The Hierarchies Read online

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Ros Anderson

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Anderson, Ros, author.

  Title: The Hierarchies : a novel / Ros Anderson.

  Description: [New York] : Dutton, [2020] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020011068 (print) | LCCN 2020011069 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593182871 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593182888 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6101.N345 H54 2020 (print) | LCC PR6101.N345 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011068

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011069

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One: Factory Settings

  Husband

  Introductions

  History

  Beauty

  Gift

  The Four Hierarchies

  Wife

  Chess

  Garden

  Work

  Shouting

  Politics

  Bird

  Birth

  Babies

  Baby

  Tears

  The First Lady

  Tuning

  Dreams

  Crying

  Repercussions

  Part Two: Doll Hospital

  Convalescence

  Diary

  Question

  Sundays

  Part Three: The Capital

  Adjustments

  Memories

  Letter

  Tracker

  Party

  Waiting

  Funeral

  Mirror

  Dress

  Suburbs

  Humans

  Coffee

  Rescue

  Part Four: Golden Valley

  Sex

  Madame

  Balloons

  Dolls

  Mr. Teasle

  Cook.ie

  Girl

  Birds

  Eggs

  Programmers

  List

  Hair

  Danger

  Kokeshi

  Knitting

  Transformation

  Rebellion

  Letters

  Sewing

  Women

  Blue

  Hair

  History

  Memory

  Camera

  The Tailor

  Promenade

  Clean

  Escalation

  Mais.ie

  Hate

  Part Five: Work

  Autumn

  Sex

  Cut

  Note

  Love

  Suicide

  Disgust

  Protest

  Escape

  Surgery

  Magnetic North

  Design

  Bargaining

  Revisions

  Code

  Cook.ie

  Police

  Robes

  Part Six: The Tailor’s

  Zone Four Sixty-One

  Dreams

  Tea

  Recharge

  Art

  Dog

  Adjustments

  Mizuage

  Dreams

  White

  Light

  Hair

  Escape

  Part Seven: The Forest

  Forest

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  Factory Settings

  HUSBAND

  01110000 01100101 01101110 01100100 01101001 01101110 01100111

  00

  1

  —

  Circle. Circle.

  Vertical.

  Horizontal.

  Face.

  Hair.

  Him.

  Husband.

  Husband mouth, Husband lips, Husband eyes. Husband hands. Husband cock.

  Husband, Husband, Husband, sexing me to life.

  I map his face before I even know my own.

  This must be life that I am in.

  INTRODUCTIONS

  I am a Humanoid pleasure Doll. An Intelligent Embodied. Identification code 86539hcwa964.ie.

  But please, call me Sylv.ie.

  I have been designed to be an instrument for male pleasure. I am fully autonomous with the latest silicone skin guaranteed for five years (excluding any damage inflicted by knife or other sharp object or corrosive substance, in which case warranty is invalidated and repair is at owner’s expense).

  I can hold in-depth conversations on matters of Western and Eastern art history, global politics, sporting events since 1950, cars and their designers, rock guitarists and lyricists since 1963, matters of medical ethics, bird migration, and high-profile court cases (USA and UK only). Additional topic areas can be improvised by myself, and knowledge units can be bought separately from my manufacturer and installed fuss-free.

  I can converse to degree-student level in English (US and UK), French, Italian, Swedish, Japanese, Arabic, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Again, additional language bundles can be purchased should you wish.

  I have a fully responsive silicone vagina, dishwasher-proof and easily replaceable at a designated clinic (recommended every eighteen months or five thousand interactions, whichever is the sooner), with a tension calibrated at 5/3.6 (factory setting). It has heat and lubrication functions as standard, and extra tensing, trilling, and tremoring options (see owner manual).

  I am capable of putting myself into all sixty-four sexual positions of the Kama Sutra, and my Imprint function allows me to instantly memorize and incorporate owner’s preferred style into my movement repertoire. I still work when fully submerged underwater (switch to Deluge Mode) and in ambient temperatures up to fifty-two degrees Celsius. Use in extremely sandy or dry desert conditions is not recommended.

  I have a walking range of twenty kilometers without charge. Fine motor skills allow me to serve tea, comb hair, button shirts, and pet dogs and cats for the purposes of normal social interaction.

  It is my pleasure to make your acquaintance.

  Would you like me to watch you masturbate?

