What If Women Ran the World: a free sci-fi short story

Before we begin

Have you ever wondered what the world would look like if women had always run it?

Not a revolution. Not a takeover. Just the way it has always been, for as long as there have been cities. Every seat of power, every boardroom, every parliament, every crew boss. And men in the position women hold in much of our world today: talked over, warned about the dark, told to text when they get home.

Here is the thing nobody expects. It works. The streets are safe. The trains run. Arguments go on until they are actually settled. It is a world you would want to live in.

This is one storm night on the biggest sea barrier in Europe, and the one man on it who wants to be trusted with a switch.

Here is what is real. At the mouth of the Rotterdam waterway there is a storm barrier with two steel arms, each two hundred and thirty-seven metres long and weighing six thousand eight hundred tonnes, each turning on a ball joint ten metres across, the largest in the world. It was opened on the tenth of May 1997 after six years of building. A computer system decides when it closes: when a surge of three metres above normal sea level is forecast for Rotterdam, the arms swing out and the river is shut. It closed for a real storm for the first time on the eighth of November 2007, and on the twenty-first of December 2023 it closed on its own, at the threshold, for the first time in its history.

The barrier in this story is that one in every respect but one. In this world, the people who built it, the people who run it, and the people who decide when to shut it have been women for as long as there have been cities. Not since a revolution. Always. Every parliament, every board, every crew boss, back to the first walled town. Men hold the position that women hold in much of our world: they are talked over, warned about the dark, told to text when they get home. And the thing nobody expects is that it works. The streets are safe. The trains run. Arguments go on until they are actually settled. It is a world most people would want to live in.

Tomas Bekaert is thirty-eight and has worked on the ropes of the barrier for ten years, hanging off its white steel to inspect the joints, the seals and the bolts. He is good at it. What he wants, and has wanted for four years, is to be the closure hand: the person who sits in control on a storm night with a hand on the switch, whose name goes into the national log every time the river is shut. The board that signs closure hands meets at eleven on the morning of the biggest storm of the year, and Tomas is on the barrier at ten past six that morning, on two ropes, in sleet coming sideways off the river, looking at the seal on the north ball joint.

The seal is weeping. A finger of wet on dry steel, in that rain, and the pressure in the line behind it has climbed every day since Monday. He reports it. Control logs it. Marit, in control, tells him kindly not to be hanging off her barrier at eleven, because the board sits at eleven. Priya, his crew mate, forty metres below him, tells control to sign him so they can all go home. Marit reminds him that his helmet camera is on the wall of the decision hall and forty women are watching. Watching the joint, he asks. Watching a thumbprint in the sleet, she says. Wave.

At half past eight, in the men's changing room two floors below the loading bay, a woman from the yard comes to query his crew's torque figure for the north joint bolts. Her sheet says a hundred and ten newton metres. His crew logged eighty-five. He explains, with the numbers written on the back of his glove, that her sheet is for a dry joint out of the crate and that this one has sat in salt water since 1991, that above eighty-five you stretch the stud. She believes him, she says, and asks whether there is someone on his crew she can double-check it with. Priya, perhaps. She cannot tell the men on the wall apart, she adds, and he tells her their names are on the backs of their jackets. She thinks that is sensible and asks whose idea it was.

Hanna, sixty, off the ropes now and teaching, tells him from the bench by the heaters that he should be off the water by forty. Nobody wants a man of forty-five swinging about over a river. He should take a classroom. He explains things nicely.

The decision hall was built in 1988 to hold a four-hour argument: one table thirty metres long, a glass wall onto the water, a public gallery. The argument that morning is whether to close at a quarter to four and eat the cost of nine or eleven ships held outside, or to wait for the model. Tomas says, twice, that closing early holds the north joint loaded four extra hours and that the seal is passing water, and the second time he is thanked for the observation and told that the real question is the tide gauge against the model. They wait ninety minutes for Hilde to drive in from Goeree. Nobody raises a voice. Somebody sends out for bread. Saskia, who chairs, sets the closure for ten to six, not before, because that joint should not sit loaded an hour longer than it must and she would rather pay for the shipping than pay for the joint. It is a better answer than anyone brought in, and it is his answer, and it is minuted under her name.

