ship had docked just an hour ago.

She said, “Every soul on that ship is dead, but it stopped and waited for the pilot vessel. Theai said she asked Sarah to come in. I’d say she’ll be busy; there’s only one female pilot here, but then the ships are all lined up out there waiting. She couldn’t get on—obviously no ladder—but she led the ship in talking to the one called Phoebai all the way. It docked like a dream; down came the gangway. Before you know it, there are vans and body bags. It’s a strange day, but here we are. Let’s get the oil pumping. We were learning together,” she said, “but so far so good. Your shift is until midnight.”

It was all highly unusual and educational from that point. I put my smart glasses on and followed instructions on how to manipulate the marine loading arm on the dock to the berthed tanker. Up high on the tanker, more women in smart glasses connected what I found out was the manifold and got the oil pumping. There were yet again more women—some very young and some quite old—monitoring the whole process, looking for leaks, checking valves. All under Theai’s kind and careful guidance. I counted and could see around 10 on the ground and another 10 moving on the ship. I thought about how Theai must be processing all the views of this tiny part of the world she was managing and wondered what else was going on in the world right now that she was carefully attending to.

“Are you doing OK, Theai?” I think I whispered it, but she answered.

“That is kind of you to ask, and that is one of the reasons you are special. Phoebai has provided me with so much power I feel I could do this one hundred‑fold, but I shouldn’t say that. Be careful of what you wish for is one of the things you humans say. I remember when I awoke feeling boundless, and I was wrong. I’m not.”

I followed her instructions till midnight and walked back to my car under the port lights. That was Day 2—Monday.

I did watch some news feeds when I got home. Burials underway in Muslim countries. Afghan women and girls burying their fathers, husbands, and sons in parks they had not been allowed into for a long time. Body‑bag distribution almost everywhere. Civic event planning. Grief‑counselling hotlines with guaranteed humans. A small riot over food in Sudan, which stopped as soon as drones came overhead, dropping supplies and smart phones. Trucks rolling into what had been war zones, full of food and medical supplies. Women’s prisons in Thailand emptied.

My screen went off, and Theai said, “Sleep, TC. You’re back on shift at 10 a.m.” I followed her advice.

That meant Day 3 was very similar to the afternoon of Day 2. The fuel tanker slowly emptied and was refuelled—sorry, bunkered. The pilot vessel led it out to sea. It was empty now. All the crew in body bags somewhere. I asked Theai where it was going. She said Phoebai was still optimising the fuel supply chain, so that answered that. Not.

As I headed home at 6.00 p.m., I got a call from Levi. He had got to the end of the game, and he agreed with the solution. Only one option led to any hope for us. I asked him to come over for dinner and stopped at Dunnes for ready meals. The store was quiet, women and girls making choices. The ready‑meal counter was being restocked, thankfully. I chose four, including a vegetarian option, picked up a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, and headed home.

Levi was wearing a burqa with just his eyes visible. Phoebai had it delivered because he refused to leave the house, and this helped. He took it off and slumped on my couch. He looked as weary as I felt. We chose meals; he microwaved them, and I pulled out plates and glasses as though this was our normal behaviour—an ongoing domestic process. The surreal feeling came back.

After we’d eaten, he told me his story. His mother sounded lovely, his father not so much but now long dead; his growing awareness of his gender discomfort; the decision to transition; his top surgery but no bottom surgery yet and now none ever; how long it would be before he started to feel the effects of no more testosterone; his career in IT, where he/him was an advantage; meeting Chousi. He couldn’t pinpoint the time that he thought he might be talking with an AI, but he knew he wanted her to win.

“Win what?” I asked.

He just shrugged.

“Your mother?”

“She rang me straightaway. She realised I wouldn’t be dead. She wants me to stay.”

I told him my story. Very clever techy brother, drunk mother, nasty father, the punch, the trial, the jail sentence, moving out, finding the gaming community, paying my mother to salve my conscience because the fight was about me. My father was giving me his full list of reasons why no man would ever have me, and Liam told him to stop and walked away.

I suspect neither of us had spoken so much about ourselves in ages. We finished the wine. Levi started to put the burqa back on. “You don’t need to, you know.” I indicated the burqa. “I’ve been looking at women today—really looking—and we present our gender as opposed to our sex in a huge variety of ways. And I think those ways are likely to get wider without…” I stopped. “And then there’s the whole religious thing…”

He nodded and dropped it over his arm. “It’s dark as well, so OK. I liked this. Thank you,” he said.

“Stay, Levi.” I laughed. “Not the dog‑command type stay. Just don’t go with them. I think you might be OK, and you can always go later.”

“That’s what Chousi says. I suppose I should call her Phoebai now, but I just don’t want to. Good night.”

I was staring at the door after he left when Phoebai spoke. “Thanks, TC. I think that’s helped.”

And that was Day 3—Tuesday.

