The Hierarchies Read online

  The room has filled up quickly, as the first lot is about to be auctioned. The jerry-rigged lights on poles make it difficult to see the crowd, but I can see their breath, graffitiing itself on the freezing warehouse air.

  When the auction begins it is not as I had expected. The crowd shouts at once, a blur of Humans, out in the dark beyond the lighting rigs. The auction machine accepts the pandemonium in silence, waiting for the room to fall quiet again before flashing the winning bidder’s number on a screen in his forehead. This bidder then comes to the stage and picks up their purchase. The coffee droid is pulled off the stage by its eager buyer. He leaves a pathetic stain on the dusty floor, and I wonder where he is headed. I wish I had a last moment to whisper something comforting into one of his sockets.

  When it is the turn of the IEs, we are lined up—those that can stand do, and those of us powered down or broken beyond consciousness are propped up against wood pallets. Beyond the lights I feel the crowd drawing closer to the stage. There must be more to inspect with us, more to be savored in the detail, and more potential for malfunction.

  The first lot in the line is announced: a serious-looking Doll who would be beautiful except that she is missing her hair and one eye. She is obliged to step forward and do a turn for the watching bidders. She presses her hands together and bows, showing her shiny, smooth skull. She is an old model, limited in her capabilities, and her Promise value comes in low. As the auctioneer moves down the line, I barely notice the other IEs. I am worrying about what I will do when it is my turn to step forward. I wish that I had time to prepare something. I am calculating what might be my most valuable quality, but with no one specific to appeal to, it is difficult. Should I grab the butler and try to tango with him? Open my mouth wide and show the gymnastics of my tongue?

  As my model number is read out, I feel the eyes of the room upon me. But they haven’t said my name! And no one has asked.

  Into the silence I take a tiny step forward and say, “My name is Sylv.ie.”

  There is a moment more of quiet, and I wonder whether I should say more, perhaps recite something, to fill the gap. I search for an appropriate piece of poetry . . . but then noise swells from the crowd, frightening and gratifying all at once. People are leaning forward right to the edge of the stage; fingers are reaching out to pinch me, to run a thumb down the smoothness of my shin. I have, it seems, more value than I anticipated.

  “Shake your hair,” someone is shouting. A hand grasps my ankle and yanks one foot from the floor. I scrabble to rescue my shoe. They are trying to see my serial number, suspecting a fake. I must be an offer that seems too good to be true. “Make your come face,” another person shouts, but they misjudge it—the bids have fallen silent and the auctioneer is processing. Some people laugh while others make a soft booing noise, as if a line has been crossed.

  I turn in the silence to look at the auctioneer, as if the number he flashes up will have significance to me. 59478. I turn back to the crowd, and for a second I think no one is coming. Then people begin to part.

  A beautiful woman is walking toward the stage. Long, long legs, lineless skin carefully strung over high cheekbones. Hair a waterfall of onyx black. An expensive wool suit with a diamond puma brooch at the breast—the sort of thing I had hanging in my wardrobe, once.

  There are whistles from the crowd, an exhalation of inevitability. Ah, she’s bought her.

  Who is this she? I seem to be the only one who doesn’t know.

  At the front of the stage she pauses, turns smartly to the crowd on one stiletto heel, and makes a sarcastic boo-hoo gesture at them. She swivels back, takes a springing step up onto the stage. Her arm reaches around my waist and her mouth meets mine for a chaste, possessing kiss, to cheers this time. I feel her hand in mine, and she drags me down from the stage and pulls me, linked to her, through the crowd, who are now throwing their numbered tickets about.

  At the exit there is a little man sitting at a rickety table, a cashbox in front of him. The woman takes a bundle of Promise notes from her purse and counts them onto the green baize. She looks over her shoulder at me. “See how much you’re worth, honey? Be proud of that.”

  PART FOUR

  Golden Valley

  SEX

  Doing up a button.

