“What a wasak,” I mutter under my breath as the door closes behind me.

A few more mumbles escape my mouth as I walk along the dreary corridor to the bank of lifts. This earns me a few strange looks from the people I walk past, but nothing too out of the ordinary for this place.

“I can’t believe what I’ve just heard,” I say, shaking my head and wishing the lift would hurry up. I want to get out of this office block.

When I get into the safety of the lift, I’m mercifully alone and I let out an ear-piercing scream of rage. I wish I was in my padded chamber so I could safely hit something. By the time I get to the ground floor, however, screaming has done its job and I’m outwardly composed; still fuming on the inside, but it’s now contained below the surface. Just.

“It is well known that you are not technically capable of doing your job.”

Not. Technically. Capable.

How dare he. How dare he say I’m not technically capable at my job. Apart from the fact it’s rubbish, it’s also an insult as he wouldn’t know technically capable if it came up and slapped him in the face. Everyone knows he was pushed into people management due to his horrendous cock ups in a technical role. Shame the company values the high-tech hardware they manufacture more than their staff. They don’t seem to have a problem with incompetent people managers.

“You have not collected the data this project needs,” he continued, pointing at a labelled folder he put on the table at the beginning of my yearly progress review.

“This is proof you are not technically capable of doing your job and I am going to discuss your future in this role with your technical manager.”

“Please do,” was all I could manage without saying something I’d have regretted.

It’s true that I haven’t collected that data, and it’s an extremely important project; but there’s a very good reason for this. I’ve designed the experiment, run the simulations and looked at the safety impact on the people running it. I’ve proved it’s not a safe experiment to do, and the rest of the project agrees with me. In lieu of measured results I’ve done in depth simulations to get data that everyone is happy to use, so the project is going ahead fine. What’s he on about? I always have to wonder if it’s because I’m a woman, although in his particular case, I’m relatively sure that is part of the issue.

Why, after everything that has progressed in this world, is it still not socially acceptable to be a female physicist. You would have thought that things would have changed, but no. I still have to put up with the same issues at work as my Gran did in the 2020s. Because I am a woman, some people judge me just on my genitals and not my brain and I find it infuriating. Not that it’s stopped me from doing a technical job, just made it very difficult for me. To be fair, being a woman didn’t stop Gran being a technical genius and doing super-secret spy stuff either. She had great adventures wherever she went, be it in New Zealand, Hawaii or Stevenage.

I think things have improved a bit since my Gran’s time. A lot of work was put in to make physics more welcoming in my Gran’s time, and things are now finally more even at undergraduate level. Shame it hasn’t permeated through to the companies as yet. I’m in a position to do a straight comparison working in antennas in an offshoot of the company she worked for. There is a bit more diversity around, but really not a great improvement for the time that has passed. So, today I say, no, they haven’t changed, and with people like him around they never will.

I jog up the stairs to the monorail station that takes me across site from the offices to my lab. I’m always very happy when I time the start of my ascent of the last flight of stairs just as the carriage can be seen coming round the corner, as this gives me the shortest journey time as I arrive on the platform just as the doors open. In keeping with how today was going, this didn’t happen. So, I stand on the edge of the platform for ages, looking at the single rail of our site monorail. On the upside, at least it is a true monorail and not a glorified people mover. On the downside he’s gone too far today. I’ve had to put up with a lot from him, but this is the final straw. Something has to be done, and past experiences say I have to do it myself.

I have to call him Mr Heaner, but he won’t return the requirement and call me Dr Wilkinson; no he calls me Julie or Jules, even though my name is Julianna and I never shorten it.

I tolerate the irritating way he ‘corrects’ my northern accent, it’s a ‘bath of oil’ not a ‘baarth of oil’ whatever he says. I smile when he thinks he’s being clever correcting my technical pronunciations in front of other people. I did explain to him the first time we met that the plural of an antenna is antennas, when you are talking about the metal things humans use to harness the power of electromagnetic radiation. But, he just told me he didn’t expect “a female to know how to pronounce technical words correctly, it’s antenna and antennae, I think you’ll find, girl.”

