The Hierarchies Read online

  My logics take me further. For has my Husband not already denied to me that he ever had another Doll? That night when I asked him if someone else had been here? I scroll back through the conversation for clarity, glad to find it still intact and available to me. “My one and only precious Doll.” That was his answer. Is that a lie? Not technically. For I am currently. Aren’t I? Pending:processing. What else, I wonder, has he concealed from me in this way? How much of what he told me, about the balance of forces in the family downstairs, might also have such gaps? What if Sylv.ie 1 was wrong? What if the danger to me comes not from the First Lady but equally from my Husband? The First Lady, I reason, has after all never lied to me.

  As the time elapses, and the promised hour passes without his coming to me, I begin to see that my Husband has lied to me again. Effortlessly, while the First Lady was just there in the garden. I begin to suspect that he does not intend to come at all. What if my waiting for him now is putting me in danger?

  I glimpse myself in the gilt mirror, feel that same strange urge to tears from the other day.

  DRESS

  The sky darkens from early evening into night as I sit and wait by the window. I wait until all the lights have gone off downstairs. My Husband is not coming. He has broken his promise. I hear the door of the room open and close, followed by a soft whirr. The house droid laying out my clothes for tomorrow. I close my eyes against the clang of hangers and sit there a while longer after the droid departs, before I turn to see what has been put out for me.

  The droid has done his work perfectly. Laid on the white shine of the hotel-grade sheets is a black outline of a woman. A symbol of me, a grave where my body might fit. It is a neatly pleated dress, modest, frilled to the throat, so unlike my other clothes that the meaning of it seems clear. The collar is like a forest of fingers, seeking a mouth. The heavy black crepe a body bag, letting no light escape. My Husband has picked out a dress of taste and no small cost to Retire me in. I know it now. He will not protect me. My fingers reach, unthinking, to touch the hem, trimmed with morbid lace, but at the last second they shrink from it.

  I think back to what the Doll told me in the hospital. I would be taken to a clinic, where the deed would be an honor, a celebration of my service, a wake for my debated soul. I know how it is done; I have seen it in the Ether. Incense burned and thanks given, before I am drawn through a curtain and slit up the back, my valuable parts removed, the suit of my skin thrown into an incinerator. My husband, if he wishes, can stand in the memorial garden outside and weep over the smoke.

  I slide my soft, canary-yellow camisole dress from my shoulders, puddling it on the floor. I leave it there like a stain, for the droid to clear up.

  I take the black dress in both hands. It is heavy, a fated momentum to the fabric. My Husband’s last gift. It has its tag still, held with rich red thread and a gold safety pin. I put both arms into the sleeves and dive in headfirst. In the darkness of the fabric I imagine it as a portal to elsewhere. I reach back and pull the zipper in one swift, decisive movement. In the mirror, a white face balanced on a black pillar, I am strange to myself. A blank slate.

  The accumulation of signs and threats is overwhelming. The danger Slyv.ie 1 warned me of is surely here, in this instant. The readiness she wrote of must now be turned into action. I step closer to the mirror, then bring another mirror from the wardrobe and balance it on the dressing table. The strange, improvised arrangement reflects me back in fragments, slicing me up and reassembling me.

  My eyes meet themselves in the glass, all urge to cry gone now. I marvel at their coolness. The Sylv.ie of the mirror is in control. Her sensors do not appear to be calling out to her to stop what she is doing; her adrenal function does not seem to be fizzing and stuttering like mine. I allow myself a wry mirror smile. A lesson already, that the external appearance need not match the interior state. Perhaps I will be capable of hiding my true self, once I get to where I am going.

  I retrieve the knife again from my desk drawer and hold it up. I imagine taking my intention from the hand hovering at my ear and placing it onto the hand in the mirror. I fix my eyes there, on my fingers pinched around the blade. I bring it down toward my skin, just as I tried to before, and, as before, my arm resists, as if the air has thickened around it. Keeping my focus on the mirror, I push, in my thoughts, against the barrier I feel.