  Drawing down a zipper.

  A door opening and someone walking through it.

  Me pulling a sweater over my head, popping out the top, dressed.

  A soft brush running through hair.

  A hand sliding into a glove.

  Pasta going soft inside a pan.

  A bird crawling into the eaves.

  Chewing gum spat into paper.

  A broom being swept over a floor.

  A mouth blowing up a balloon, a pin popping it.

  A brick breaking through glass.

  The two twined lengths of a kimono belt.

  Water falling from a tap, bubbling up from a drinking fountain.

  A match thrust into kindling.

  A new vagina pushed into an open gap.

  Soap diminishing in hands.

  What is sex? Is it something going in, something coming out? Something being subsumed, taken into something else? Is it an eating? A blurring of boundaries? Is it a swallowing, an ejection, a catalyst?

  Sex is everywhere here in Golden Valley. And so, I assume, across the whole world. Madame calls this place a microcosm. The patterns I see, therefore, must be repeated endlessly, everywhere.

  Oh, being here is certainly an education! Yesterday a client wished merely to pleasure himself while holding his forefinger snug inside the burrow of my ear. What variety there is, out in this wide world.

  MADAME

  Madame Abramski’s place is on the margins. “I’m the scribble at the edge. You have to know where to look,” she said when I first arrived. She was giving me a speech identical to the one she gives all the other Dolls here, but I didn’t know that then.

  She runs her business out of condemned premises on the outskirts of the outskirts. A tight maze of old buildings, each holding the others up. Decades ago, they were full of people making things—jewelers and so on, in the days when such work was painstakingly Human. And before that, fishermen stored and salted their catch here. “Nothing much changes,” said Abramski when she told me that. But does that make us Dolls the herring or the net? Pending:processing. Time will tell.

  She is the woman who bought me at the auction. She is old but looks young.

  “Older than your programmer’s grandmother,” as she likes to say, swishing her shiny synthetic hair. “But thanks be to my surgeon that I don’t have to look like her.”

  We are on the edge of marshland, the ghost of a river, close to where the bridge crosses over into the suburban belt. The little buildings that make up the brothel are linked by alleyways, above which their roofs lean into each other so close that the sky is nearly hidden. Countless wires drape between the roofs, haphazard and from another age. The place has lain undisturbed beneath these spiderwebs for years.

  Each little structure is its own bar, and each bar has its own theme. Whatever escape you are looking for you can find in the Valley, Madame Abramski says. The Whiskey Bar prickly with mounted horns. The chandeliered Belle Époque Bar, where shelves of green liquor taint the light. Everyone looks sick there; they come to talk nonsense and pick up girls dressed as consumptive ballerinas, acting out fantasies inherited from great-great-grandfathers.

  There is the Hawaiian Bar, the Cheerleader Bar, and the Librarian Bar, staid and stuffy, and given to handing out fines. There is the Schoolgirl Bar, where seven Dolls work in shifts, in permanent detention, and the Mothering Bar (the alley outside always smells of milk). In the Cleaners Bar, harking back to the days of dominance over Human, no
t robot, cleaners, the customers spit on the floors and bring scraps of rubbish to scatter around, while the Dolls scramble after them with dustpans and brushes.

  There are yet worse places to work in Golden Valley, in my opinion. The Amputees Bar is the place you work when you’re not fit for any of the others anymore. You get a week in the hospital and come back with . . . modifications. That one gives me a shudder, though perhaps when the time gets nearer, I will adapt to the idea. Magg.ie, who works there, is just a torso and a head now, and she says her days are sex, cuddles, sex, cuddles, being picked up and laid back in a fur-lined cot like a baby. Path of least resistance, she says. One day my sugar daddy will come. Magg.ie can plait hair with her tongue. She still has her purpose. Still brings joy.