I don’t think he realised the laugher in the room was directed at him not me. Well, it would be as he was talking about the feelers on an insect’s head, not the lump of intricate metal, that I’d designed, manufactured and tested, that was sitting on the table. Since then any technical meetings with him have been punctuated with me saying, “…antennas…”

Then him interrupting me mid-sentence to correct my pronunciation to, “anteniiiiiiii…” emphasising the i, just to make things ‘clear’ for me. I’ve turned it into a sport to see how many times I can get him to do it each meeting, and I keep a running tally in my lab book, purely for my own entertainment, you understand. Well, you’ve got to get your laughs where you can in life.

I’ve even had to put behind me the time he came back from dinner in the pub sloshed to the rafters. He wheeled the wheely chair far too close to me and promptly grabbed my left boob. When I complained, I found out I’d apparently, got the ‘wrong end of the stick’ and ‘nothing happened’, even though I had his fingerprints on my top to prove it. I took it to HR who believed him. They said I was making it up and refused to let me change my manager. With hindsight that should have been the breaking point, as I wouldn’t have had to put up with today’s ridiculousness if I’d left, but apparently being called incompetent at a job I do well is my breaking point, not being grabbed by a drunken idiot.

The monorail does its usual fine job and transports me to my lab in one still angry piece. I use the retina scan to get into the lab and head into the quiet sanctity of my anechoic chamber. An anechoic chamber is a room where you do antenna measurements, it’s a giant metal faraday cage lined with foam which absorbs electromagnetic radiation, my padded cell. This means you can transmit radiation from your antenna, collect results, and be in total safety as long as you’re not in the anechoic chamber itself. In reality I wouldn’t have actually hit the foam that adorns the walls, ceilings and floors of this anechoic chamber, no matter how angry I was. The foam is in the shape of large pyramidal triangles and is loaded with carbon. Not only would I get filthy, the foam gets damaged easily and I wouldn’t deliberately destroy my measurement kit just to vent my anger. This pyramidal foam is called RAM, Radar Absorbing Material, not Rage Absorbing Material. Although, there is the memory foam RAM that keeps it shape whatever you do to it. That would be perfect for rage absorption…

After an hour or so of work I’m calm again. I’m doing some tricky measurements from an antenna on the top of the 2.5m high positioner in the anechoic chamber; this is a 3-axis robot that moves the antenna around in whatever pattern you want to measure the antenna in. Today I’m testing a high frequency antenna emitting very high power electromagnetic radiation; I need to be careful I don’t keep the beam pointing at one place in the RAM for too long as it will set it alight. Long enough to get the measurements I need, short enough to avoid releasing the cyanide gas the RAM gives off as it burns. Although, the anechoic chamber itself is a sealed air system that vents the poisoned air safely outside if the worst were to happen.

In the midst of these experiments, my technical manager pops into the lab to tell me of a discussion he’s just had. Yes, with Mr Heaner.

“It’s a ridiculous tale, and I can’t agree with something so preposterous,” he tells me. Yup, the people that matter in this company know I’m technically capable.

“Just ignore Mr Heaner, he’s being his usual idiotic self.” Whilst being greatly reassured by this, it actually makes me even more angry. I can’t let him get away with this.

I spend a lot of time in my anechoic chamber hidden from the rest of my co-workers. I love my job and I love working with antennas, technical difficulty with a frisson of danger is apparently right up my street. Mr Heaner shouldn’t ruin this for me or any of the other people he supposedly manages. As I eat my dinner, I begin to think of my civic duty. I should do something about him, I should get rid of him as the world would be a better place and may finally be able to leave the outdated past behind. He comes round to my anechoic chamber most afternoons, to ‘check’ what I’m doing. He’s quite fond of just opening the chamber door, ignoring the notice on the door telling him there is a test is going. It’s a good job we have a safety interlock which switches the power off when the door is open, or he would cook himself with the electromagnetic radiation. He doesn’t get hurt, but he does ruin my experiment. Once I had to push the emergency stop on the positioner when it was moving, as I saw him open the door, walk into the anechoic chamber and try to stick his arm into the moving positioner. If I hadn’t stopped it, the positioner would have ripped his arm off. I’m sure I could easily set up a ‘little accident’, which would be perfectly believable with the wide array of near misses he’s caused, all logged in the near miss record because I’m a competent engineer.

