The Power

Tunde is interviewing male protestors outside a mall in Tucson, Arizona. He had gotten a tip that something was going to happen here, but it seems it might have been false. The men wave banners reading “Justice for Men” and talk to him about the inequality men are facing. Tunde thinks about all the stories he could be covering: the new female Pope in Bolivia, more unrest in Saudi Arabia, girls trying to cut their skeins out of themselves with scissors (even though more than 50 percent of the time, if a skein is severed, the person dies).

Suddenly, a bomb goes off in the distance. Tunde runs towards the thunderous sound, helping people up as he goes. The mall is on fire, and there is a pregnant woman trapped in the rubble by a concrete pillar. She is discharging her power with great force. Tunde tells her to breathe, trying to comfort her. She begs him not to leave her, and keeps sending her power into the ground. Suddenly, a fire ignites around her. Tunde picks up his camera and runs.

On the local news, Kristen’s face is grim as she announces that a terrorist group called Male Power has claimed responsibility. Tom tells her, however, that the men just want equality. Kristen tries to wrap up the story, but Tom cuts in, refusing. He starts to argue that there’s no funding for men, and all the money is going to girls’ training camps. He curses at Kristen, telling her that he knows she has the power, too. They get him out of the building before they come back from commercial—the network had cut away even before he started his rant.

Tunde watches reports of the story unfold from a hospital bed in Arizona. He emails his sister, Temi, who asks if he has a girlfriend. Tunde responds that there’s not much time for that. He had briefly dated another journalist named Nina for a while. She had used the power in bed, but he’d shied away from it, telling her to stop and crying.

An email comes in from info@urbandoxspeaks.com. The email is from UrbanDox himself, saying that he saw Tunde’s reporting in Arizona and Delhi and they want him on their side—"the side of all men.” Tunde agrees, thinking that it would be a good interview for his book.

Tunde is driven blindfolded to the interview. When he meets UrbanDox, he finds a white man in his mid-fifties with bleached blond hair and blue eyes. Recently, more and more people have started to read UrbanDox’s blogs and use them as a manifesto for violence. UrbanDox opens the interview with a series of conspiracy theories: that the power was planned after World War II because people thought that men had screwed up the world too much. And so, he goes on, they put Guardian Angel in the water to give women the power. The endgame is to kill all of the men.

Tunde starts to argue, knowing that there have been women who’ve protected him the last few years. UrbanDox says that they do that to confuse him, so that he doesn’t only think of women as the enemy. He asks Tunde if he’s seen the numbers on domestic violence against men. Tunde has seen the numbers, and he knows the reason they are killing the men is “because they can.”

UrbanDox continues, repeating that the women want to kill all of the men. When Tunde brings up the fact that women need men to carry on the human race, UrbanDox argues that women only need to keep a few genetically healthy men around in order to reproduce. UrbanDox also says that people “got slavery wrong.” He says that however badly a man treats a woman, he needs her in fit enough condition to carry a child. But now, the women only need one man to have a thousand children.

UrbanDox then asks Tunde to join their movement. He says that they need laws to protect men, curfews on women, and for the government to research a cure. UrbanDox also says that the terror attacks have only gotten started—that a bunch of nuclear weapons got lost after the Cold War, and the men running the terror attacks might have some of those.