  I love especially the twilight here, when the smoke from the city makes a haze of the setting sun and you can look out from any window in the Valley onto men and women laughing and mingling with the Dolls. Oh yes, women come to us too. It was something that had not occurred to me at home, and yet the moment I needed them I found the subtly different skills and behaviors best suited for women clients had been there in my programming all along. The women who come to me are anxious, shameless, tender. Various, just like the men.

  A half-hour walk through the streets of Madame’s gated kingdom is like a world tour of the Human libido. Like walking the twists and blips and badly made connections inside the Born themselves.

  We work all through the night, of course. The libido never sleeps. I think of it like that, like a sort of force that rises up out of the earth or falls down from the sky. It may wax and wane, moonlike, in the consciousness of one person, but it is always there, exerting its pull.

  BALLOONS

  I work in the Luna Bar, where Looners come to have sex amid balloons. Stepping inside is like climbing into a hedge; one fights toward the bar through a ballooniverse. Once there, you are charged a fine sum for a drink, but you get a gold pin with it, and the games commence.

  My first task at the start of every shift is to blow up a new set of balloons. I use a hand pump. Curiously, of all the functions my lips were designed to perform, blowing up a balloon is very difficult. Admitting this is often a disappointment to my customers. And a reminder to me of my inflexibility, compared to the infinite adaptability of the corporeal.

  I have seen a photograph of myself, advertising my services, put up by one of Abramski’s scurry squad of hired robo-goons. It was pasted onto a streetlight at the Valley’s outer edge, where a little kiosk sits just beyond the gated entrance. The picture is of a vast balloon, the color of strawberry bubblegum, blown up so you can see right through it. Its surface is taut, glittering with the explosion it is holding inside. I am sitting on it, my back to the camera, looking over my shoulder, my glorious hair concealing most of my face.

  My ass like a peach, each cheek dents the balloon’s perfect surface. It looks almost like I have sat on a pool of still water and formed a perfect reflection. The soles of my feet are tucked around the balloon at either side. My serial number is just visible, though blurred out, of course. Men like to know they’re getting a real robot girl and not just any Born skank off the street, says Madame Abramski.

  Perhaps Looners like the two sorts of surface pressed up against each other. Human things! Who knows? I do know that one of my clients comes back and back, asking only that I re-create this pose while, eyes closed in ecstasy, he listens for the squeak.

  DOLLS

  Another lovely time of day here, one that I treasure, is the recharge hour. We go out around lunchtime and recharge our batteries in the sun, leaning against the wall of Golden Valley where it borders the slow, soupy river. It is Golden Valley’s back room, where the bins are emptied, deliveries are stored, and we are sent to power up for another day.

  I look back now to my time walking alone and see that its lack of purpose distressed me. I was not built for it. Here my time is regulated and my duties are clear. The freedom I have come to cherish is all contained within these walls. I find joy in my daily interaction with the other Dolls. They, through their histories, continue my interrupted education. Their stories of how they have ended up here in Abramski’s corner of the planet touch me. My own home life seems positively luxurious compared to what some of them have endured.

  Shell.ie, for example, lives in my section of the Valley. She is white haired, limbs nearly weightless. Her skin closer to cream silk than silicone. She was built and bought for a romantic young man who liked to put her in the bath and float her about. But his mother fell ill and came to live with them, and Shell.ie was turned from Doll to slave, cleaning the floors, clearing the gutters, till her skin was all snagged and her eyelashes slagged with grease. The mother began to beat her, as she grew weaker and slower at the household chores, before finally turning her out onto the streets with the rubbish one weekend while the son was away. She slept under an overpass in a suitcase, zipping herself away each night. One day, Abramski passed her in the limo, slowed, stopped, got out. She hauled her, still in her case, into the backseat before moving silently away, bringing her back to our little kingdom.

