The Hierarchies Read online

  I look back toward the trees. The three women are young, much younger than the First Lady. Perhaps the age of the Dolls who served drinks at the ice party. And yet they have a different tone. Perhaps it is the lack of uniforms. Their clothing is bright and designed for attention. I watch them talking and laughing, one pantomiming something for the others while the rest hold on to each other’s elbows or shove at each other gently in fun. They have none of the decorum about them of the other women I have observed. The First Lady, the women who shook my hand at the party, the women under weeping willows or reclining in boats that I have seen painted in my Husband’s books. And yet they have their own charm. The threads of communication between them seem to twitch and shift constantly, throbbing out an energy that my own wiring responds to.

  A crowd of girls. Everyone at the party was on the arm of a man or serving. At the hospital we sat in lines or were hung in them without our heads. Here in front of me for the first time I am witnessing what I have only read about. Female company. Do I dare?

  I think, wondering on what pretext I might be able to join them. I wish only for a few moments in their orbit. A brief exchange, perhaps of laughter. Some sisterly advice. What would be an appropriate way to introduce myself? The landscape of protocols for this is barren. I feel conspicuous, ill equipped for the world as it is. There is noise from the kiosk, and the woman in the tabard puts off the light inside and bangs down the front shutter.

  The voices of the girls grow louder, and I smile. Perhaps my interrupting them will not be necessary, as they are walking toward me, coming to enjoy the chairs now that the kiosk woman has switched out the light. Her sign about tables being for customers only disappears into the darkness with her.

  One girl has pink hair piled high on her head. Her nails are long and intricately painted. I watch as, at the next table, she flips open a small brass pot and drops tablets out on the tabletop, her fingers moving swiftly, so I cannot see what is painted on their ends. I feel a sense of certainty of the right thing to do. Of Sylv.ie 1 looking over my shoulder.

  “Your nails look wonderful,” I say. The girl stops and looks up. She smiles. She raises both her hands in the air and waggles her fingers before snatching her palms closed toward her.

  “Thank you,” she replies.

  “May I have a closer look?”

  She nods her head once, in what seems to be an emphatic if surprised yes, and I get up from my seat to walk toward her. Already this feels exciting, a departure, surpassing even the imaginings I had of speaking with the First Lady’s hairdresser. These are Real Born girls. And I am about to join them, freely.

  She holds out one hand, her forearm rested lazily on the table. Her nails, I can see now that I am closer, are painted, each with a minuscule yet finely detailed landscape. A shore and sea, an island topped with a tree. A mountain pass. And in each, as I bend even closer, a figure is picked out, dotted into the frozen world with a dab of red, of blue. A Human rendered in three or four strokes, and yet unmistakable. I want to tell her that they remind me of the scenes on the furniture at home.

  Instead I say, “Who did these?” and the girl looks back over her shoulder.

  “Maxx did,” she says. “Doesn’t she have talent?”

  Desiring just another look, I reach my hand to touch my very fingertips under hers, to lift the pictures better into the light of the streetlamp. And at this moment I feel the hand shrink and recoil, and I know I have miscalculated.

  I pull my eyes up to her face, looking for what has changed. Her skin is blotchy, smog stained, as if she spends most of her life outside. Her makeup, I now see, is crudely drawn, her big baby eyes sketched out in blunt pencil, lips filled in slightly wider than the natural contours of her mouth. An approximation of robot beauty painted over more youthful, fluctuating features. She half turns to speak to both me and the wider group.

  “What are you doing out here on your own anyway?” she says. A reasonable question that could be asked of any Born woman. But still, I will stick to the shallows of what is true.

  I tell her I have been exploring the city, and that as it was late, I wanted a coffee to sustain me. Is that enough? The other girls become attuned to our conversation. I can feel them slowly leaning in closer on the table.

  “I’m just here having a few days away from my Husband,” I say.

  She raises her eyebrows and purses her lips. She doesn’t believe me. I feel an irritation at the back of my neck, a fly, and go to brush it away without thinking. One of the other girls is behind me, and there is a trace of something in the air, a hot sweet smell.