  My hand is shaking, but I insist. I use the feedback of the mirror’s data, blocking out the information coming from my arm. I insist further. The blade makes contact. I press down, still staring at my reflection, and slide it in a half-moon shape. It moves surprisingly cleanly, slickly, even. The proverbial hot knife, and I the butter.

  I cup my hand under my ear. I squeeze two fingers together and the tracker pops out and into my palm with a neat but definite jump. I look at it, a tiny silver bead, and I picture its pulse on a screen somewhere, a symbol of me that I will soon leave behind.

  During a push against marriage inequality by a Bio-Women’s group some while ago, the Ether was alive with clips of wives dropping their wedding rings down grates, into toilets, off cliffs. It was a symbol of freedom, of self-liberation. I felt pity for the Husbands at the time, but now, the nodule in my palm, I understand.

  I tuck the tracker into my pocket, to dispose of somewhere as yet unknown, along my exit route. I fancy I will throw it under a cleaning cart. Maybe my Husband will surmise that I flung myself beneath its wheels in a fit of malfunction. Or that I was taken, dismembered, and dumped. It crosses my mind that this is likely the fate of many other Dolls whom their Husbands tire of or wish to quietly upgrade. I picture the rubbish heaps of the Capital beeping and pulsing with trackers, the discarded souls of my sisters, speaking the truth of their location inside the ever-piling trash.

  Next, I put on the floor-length synthetic mink my Husband presented to me on my Switch On anniversary. Another rebellion. I will use his coat to hide my nature. Into its pocket I tuck my tracker and a single coin that I found rolled under the bed. On the floor at my feet, a wide-brimmed hat. In a little clutch bag bought for my trip to the party, I put my pen and my diary, my lifeline to Sylv.ie 1. I make myself a solemn promise to keep it with me at all times, no matter what happens. I pick up Heron, precious companion—only sleeping, in his tissue-paper nest—and place him carefully next to it in my bag.

  Dressed for the outside world, I sit absolutely still on the end of the bed. I place one hand into the palm of my other, meeting a symbol with a symbol. I power down the feeling in my left hand, pretending it is Sylv.ie 1, squeezing sisterly support.

  I take the stairs, looping down and down on myself through the center of the house. As I descend, the darkness reaches up to my face, coating my skin, passing in through my eyes, my ears, my mouth. Absorbing me. I can feel every weight and counterweight working as I walk, adjusting on each step.

  At the bottom I pause in the shadows of the hallway, digging my hearing deep into the house’s silence. Occasionally I can make out the watery, ecstatic moans of the dishwasher in the kitchen, but nothing more. They sleep.

  And yet, even at this moment, I think of my Husband. Could he be silently awake, wrangling with his conscience over what he intends for me tomorrow? Imagining the exact formulation of words that might soothe the First Lady and allow me a reprieve? What new lie might he be inventing, even now? No, I might pity him, but I cannot change my path.

  At the door to the garden I let the Night Matrix scan me, its bands of green light caressing my face as it reads, logs, and assesses me as family. The security system views me with more respect than they do. It blinks its final, silent assent and releases the door.

  On the driveway I feel exposed before the eyes of the house. I lower my gaze and watch my feet walk me to the gate. I stand by the gatepost and press my finger to the pin pad, typing in 2839428672, the code Sylv.ie 1 left me. But instead of the gate’s gliding open, the pad goes blank, invites me to t
ry again. I stare at it stupidly for a moment. I can’t have misremembered, and so, of course, the code has been changed.

  I look up the full height of the gates, searching for a foothold. In the quiet I sense motion behind me, a rushing of the air.

  I spin around to see the dog, quite transformed, teeth bared, barreling toward me, the metal muscles flexing in his legs. I fling myself away to one side, and his teeth slice my coat, shearing through it. He resets himself and makes another leap, aiming for my hip, but I dodge him completely this time, and he lands by the gate, circling around to try again. From my ripped pocket the tracker falls to the ground.