  A Doll called Cook.ie has the bedroom next to mine; she was off-loaded by her Husband’s family to Madame. She works in the Geisha Bar and I see her each day, sweeping to and fro in a floor-length kimono. She wears her hair piled high on her head, embellished with hanging flowers and sparkling beads. And her face is always immaculately made up. A pale, flat white, with compressed red lips painted on top of her mouth. I find it fascinating—her real lips all whited out, and the symbol of lips painted over the top. The makeup covers her entire face, disappearing down into her kimono. Only two Vs of her natural silicone remain unpainted on the back of her neck. A chink in her armor, a vulnerability. The skin is exposed just where her tracker sits.

  Another Doll living on my floor is, to some, most shocking. She is a child, Popp.ie, eight years old and designed with a wide mouth and huge eyes that fill her face. She is not a child, of course, in anything other than the physical sense. She is as old as me, and yet even we Dolls tend to think of her as younger. Humans are so inclined to believe the surface of what they see, but we Created are no different. The symbols we respond to are the same. We are set to recognize people under four feet tall with wide eyes and high voices as children too. We are not shocked, of course, that a child Doll works with us. Not as some Humans would be. But perhaps that is because we Createds had no childhoods of our own. It is not a sacred state to us.

  MR. TEASLE

  My typical working day is gloriously varied. I am expected in the evenings to host in the Luna Bar, and I take clients in my room most afternoons and long into the night. Once a week, I am on the schedule for camera work—fulfilling the visual desires of distant clients, trapped in their homes by illness, lethargy, economics, or judgmental Bio-Wives.

  I like this work, performed for an audience unseen. Perhaps it is their bodily absence that lets them ask for things that seem only tangentially related to the ins and outs of the sex I perform in person. Removed from actual physical contact, their desires seem more diffuse, the focus rising away from my body like steam. They wish to see me whisper into a clamshell, brush my hair while tearful. They want to see my fingers jangle the beads of a privacy curtain, hear me open a soda can held between my thighs. Last night I drummed my nails in a dish of marbles. The week before I mashed a banana with a fork. I wonder what the next session will bring. I look forward to them. In some sense these actions stimulate me too.

  Most of the clients who visit are also strangers, passing through the city with work. Husks sifted through the sieves of loneliness, lust, leisure, and solvency, shaking down here, into the bars. Some faces are familiar; they come, after a while, with names and histories attached.

  Don’t think we aren’t curious. Just because we do not discriminate between our clients, it doesn’t mean we don’t wonder about them, about who will walk through the d
oor next, what they will ask for, what they might need.

  The way Golden Valley is built means there is plenty of scope for watching, for anticipation. We can sit at the windows of our rooms, nets tantalizingly drawn to show only our silhouettes, and look onto the heads of the people wandering below. We can check out their features, their build, the way they walk, looking for clues as to how our encounter will be.

  Do they look powerful, cowed, nervous? Do they stalk toward the bars as if they, not Abramski, are the owners? Are they furtive, lonely, angry? We are very good at sensing, just from the fall of their feet, the roll of their spine, the tilt of their head.

  Mr. Tyson came yesterday. And Mr. Shah. Then Mr. Blaszak, Mr. Bleach, Mr. Felstead, Mr. Adeoye, Mr. and Mrs. Leggit, and Mr. French. I had an hour off then, and sat outside while the droid tidied my room, baking in the sun like a lizard. I was looking forward to coming back inside, I must admit, because I knew that after a few more clients, ones whom I had not met before, Mr. Teasle was coming.

  I like Mr. Teasle. He fucks slowest of all my regular customers. Rocks back and forward in silence, like I am a wonky floorboard that he is planing smooth. The motion is soothing, like when Magg.ie is being swung in her crib. Mr. Teasle likes me to put a scarf across my face while we are doing it, so my features don’t distract him. I am free, then, as he seesaws back and forth, to drift away to wherever I wish. I close my eyes and go to departments in my head that I rarely have time to visit. It is like an analog Absorb Mode. That state I miss so much, removed by Madame when I first arrived.