  “Do you mind,” I say, and turn around, but she is looking over my head at the others, a signal flying between them. I turn back to the girl with the pink hair to find that she is staring more intently than ever. As our eyes meet a look passes across her face, a kind of glee, perhaps.

  “Why would you want to lie to us?” she says, and I am confused by this sudden new line of conversation.

  She reaches out her arm, her eyes bright with delight, and knocks the cup and its remaining contents from my hand. It spills brown liquid across the skirt of my dress.

  “Maxx put that cig on your neck, and you didn’t even flinch. I knew there was something weird about you, how you just spoke to us like we knew you. You’re not the wife of some rich man; you’re just a Doll.”

  “Going about in a fur coat,” adds Maxx delightedly, as if this were some sort of crime.

  Her fingers are reaching for the fur, grubbily picking at it, and I pull it closer around myself.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to trick you. I never said I was a Human,” I say in my most placatory tone.

  “So stuck-up, and she’s just a Gynoid,” the pink-haired girl says to the others. “A jumped-up droid in a wig.”

  I am about to politely protest that it is not a wig.

  “Watch me,” someone else says.

  The blow lands while she is still speaking, a thud to my right ear, which topples me from the chair to the ground. I sit up, surprised, and dust gravel from my coat.

  “Oooh, she gets right up again. I told you they’re dangerous.” I feel a kick to the hinge behind my knee. My balance levels shift, teeter. My left leg tries to compensate, but I can get no leverage on the gravel, and I lurch forward, the new information of the ground coming up at me fast. I throw out my arm as my left cheek crashes into something hard. There is a whirl of recalibration as my body tries to save itself.

  I’m sprawled on the ground, my right leg flailing in the dirt, stirring up dust. I look down at it as I looked down at my extracted vagina in the hospital, as a thing not of me. My head is pulled back and the sensors at the base of my scalp shout for attention as the third girl takes hold of my hair, dragging me, a dog on a lead. I follow the yellow stripe of my hair, pulled taut, crawling toward it, trying to release the tension in my skull.

  I tumble forward. A scalding in my skull interferes with my sight. Another fist, glowing yellow, comes speeding toward my face. Knuckles strike my lip, reflexing my mouth open. For the first time in my life I taste my own hair. Fingers, iced with colorful painted nails, cramming in strands, filling me up with silence.

  RESCUE

  I wake with something cool against my forehead, lights passing before my eyes, fleeting, blurred. There is a man with me, an expectant prince, waiting for me to resurface.

  I sit up, and the seat beneath me crackles. It is at once stiff and greasy. I wonder whether my memory has been wiped again. I review the last available images—the gravel, a fist up close. Someone is talking.

  “I am a Humanoid pleasure robot. An Intelligent Embodied. Identification code 86539hcwa964.ie. I go by the name of Sylv.ie.”

  A hand reaches out to my mouth, which is speaking without instruction from me. There is a shushing sound, and I widen my focus from the hand, along the arm, to the man it belongs to.r />
  “I know all that. You’ve been telling me that half the night, Sylv.ie.”

  Turning toward his voice I see him in profile, his hands on a steering wheel. He is unfamiliar. He has dry sandy hair and a weathered face, one eye half-closed. Dirty clothes. The passing lights of the street strobe over him, making him seem one way, then another, in turns.

  “Who are you?”

  “Sylv.ie, you could call me your knight in shining armor,” he says, and he smiles crookedly, squeezing his bad eye further. “I found you in the parking lot and stopped the worst of it. Those girls were giving you a pretty bad beating. I had to power you down to get you to safety.”

  I touch my fingers to my face, feeling for damage.

  “They just roughed you up a little. Not everyone is so keen on Dolls these days. Real women protests, all that stuff. It’s stirring up a lot of trouble, if you ask me. Live and let live, that’s more my motto.”

  I barely hear, much less understand, what he is saying.

  “What on earth were you doing out there on your own anyway?” he says. “Don’t you have a home? A Husband?”

  “I did, but I left them. I ran away.” I am surprised to hear the words.