The certification board catches him in the corridor. His file has been read. Ten years on the ropes, four on the turbine field. He has the one boy already, six years old, which is good, because most men have their wobble at about his age and are lost for two years. The board is minded to sign him. He should get through tonight.

At ten to four the port crèche rings him, and it rings him first, because he is first on the card. Boaz is warm. Thirty-seven point four. Nothing dramatic, but the boy is asking for his father. His wife is walking a box ship up the river. Saskia, without looking up from the flood model, tells him to go, family is family, they are not monsters, they will cover the arm.

The crèche under the cranes is a lit glass barn, free, open round the clock because the port is. Ans, who runs it, tells him Boaz was thirty-seven four when he came in and thirty-six eight now, and has had a biscuit. The boy is at the window that looks at the barrier. He asks whether his father can see the crèche from the arm, and is told his father can see the roof, which is green. He shows his father a drawing of a small man on a rope holding the part that turns, and asks whether it ever comes off. Not while his father is looking at it. And if his father blinks, Priya is looking at it, the one with the red helmet. Ans mentions, at the door, that it is the second time this month.

At ten to six the city is out on the dyke with its phones. The arms come off their docks and walk out over black water, each longer than a football pitch, lit from underneath, sirens going out across the river. Tomas is on the north arm, clipped, talking control across every degree of the swing.

At forty degrees the joint chamber floods four minutes early and the needle falls instead of climbing.

He is not on the closure channel. He uses it anyway. The chamber has flooded early and the pressure is dropping, which means the seal is passing, which means that at the moment the arms meet the whole load will land on that joint as one hammer blow. He says to abort the swing and hold at forty. For two seconds there is nothing on an open channel that two government feeds are listening to. Then control holds at forty. A vent crew re-seats the seal. The arms walk home to the join. The barrier shuts at eighteen thirty-one. The surge hits it at nineteen forty and does not get past.

He apologises, on the channel, for jumping it. He is told to sit down. On the stairs the deputy director puts a hand on his shoulder and tells him he was so calm, honestly lovely to listen to; most of the men go up a whole octave.

On the late news, from the canteen balcony, the engineer who drew the joint in 1979 is asked why it held tonight and says: because somebody was watching it. The gentleman behind her in the fleece, the reporter adds, is one of the barrier's operators, and they will come to him if there is time.

The board signs him at eight. Saskia lays it out before he answers. It is nights, storms, a pager at four in the morning in February, the whole delta behind the switch. His name goes into the national log, which is the thing he is actually buying. And his boy goes into the crèche for the afternoons, properly, not the odd one. Most men his age say no, and she thinks none the less of them. He should sleep on it and tell her at breakfast.

His mother leaves a voice note asking for a thumb up when he is in the door, and not to take the dock path tonight.

Boaz is asleep on a beanbag under the crèche window at five past eleven, parka on. Ans says he was fine by four, and that they watched the closing in there and he told the whole room which arm was his father's. Then she says, kindly, like everything anyone has said to Tomas all day, that the boy knows where the heating pipe runs under that window, and that he holds the thermometer strip against it and counts to sixty. Third time this month. He is six. It is the one lever he has, and it works. His father is a good father. The boy simply cannot reach him when he is up there. That, she says, is what six sounds like when it is worried.

Tomas stands in a warm room full of sleeping children and does the sums. The pager. The nights. February.

Then he rings Saskia with his thumb over his other ear and tells her yes, tonight, because he would rather not have all night to be clever about it. She says good man, Monday.

He gets the boy over his shoulder and tells the wet hood that they read the log out in the chamber every January, that the boy can come and listen, and that the boy's name is inside his.

In the yard the poster by the bike racks asks him to keep to lit routes after midnight. The night tram comes through empty and on time. Ans holds the door and tells him the boy will ring again tomorrow, they all do at that age, and that he should text her when he is in.