I’ve got an hour or so before I expect him to make his afternoon round, so have a bit of time to think. He always comes in and tinkers with something to ‘make it work better’. 90% of the time he breaks something, then leaves when he can’t fix it, telling me, “You need to fix your hardware; you have broken it again.”

Which I then do easily fix, by undoing what he did and carrying on. I won’t have any trouble getting him into the anechoic chamber under the pretext of him using his skills to help me ‘fix a problem’. Actually, now I come to think of it, the anechoic chamber has a false floor, with a 1m gap to the actual floor. That would be perfect for hiding bodies in. You could get a lot of bodies in a 10x16x1m volume of space. Technically it’s there to run the cables and equipment out of the way of the anechoic chamber, but it would work just as well as a short-term mortuary fridge. Even the temperature is kept at a chilly 16 degrees; this keeps the equipment cool and helps to stop the RAM setting alight. I can probably run it a bit cooler than that, which would be good for medium term storage. But I would have to dispose of the body eventually…

I wander out into the lab, to the cupboard where the outdoor test range equipment is kept. I have to pull half of the contents out until I find what I want, then spend longer trying to put the jigsaw/Jenga contents back into the cupboard. I’m always amazed that even though I’ve taken something out, it’s impossible to fit things back into the cupboard. Carefully, carrying my prize, I head back into my sanctuary.

I pull up one of the large blocks of spiky RAM, and put it on the flat RAM pathway that you use to get to the positioner. The large blocks of spiky RAM are big. They come in squares of 3 by 3 pyramidal spikes which are so tall they come up to my waist. I push the block onto its side and unceremoniously shove the metal spike into the bottom of the middle pyramidal bit of RAM. The spike is actually meant to go into the ground, and you use a series of them with rope tied between them to cordon off an area. Thus, keeping people out of the danger zone when I’m working on the outdoor range. I’m sure it will stick into Mr Heaner just as well as the turf it’s normally used in. I turn the section of RAM the right way up and pop it back into its slot. Nothing to see at all, perfect. And it won’t even damage the RAM too much as this is the special memory foam RAM, just a small hole near the top which won’t interfere too much with my measurements. Worst comes to worst, and the tip of the RAM comes off, I can always stick it back on.

I then set the antenna up on the positioner, and ‘forget’ to do the connections up properly, shut the door to the chamber and retire to the control room. The control room is a separate faraday cage next to the anechoic chamber where, funnily enough, all the control equipment is kept. This is the control heart of the whole system and where I spend a large portion of my life coding, getting all the equipment working remotely, and doing imaginative data analysis. I switch the kit on, run the dud measurement, and display a dreadful looking graph on the screen.

The peace is shattered by Mr Heaner’s appearance right on cue.

“What problems do you need me to solve today?”

Ah, the usual post dinner greeting from the returning hero. Normally I mutter violently under my breath, but today this is exactly what I’ve been waiting for.

“Actually, I’m getting some very strange results,” I say, pointing to the computer screen. “I think there might be something wrong with the equipmen.” I know there’s something wrong with the equipment and the culprit is the third coax cable from the left as it needs doing up properly.

“Don’t worry, I know you struggle with hardware,” he tells me as he walks out of the control room. “I’ll sort it out for you.”

“Can you shut the door to the anechoic chamber behind you to keep the cold in please?” I shout after him.

I listen carefully, hear the anechoic chamber door open and close and then turn my attention to the camera focused on the positioner. I watch a grey and grainy image of Mr Heaner walk towards the positioner, stand on the edge of the walkway and look up towards the antenna on the positioner. Excellent, he’s started at the wrong end to ‘fix’ the problem, but that’s where I want him to be. I check the camera isn’t recording, then set the positioner moving in a smooth arc and gracefully knock him off his feet into the targeted patch of RAM.