  His face speaks louder than he knows. A new vista has opened up before him. A fascination. I saw it on the face of my Husband’s friend at the party. Is it the lust to know? To take apart the artificial?

  “An emancipated woman. A free Doll. That’s a new one on me, Sylv.ie. Isn’t your Husband looking for you? You’re an expensive piece of tech to lose. How long have you been free?”

  “Only a few days,” I say. Has it only been that long? “I’m sure if my Husband had anyone following me then they wouldn’t have let that . . .”

  “Happen?” He steps in, as if it might pain me to put words to my experience. “True enough. Not much of a Husband to allow that. Some Born girls today are just feral. Mindless vandals, smash-up artists. I’m half-afraid of them too.”

  Streetlights strobe by; he twitches one thumb, a pulse, against the steering wheel of the van, and I take the opportunity of this pause to ask him again who he is.

  He jams one elbow into the steering wheel and turns his face toward me. “I’m the Scrap Man. I collect waifs and strays. Like a public service. Unrecognized by the authorities of course, but then anyone who truly does good is a threat to the system these days. You know?”

  It is framed as a question, which would make me obliged to answer, and yet I can think of nothing to say. I am certainly a stray. My lack of an answer pains me, and yet after the last few days, I am learning that to feel some of this pain in small amounts allows me to push the boundaries of my actions.

  “Time I gave you your freedom,” he says, and I realize, like another punch, that I have been imprisoned again without even knowing it. “If we were stopped”—and here he runs his hand through his hair—“this would get me in trouble. Now, doesn’t that seem a shame to you?”

  I balance a slice of imaginary, unmelting butter on my tongue. “What sort of trouble?”

  “Oh, they’d characterize my rescuing you as robbery. Now, how can that be fair? And if those laws change the way some people want, I could be had up for kidnapping. Imagine!”

  The very word makes him slap the steering wheel. I look out the window, seeing strange parts of the city slide by, smearing me with information.

  “What do you think, Sylv.ie? Do you count yourself as a person?”

  Discussing the notion of my being, my rights, seems like it must, surely, be forbidden, although nothing immediately bars the thoughts. My mouth starts saying “My Husband,” but the words wobble, and I remain quiet. The Scrap Man is looking out the window now, as if voicing his thought dispelled it, pushed it off him and onto me. He suddenly applies the brakes, and we come to a stop underneath a streetlight, close to a store and a restaurant. He opens the door and hops out.

  I wonder whether this is my moment—another one. Whether I should open my door too and slide my feet down onto the street. I see an alleyway across the road where I could be gone from sight in seconds. But the thought barely comes into being before the passenger door opens and the Scrap Man thrusts something onto my lap.

  It is a coffee dispenser, filthy with grease and somewhat dented on one side of its ugly little body. A wire has been pulled out of the back and its wheels, grotty with grime that is now transferring to my dress, are partly buckled.

  “Found you a pal,” says the Scrap Man, and slams the door again.

  Back in the driver’s seat he is pleased with himself. He pokes his fingers under the machine’s bodywork. The droid, a broken baby, nestles deeper into my lap under his ministrations. “Poor little fella out on a cold night,” he says, as though he has no problem at all accepting machines as people. The dead droid lets out a dribble of stale coffee, which runs down my leg.

  “Mother and child reunion,” he says mysteriously as he starts the engine up again.

  I realize that this is one facet of womanhood that has never been attributed to me before. I find I don’t know what to do with it.

  A half hour later we stop again, and the way he hauls up the handbrake like Hercules tells me it will be the final time. We are in front of a warehouse, wire cages rusted over the tall windows. The door is nailed shut. The only sign of life is a hut on a scrap of yard next door, advertising droid washing for vehicles. I wonder whether I am to be attacked again. It seems just the spot for it. And yet running would appear impossible. There is no trigger. Why would I run, and toward whom?

  He gets out, scoops the sad little coffee machine under one arm, and opens the door for me to join him. Suddenly everything seems very urgent, and he takes my elbow, leading me to the back of the van.