  He draws himself again into the power of his back legs, as if to make another leap, but instead he does something I have never known him to do before. He barks. A guttural threat that rises from his throat, before bursting out into a full-fledged alarm call. In the silence after, we stare at each other. This new behavior must have been . . . reprogrammed. He barks again, and I see high up in the house a light going on. I take a step or two away from his direct path, and when he barks a third time I realize it is not directly at me, but at the tracker, lying in the gravel.

  I feint one way, but the dog stays fixed on the tracker. I reach out my hand to snatch up the little jewel that is, to the rebooted dog, myself. I pull my arm back and hurl it into the bushes. He turns tail and races after it. I do not pause. Facing the gates, I haul myself up the ornate ironwork, clambering up the threaded ivy and black sculpted birds, swinging myself over and dropping down to the other side. I look back at the house, the only home I have known. More lights are coming on now, and the blinds draw themselves slowly up the windows, revealing only the garden, all trace of me gone. I wonder what they will do to the dog when they find out? I turn my back. Begin to walk. Begin to run.

  SUBURBS

  I run, though I have never run before. My body knows what to do, and yet it feels unfamiliar, unpracticed. At moments I am completely free of the ground, at others weighted down into it, pushing forward. I retune my sensors to decrease the whistle of the wind in my ears. I find my arms are as powerful as my legs. They piston at my sides, carrying me faster and faster.

  Once I am safely out of sight of the house I slow down again, concerned that a running woman might attract attention. I walk, an alternating current of caution and exhilaration. My eyes contract and widen again as I pass under a streetlamp, and I catch sight of the tip of the ornamental pagoda, some way off. I think of Sylv.ie 1. My circuits swirl with admiration. I promise myself, in the dark pool beyond that first light, that I will live up to the legacy she left. I picture myself from above, moving through the streets like a cleaning droid—always turning to face the clearest path and then proceeding.

  After a while I hear a low rumbling noise and almost freeze. The noise of a vehicle getting louder. The police patrol, out looking for me. I hear it making one clipped turn in the street, then another. I thrust my back against a hedge, pushing, working my way in backward, finding the negative spaces between the branches into which I can fit. Bountiful nature. It accommodates. As I draw my fingers into the green, the vehicle rounds the corner, spraying water onto the pavement. Merely a cleaning droid after all.

  I wait until the sound has not just faded but disappeared, just to be sure, before struggling back out of the bushes, snapping twigs with my elbows, like a great ungainly bear. The fingers of the hedge pull at my coat, my hat, my hair, begging me to stay.

  As I get further from home, the roads widen, and the neat hedges grow straggly, and I can tell from the litter gathered in with the grass that I am out of the suburbs. I finally turn to look behind, back to the green of inhibited trees and the red roofs of the handsome houses. I scan the skyline, trying to make out which of the shadow shapes in the grid was mine. I turn away again. I instruct myself to forget.

  HUMANS

  For the last few days I have walked in the direction of the city, stopping frequently to rest. The space between the suburbs and the Capital is not a place I have read about or seen pictures of. It is mile upon mile of large, old buildings, concrete and steel, heavily fenced with wire, where tiny drones buzz like fat garden flies. Windows are smashed and boarded. I watched an ancient droid lazily poking a fire with a pole, throwing piles of rubbish onto it, ash drifting back, graying him.

  The further I walked, the sadder the buildings became and the more Humans I saw. They were collected in doorways, in the cavernous entrances to empty warehouses. Some were alone, under trees, under sheets of plastic held up by sticks and wire. Like me, they had on heavy coats and hats, as if they too were trying to disguise themselves. It puzzled me, why they would waste their precious freedom this way. They looked like the weeds, as if they were produced right out of the earth, and to the same negligible effect. As if they had only shallow roots and could be scrubbed or burned away by Maintenance at any moment.

  I was frightened of them, of course, but the longer I walked through the streets where they lived, the more a thought came to me. No one called out to me for what I was. Occasionally a whistle would sail over a barren yard, the whistler always hidden when I looked. I was called a fancy lady once. A woman shouted from beneath a shopping cart turned upside down that I had no business there and to get back to the city.