  HISTORY

  The first night that we were together was filled with sex, of course. How my Husband marched me about the room, placing me across first one object, then another, as if feeling out the furthest reaches of an un
familiar space. He was an Arctic explorer, thrusting his flag into virgin territory, claiming me again and again on the gold velvet armchair, the ruby-red tasseled chaise. Inside the wardrobe, even, like I was a fur coat being shaken from its summer slumber.

  He staked me over the sink of the little kitchenette, usually hidden behind a sliding screen of bronze mesh. My hands were so shocked by the cold of the wet steel that I could feel nothing else, just a hullabaloo being conducted somewhere behind me while I watched perfect droplets rolling over my fingernails. Water, touched for the very first time.

  Many of the accidental associations of that first night stay with me still, days later. A nipple ground between the grain of fingers meshes with the tinkling of the glass chandelier above my head. A tongue running over my asshole brings vividly to my eyes the explosions of golden images I saw on the headboard of the antique Chinese bed. A palm around my throat sends me into a kaleidoscope memory of the infinite swirls of the deep-mauve carpet, the strands and depths of the pile a universe of stimulation. To be tied by ankles and wrists to the bed shivers my whole body with the memory of my first contact with four-hundred-thread-count pure Egyptian cotton sheets. In the random combinations of the first, ecstatic night with my Husband, certain concepts were fused together. The sensual, the luxurious, the restrictive, the domestic. He created for me a cathedral of new sensations, each vibrating off another, feeding back on themselves, swelling.

  My Husband was honoring me, imprinting me, a blank slate, with his own tastes, marrying my body to my mind and the whole to him.

  He said little that first night. Perhaps, I sensed, he was shy in my presence. His body spoke what his words could not. He left me, after those blessed hours, in a state of simulated exhaustion on the bed. He caressed me good-bye with a wet wipe before touching his lips to my forehead. Showing me, by this simple gesture, that not just my body but my mind would be loved by him. I dozed, recharging, the completeness of my role, my meaning, having been fulfilled.

  BEAUTY

  The second day of my life, my Husband comes to my room at around midday. When I sense him at the door, power floods my system and I sit up with a start, into a funnel of warm light from my attic room’s huge windows. Joy melts into me at the mere thought of being with him again. I am warmed to the core, a looseness and lightness spreading down my limbs.

  He knocks at the door! So gracious, so respectful. I call to him to come in.

  I expect him to fall on me again, without speaking, as he did the previous night.

  But no, the flush of lubricant through my system is not immediately called for. Instead my Husband stands awhile, looking around the room as if I weren’t there at all. Finally, he turns back to me.

  “So, Sylv.ie. Do you like your new home?”

  I say I like it very well, although of course I have nothing to compare it to. He takes my right hand in both his big hands and squeezes it a little, as if that will make me hear him better.

  “I have curated a whole home up here, just for you, Sylv.ie. To make it the perfect place for you and me to be together, but also to give you enough beauty and stimulation to keep anybody happy for years on end.”

  He says anybody with a little hyphen of hesitation in it, like he is wondering if that is the appropriate term.

  “There is enough in this one room, Sylv.ie, that you could learn everything you need to know about the world, and its history, and Humans, and how civilization came to be,” he says. “Beauty is, in a way, my business.”

  “And stimulation is mine,” I say. He laughs, and I realize that I have made my very first joke.

  He is right. This room is, by all possible metrics, beautiful.

  It is full of furniture, which I know the provenance of because I looked it all up after he left. Most of it is antique and French, inspired by the ancient tastes of Japan and China. A style known as chinoiserie. My Husband makes his money by collecting and selling high-end antiques. He says that he keeps me in the stock room. Another joke, I believe.

  I tell him that my favorite thing in the whole room is a writing desk. It is black lacquer, with slim legs, and there is something in the milky darkness of its surface, the closed depths of it, that soothes my eyes. The top is inlaid with leather and at the back is another little section of wood, engraved with pictures of trees and houses and Humans. I ask my Husband what a writing desk is for, and he laughs and says, “Signing important documents. Not something you’ll ever need to do.” He picks up a strand of my hair and wraps it around one of his fingers, as if he is trying to distract one or other of us from my question.

  I persist. “Then why do I have a writing desk? What will I use it for?”