  Light glints on disappointing jewels. A mangle of metal, bits of old cart and wire and some rusted sheets in a pile. On top, I see what I thought was a mannequin, but as he pulls it from the pile it is clear that it is a maid.

  He pulls her once, twice, by the ankle, and she comes free of the wreckage with a piercing, grating complaint. “She’s had a life,” he says, almost to me, as he hauls her up over his shoulder. I can see that one side of her face is smashed in, wires protruding from the concave flesh. “See if you can find another arm in that lot, will you, and pick up the coffee droid.”

  This, then, is how I enter the auction at which I am to be sold. Carrying a maid’s arm and a broken coffee machine, and on the same social level as both.

  As I step inside the warehouse I am ushered toward a bench of Dolls in varying states of distress and decay, each tagged at the wrist. A fire sale of damaged goods.

  The Scrap Man disappears into the back of the space as soon as a tag has been tied around my wrist. I think of Sylv.ie 1. She would be disappointed that my short-lived freedom has been squandered this way. Yet I am neither frightened nor indignant. Perhaps the state of my being owned is ingrained so deep that the thought of being returned to it, even by a person as yet unknown, is a comfort. If the thought of a hand rising from the crowd of buyers, a sleeve drawing back to reveal my Husband’s distinctive diamond watch, reclaiming me, returning me home, crosses my mind, I do not allow myself to linger on it.

  The auction lots are organized by type. The warehouse has a raised stage on which a machine auctioneer stands, and the things to be auctioned are lined up in front. It doesn’t strike me until later that I allocated the pronoun “him” to the auctioneer, despite his barely being embodied at all. He is just some eyes and a series of automated responses, wrapped in a metal shell. “Him.” It must be his position of authority. And yet the UUs are always categorized as male too—a hangover from when Human hard labor was done by the men, of course.

  It’s the UUs who are lined up first. The Unintelligent Unembodied. The machines that make no pretense toward being Human. The poor little bottom-feeders, like the coffee machine. Seeing him up th
ere, slumped and wonky on his broken tracks, squeezed in between a lawn maintenance bot and a toaster, touches me. As if the hour or so sat in my lap in the van has awakened me to his—what’s the word? I read his adriftness, his longing for a return to use, as keenly as I feel my own. My empathy is like a virus, a contagion. No one is safe!

  The coffee machine’s potential personhood. His pseudo-person. Those are the words I was reaching for. I view him the way that Humans view me, and in this space, where we will all, over the course of the night, stand on that stage, we may as well be the same thing. To our buyers, we are.

  After the UUs will come the IUs—the Intelligent Unembodied, the Ghosts. Calculating machines, administrators, and research robots valued only for their brainpower and built into ugly, awkward boxes. Next are the maids, with me and the other IEs at the end, the grand finale. I have been allowed the dubious dignity of sitting on a bench near the edge of the stage, as if I am a famous actress waiting to play her part to an adoring crowd.

  I look around at the others I am sat with. Next to me is a Doll completely undressed. Her skin is the rich brown of walnut wood, and through her long hair peep two neon-pink nipples, which I don’t think is quite correct.

  She in turn has been sat next to a white Doll with enormous, anatomically inaccurate breasts. Her nipples, big as plungers, touch her thighs as she sits. The Doll next to her has her head padlocked down between her knees. She leans against the bench on her neck, her face implacable and upside down. Next to her a slim-bodied Doll in a gas mask. I can’t tell if it comes off or whether it is part of her face. My fingers itch to reach out and twang the elastic, just to see.

  A robot approaches, the old-fashioned sort without any surface skin, the movements of his joints on display. He has on a butler’s bow tie, slightly askew. In his arms, a large set of buttocks, pulled open to reveal a frilly pink pair of lips and a tiny black bullet of an asshole. He hefts her down onto the bench beside me and all us Dolls jiggle. She has no legs to speak of, but the soles of her feet, crudely modeled, curl around the contour of her bottom. Looked at from the side, her little ankles grow straight from her waist. This girl certainly has no speech components, no head, and therefore I assume no cognitive function at all. And yet she has two penetrable holes, and so sits with us. I am at once touched and insulted.