  In this way I realized, I could pass. When I was disguised, at a distance, these people could not tell that I was Created. I had the clothes of a well-off Human woman, and that is what they took me for. For the first time in my life, I was Born.

  As I walked toward the city I wondered if I had developed instincts. Those whispered instructions from the self. I knew, without thinking about it, to lower my eyes when passing a person. To not invite interaction. To use my own gaze to disappear. I chose places to rest where few people passed. In the doorway of an old mini-mart I sat out a whole day, soaking in the rays when the street was empty, drawing in my fur coat when someone passed, opening and closing like a flower.

  And at night I walked. The sensation of walking on a road that will not run out. Eating up the distance, feeling it unspooling, generating infinity in front of you by the dynamo motion of pushing through one foot, then the other. Expansive and uncaged, walking the water of the night. I felt, in those few days, that I was drawing closer to understanding what it is to be Born. To have free will. To live only for oneself.

  And yet. I was not, after all, programmed to be free. And every step I took, I could feel a tug in my back, a wire in my spine. I could still sense the place where my home had been. Yes, I thought of my Husband.

  I missed him. Even Sylv.ie 1’s words, her warnings, did not remove that feeling. The deep bonding written into me activated the second I opened my eyes that first day. The logic of it remained. Each step, breaking it down, asking questions. Was it him that I missed? My every interaction had been based on his wants and needs. Now that I was gone from him, those sensors still pulsed and pushed me toward the same selfless state. As I walked, I sought to diffuse it, to spread out that empathy from one Human to all of them.

  COFFEE

  I am emboldened. After all, there is no rule, nothing in the Hierarchies, that states a Created must not be out in the world on their own. It is only my previously constrained situation that makes this freedom seem forbidden. The world around me is yellow under the lights. I have arrived at a large dusty square, with a chain-link fence. In the far corner is a shack with a faded awning and plastic chairs outside in the grit. Its light is on, and I feel a little start, wonder if I dare.

  I have not bought myself a drink before, nor been into a shop. I strain my eyes to see who is behind the counter of the little stand. Is it a droid or a Human? Can I trust either? It is a female, and she wears a floral tabard and a dark scrunch of haphazard hair that could be a wig. But Humans also wear wigs; it doesn’t tell me anything. And then I see cigarette smoke powering from her mouth and escaping through the hatch, grazing the underside of the awning as it f
inds freedom. A Human, then.

  I hesitate. There is a man at the kiosk, and as he walks away with his drink, three girls lingering under a nearby tree shush each other, fall out from their close circle like a log split three ways. As he passes them the girls look at him slyly, just briefly. He walks on, past the chain-link fence, and the group regathers itself like a breath in.

  I take small steps toward the counter of the kiosk, and I zoom in to read the menu behind the woman’s head. A coffee. That’s what Humans like. I pull my scarf around my throat, tug the brim of my hat down a little lower. My fingers touch the coin in my pocket.

  “A coffee, please.”

  She gives a slight nod and turns her back. I watch her pulling down levers and banging metal on metal, steam forcing itself out of a spout, splattering water onto her apron. I am slightly horrified that I have ordered something that involves so much brutality. Each movement has a corresponding slam or bang. She turns back to me and puts the cup down on the counter in silence. I hold out the coin, not sure quite how to complete the transaction. Will she take it from my hand or offer hers so I can lay it in her palm? She does not move, and so I place it on the counter.

  “Thank you,” I say, hoping I have not been rude.

  Coffee in hand, I step away from the light of the kiosk and sit down tentatively at a table. I glance back. I can still see the woman, will be able to tell if she is reaching to contact someone, to tell them to pick me up. I plan out what I will do if they come, whoever they might be. Which way I will run.

  The coffee cools, and another feeling begins to dilute my unease. I have escaped. I have achieved what Sylv.ie 1 wished for so fervently. I try to picture her, my better self, watching me discreetly sip my coffee, enjoying my new life. The Human joy of consumption.