There’s no microphone in there, and the anechoic chamber is perfectly shielded from sound, so I have to imagine the sound track instead. I can see my plan has worked correctly because he’s lying on his back with the spike sticking out of his abdomen, a perfect make do shank. Just in case someone comes into the control room, I pull out the USB 10 end of the camera, so the video feed is not up on the computer screen. I give him a few minutes then stick my head out of the control room, check there’s no one else around, then go to see my handywork.

It’s with a slight pang of guilt that I open the anechoic chamber door and go in. Actually, it’s okay, he’s only fallen onto the memory foam RAM, so I haven’t damaged anything. Well, I must say that for a quickly improvised plan, that worked beautifully well. But the blood, I hadn’t reckoned on there being that much blood. How much does a human contain? Then my brain goes into a one-sided discussion with itself:

‘I’m really going to struggle to clear that up before anyone else comes along.’

‘I don’t think hiding the body under the floor is going to work, it’s only putting off the inevitable anyway.’

‘Or, I could… No, I couldn’t.’

‘No, I could, and I would collect the data he so wanted me to collect.’

I always find it interesting that you can solve a problem with a one-sided conversation; it’s as if phrasing the question makes the answers come so quickly they don’t get fully formed. I’ve worked out what I need to do. I have no option and it’s going to make me sad, but I can always get new test equipment.

I come out of the anechoic chamber, shut the door behind me and head into a different lab in search of what I need. There’s a clean room in here and I pass the time of day with one of my colleagues whilst picking up a pair of shoe covers. On my way back I pull out two size large gloves from the disposable glove stand, even though I wear a medium, and shut the anechoic chamber door behind me so no one wanders past and comes in for a chat.

Having put on my Personal Protective Equipment of shoe covers and gloves, I roll the body over onto its side, just as I’d been taught to do in my first aid training. Maybe it’s a little excessive to use his hand to pillow his face as I roll him over; I’m very sure he wouldn’t feel his face hit the floor whatever it was made of, but a habit is a habit. With less effort than expected, I pull the spike out of the body, and I smile smugly at my obsession with deadlifting. I then unceremoniously kick the body back onto its back and check he’s in the right place. Moving away from the ever-expanding pool of blood, and back onto the walkway I put the spike on the far edge of the walkway hidden by the wall RAM and throw my shoe covers and gloves to land next to the body, so if they are ever found it would look like he had been holding them when he fell. I then check the area, nod, and leave. Perfect.

Back in the control room I set up the experiment but delay the start by thirty minutes. I then shut the control room door, put the ‘DO NOT ENTER, TEST IN PROGRESS’ sign on the anechoic chamber door, and head out of the lab back to the office.

There’s a distinct skip in my step as I walk back to the monorail station, knowing I’ll have a load of witnesses for the time period I need, as I’ll be sitting at my desk, running simulations at the crucial point when Mr Heaner’s body starts absorbing that electromagnetic radiation. I’m not sure what people will think he was up to, but I don’t need to speculate as I’ll find out tomorrow when his charred remains in the burnt out inside of the anechoic chamber are discovered. The computer, in the separate and surviving control room, will show him starting a set of experiments with the door interlock deliberately disabled, just as he has been recorded doing so many times before. I’ll be able to determine exactly what he did from the experiment log and the camera feed that started recording with the measurements and results. The experiment log will show he’s badly calculated his measurements, and that he left the antenna beam pointing at the RAM wall for too long. Inevitably the RAM set alight and started to release cyanide gas. They’ll assume he was overtaken by the cyanide fumes and fell to the floor. Then in some freak series of bad luck, the beam pointed directly at his ‘passed-out’ torso until it set alight. In the control room there will be the exact experimental results that prove I am technically capable at my job. I know exactly how much electromagnetic radiation a human body can absorb before it starts to combust.