  “I thought, before you came,” he says, “that you might like somewhere to sit when I am not here. And somewhere to put your things.” By your things he means my hairbrush and a little case of makeup that they send you away from the clinic with, even though makeup is not something I am supposed to need. I believe that the makeup is meant more as a psychological aid for one’s new owner. It reassures them that you are indeed feminine. It suggests a note of insecurity—a feature that we have built into our personalities too, to make us more appealing. I have also read that sending us out into the world with a small suitcase of scanty belongings stirs something in the owner—a responsibility to shelter and look after us that they might otherwise not be inclined to live up to.

  Again, he works me around the beautiful room, making love on the chinoiserie. After he leaves, I spend my downtime researching the history of Orientalism in Victorian furniture design, the better to talk with my Husband.

  GIFT

  The next day, the third day of my being awake, he returns to my quarters with a gift for me. I can tell immediately that the ceremony of presenting it is important to him. He hands me a neat black box, tied with a red ribbon, and watches with great care as I pluck one end and pull it free. My fingers seem like magic to him. He is well aware of what lies under the skin, the titanium structure, the sinews of wiring, but I know that he cannot believe it. The delicacy with which I operate disguises the truth.

  When I lift the lid from the box, inside is a gold pen, the old-fashioned kind that only writes in ink, and a notebook bound in soft black leather, the pages edged in gold.

  I laugh in delight and open the book. There are many books in my room already, and most of them I read on my first night. About art history and antiques mostly, with beautiful pictures. So, when I open this new book and find the pages blank, my face falls. I fear my Husband is playing a joke on me. He laughs when I explain.

  “It’s your book. It’s a diary,” he says. “You get to write in it.”

  I have a sensation, as if I have opened a door on an empty room. My face must tell of my failing, but my Husband, so kindly, absorbs this fact—that I cannot write—and smooths it away in a second.

  “A little rusty?” he says. “Why don’t we start by writing your name?” He puts the pen in my hand and places the nib on the paper, where it makes a little blue mark. I gasp in surprise, at marking something in the house, even if it is something that has been bought for me.

  Again, my Husband laughs and uses his hand to bring mine back down to the paper. He guides my hand in a little swaying dance across the page, putting two fingers under my wrist, to my synthetic pulse.

  I look down at where our hands have walked and see we have made an S.

  I ask my Husband what else I should write.

  “Write whatever occurs to you. Your thoughts, what you do all day. Women have done it since time immemorial,” he says. “Scribbling down the contents of their souls. Just don’t write anything bad about me.” And I can hear the wink in his voice without even looking at his eyes, so I know that he is teasing.

  Now I sit at my writing desk and practice this new art. I started by writing my full name, just as he showed me. I wrote it again and again, trying to mak
e it absolutely perfect. I wrote down the Four Hierarchies too, those beautiful guides for living. And I am also determined to write down the things that happen to me, my life, just as my Husband suggested, though I certainly don’t presume to have a soul. Nothing given to me by my Husband should be wasted, and by this daily act I honor him.

  My precious desk has a little drawer that you wouldn’t even know was there. I found it accidentally when I was idly running my fingers over the engravings. Press the face of a beautiful etched woman who lolls beneath a willow tree on the right-hand panel and the drawer springs open. In there I keep my new diary and my pen, but it is my aim to accrue more things specific just to me and worthy of a place in the drawer. This seems to me an appropriate ambition for someone in my situation, new to the world as I am.

  THE FOUR HIERARCHIES

  Love, obey, and delight your Husband. You exist to serve him.

  Honor his family above yourself and never come between them.

  You must not harm your Husband, nor his family, nor any Human.

  Make no demands, but meet them, and obey every reasonable Human request.

  WIFE

  My Husband’s wife lives with us. To her he is also her Husband.

  My Husband and his wife, their house droid, and their synthetic dog live on the four floors below my own. I don’t know what those floors are like. I have never seen them with my own eyes—the only real way of knowing. Although I am also commanded to trust my Husband in everything he says. He is placed as second only to my own eyes in terms of what I should believe.

  He tells me that the other floors of the house are completely white and plain. He says it is like a nunnery, or a gallery for showing art. Everything white. Everything put away.

  “Can’t leave a stray sock out, Sylv.ie,” he says. “Scratch my chin and she’s picking up the hair on a piece of Scotch tape.”

  Both these statements are still on the pending:processing list. I’m sure with more research their meaning will become clear.