Torchwood: Exodus Code

a kind of mass female hysteria.
    One local GP from Cornwall was quoted as saying these women were trying to ‘have it all’ and, as a result, they were ‘cracking under the pressure’. He called it ‘Multi-Tasking Madness’, encouraged women to stay at home more, to avoid stress and too much over-stimulation.
    The backlash was immediate. Soon the media was less interested in the newest cases breaking out in the UK and instead focused on the debate over the feminist and political ramifications of the madness.
    Social media muted whatever rising panic was happening among its female followers and responded to the events with black humour and ironic mockery. At the end of day two, the most popular trending topics on Twitter were #realfemmefatales and #nolongerontheverge.
    Jack sat at the kitchen table, a laptop open in front of him, scanning reports from the World Health Organization, the International Organization for Women’s Wellbeing, Doctors Without Borders and as many international news agencies as he could access.
    He scrolled through masses of text, his brain grabbing any repetition of details, slivers of conversations, similarities in descriptions, suggestions and allusions, anything he could discern, no matter how trivial and irrelevant, that might suggest a pattern. Anyone watching him, his body stock still, the occasional shifting of his eyes as lines of text whipped past him, would have thought he was in a trance.
    He wasn’t sure where his eidetic memory had come from but, for as long as he could remember, Jack had been able to store huge amounts of data in patterns and images.
    While he was reading, he noticed that with certain websites, the yellow dots he’d seen earlier in his peripheral vision had returned. He did his best to ignore them, especially when they shifted colour the more quickly he scanned.
    On day three, the ‘masochistic madness’, as a blogger had labelled it, was being reported internationally; the numbers of women experiencing symptoms of violent mental breakdowns were being registered in six or seven secluded regions across the world. From the highlands of Scotland to the island of Rakiura off the southern tip of New Zealand, women living continents apart were committing random acts of violence towards themselves, their families, their neighbours and their communities.
    Thousands of women worldwide had descended into a kind of madness that even the most highly trained psychiatrists and experienced neurologists were having difficulty diagnosing. The only thing the medical community knew with any certainty was that this increase in mental illness involved a breakdown of each woman’s physical senses , a mangling of what she was feeling, seeing, smelling, and even tasting.
    Jack made a few more notes, sent a couple more emails, and made a secure phone call. While Gwen was still in the psychiatric ward, Jack had settled into relative domesticity with Mary, Rhys and Anwen. He knew it couldn’t last, but as long as he was trying to make sense of what had happened to Gwen and these other women, Wales was as good a place as any from which to investigate the phenomenon.
    Mary had taken Anwen for a walk in town. The house was quiet. Jack scanned the reports he’d hacked into from the World Health Organization, which had become a clearing house of data from the various medical communities dealing with these afflicted women.
    According to the recent reports, no two women reacted the same way when the madness descended upon them: some collapsed from an overwhelming sense of smell; others felt as if the volume in their surroundings had been cranked too high; a few tasted emotions so strongly they were physically ill; even more reported that they hallucinated realities they could never have experienced and heard imagined music and disembodied voices.
    After three hours of reading, Jack closed the laptop, got up from the table and, lifting his coat and binoculars from behind the kitchen door, went out to stretch his legs and to think. Outside, he could smell the coming rain… and something else – wood smoke, sulphur and the stink of hot tar. It was mid-afternoon on a cold, dreary Wednesday. He was alone in the street.
    He could sense a strange tang in the air. The vaguely ruddy scent of blood and rust drifted towards him, leading him south, towards the seafront. By the time he reached the Marina, the rain was falling in heavy, lashing drops and the smell was stronger, as pungent as