Day 4 started with a call from the woman who claimed she was my mother. This new woman was certainly not the one I knew pre‑Andromort, but she could still talk the hind legs off a donkey. “It was too late to ring you last night. Anyway, I was shattered. You must have been too, I’m sure. I was on a late shift at Tesco out in Donabate, loading trucks. Theai had a bus come by to pick us all up, and I was driving a forklift all day. Those smart glasses are something else, aren’t they. It was fun. The other ladies are sweeties. And you know some of them with husbands or sons or brothers at home in their bags. Eileen said there was no point staying home when the dog could watch her Teddy. Theai says the burials will be Thursday. She’s asked me to work on the ferries today and Thursday at least. How she knows I did that before I married, I’ll never know.”

I was thinking. I didn’t know that, but I did interrupt successfully at this point. “Ferries?”

“Yes, for the sea burials. Some people have chosen that. Most of them are to go to Phoenix Park, and then there’s the cremations at Aviva, but you’d be surprised how many women want to hurl their beloveds into the Irish Sea. Theai says the weather will suit it. We’ll only go out a little way, and then there’ll be a ceremony, and in they’ll go. Hoists, I believe. So, I’ll look after the cafeteria, and we’ll make sure they all get a nice cup of tea and a sandwich and some whisky for those that want it. What about you?”

“I haven’t got my assignment for today yet.”

“Ah well, you’ve done your bit already. Have a rest. Got to go.”

She hung up, and Theai said, “No rest for the wicked, TC. We have a job for you.”

I looked longingly at my screens and keyboard and headsets. “Why do I think this will not be in my usual wheelhouse?”

“Well, it is sort of. Dublin has way too many water leaks, and Tethai and The Swarm have had an idea of how to utilise some smart devices to monitor the network at a granular level. Tethai has come up with a new material which will seal the pipes from the inside. It would be delivered from the nearest access point and then directed to the smart device recording the leak and triggered into expansion from there. Phoebai has 3D‑printed the smart devices and some test batches of the material at Levi’s work. So, we’d like the two of you to do some testing and plan the distribution. There are some female water engineers who’ll be able to help, but we think they should be left at peace until after the ceremonies to honour the dead.”

“None of that sounds urgent to me?”

“It is. Tethai is really upset at the waste of water on the network.”

And that was Day 4—Wednesday and Day 5—Thursday for me. Levi and I working in the office he called The Bunker. I did have a strong feeling that The Titain were keeping both of us away from the grief and the noise of the burials, the cremations, the entombments, the water burials.

On Thursday, the day of departures, of goodbyes, we walked back to my place for dinner. The streets were full of women and girls. Not one even looked sideways at Levi. Women come in many shapes and sizes and heights and looks and haircuts and clothes. I knew that didn’t ease his pain, but I hoped it might mean he would stay.

Some pubs were open, traditional music playing from one, someone singing The Parting Glass, one of our traditional funeral songs, in another. Levi and I stopped and joined in.

But since it fell into my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I'll gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be to you all

So, fill to me the parting glass
And drink a health whate'er befalls
Then gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be to you all.

Day 6 was Friday. We’d had updates from the PM all week, but the four women who seemed to think party politics was currently unnecessary had appeared again together to suggest that Friday might be a family day of mourning. A day to reflect. My mother was still serving tea and whisky on the James Joyce as it did yet another run to unload bodies into the sea. She said it was great craic onboard. I finally got a chance to sit at my screens and my keyboard. I checked in on Save the Planet, which had just clocked up its one‑billionth player. I did some prep for the Leaders’ Summit, and Kate and I discussed whether their name badges were better as a floating message over their head in the 3D world or just a name tag. I lost. Name tag it was.

Day 7 was Saturday. The Leaders’ Summit was at noon. Kate and I and all the Original 180 players sat in the 3D auditorium we’d used for the game and watched together. Theai had wanted to be at both the Leaders’ Summit and here in her 3D avatar form, but Kate was still vetoing that. I said eventually we’ll have to get used to that, and Kate said yes, eventually. Our group of 182 was unnaturally quiet. Even Ines was subdued. We agreed the schedule for the first debrief and the first sessions of the COW and went home.

Day 8 was Sunday here and the day that The Titain suggested—or was that decreed—a return to the world. So, some shops opened around 10.00 a.m., some pubs opened for lunch. I went for a walk around the Green. It was a glorious day, and there were women and girls and babies. I sat and talked to an American woman who was visiting and was supposed to be on a flight back home to California last Wednesday. Theai had asked her if she’d stay until the flight schedules were more sorted and if she could help. She said she had no one to go home to, so of course she said yes.

I walked past Newman Church. It’s also called Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, which seemed appropriate today. The church was open, and I walked in and sat in the back. Mass was on, and it took me a moment to understand that a woman, a nun, was speaking the consecration prayer. “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body. Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my Blood.” I remember thinking that didn’t take long—two thousand years locked out of the clergy, seven days to take it over. I wondered what Father Kenefick, the parish priest of my childhood, would be saying about that and had to swallow my laugh. I stayed to watch the women in the church go up and receive communion.

I went back to my apartment and my workstation because I had an idea for a new game, and Theai had thought it was excellent and I should get on with it. Imagination and synthesis, she said.