Sylvia is getting angry with me now. It’s because I won’t shut up. I think I spoiled her precious board meeting but they had to be told. I’ve built up a dossier of all the abuse cases I could find – the pouch being used to threaten, to manipulate. Women too terrified for the life of their unborn child to stand up and speak. Society was not ready for my invention. We have to take it away. We have to stop. There is even a group of them, in the States, men who believe women are redundant. The pouch gave them the last of our power. Men who want the world to themselves. Men who hate.

I go to their birthing centre and talk to the scientists, because I imagine them to be my friends. ‘You’re responsible,’ I tell them. ‘You’re responsible for what you create.’ I hear whispers when my back is turned. Someone has called Security and I am politely escorted from the building.

I take things further. I write to newspapers, to reporters, and I tell them – report this! A man refusing to let his girlfriend carry the pouch – report this! A woman afraid to leave the pouch with her husband – report this! But they fill their pages with statistics about equality at work, joint parental leave, about women in politics. Someone actually takes out a restraining order on me. Me! No one notices as the NHS slips away. Hooray for the UK! These women, these rising stars, see only how their own lives have improved. Sylvia takes me to one side, like she is trying to be my friend.

‘You have to look at the whole picture,’ she tells me. ‘We are making things better, don’t you see? You are upset about a few individual cases, but overall we are making things better.’

‘Make the pouches stronger,’ I tell her. ‘Give them a protective coating. Something non-biological, plastic, rigid—’

‘Like a cage?’

‘If it keeps them safe.’

‘You know it has to be soft.’

‘But the way it can be misused—’

‘You’ve lost your case,’ she says. ‘Men have the same rights to the pouch as women.’

‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘Actually,’ she says, and she’s changed now, she’s not pretending to be my friend, ‘what’s dangerous is the way you selectively presented your results on mouse reproduction.’

Fear crawls under my skin.

‘I’m sure it was because you believed in what you were doing.’

How does she know?

‘I’m sure you just wanted to be taken seriously. We have all done things, in order to be taken seriously. As women in a man’s world. I understand.’

I thought my rodent trials were confidential. And there was no sign of any problem in the primate trials. It was a one-off. Before the technology was perfected. I just hadn’t been able to find my mistake.