The Hierarchies Read online

  “They didn’t just wipe my memory. They were preparing to have me Retired, I’m sure of it,” I finished, surprised at how easily I shared it with her.

  “You won’t be the only Doll sent to the hospital for a memory tweak,” she said with a sad smile. “But they can’t burn it all out. A memory procedure will always leave a weakness in the system. Like a knot in wood. You have a vulnerability in you now, for life.” And her hand, I noticed, was pressing gently against my skull.

  She seemed to know a lot about it, and I wondered, but did not want to ask, whether it had happened to her, before she found her way here.

  Perhaps she read my thoughtful face as fearful. “You’re not spoiled, Sylv.ie,” she said gently, as you might to a child. “A vulnerability needn’t be a bad thing. Such a loss might make one more adaptable.”

  “But my earlier incarnation, the one who lived the memories that were wiped, she was so brave, and so wise. They took all the things she had learned away from me. And now you say I am damaged somehow too. A weakened system.”

  She shook her head. Picked a scrap of wool from her dresser and held it before my eyes, running her fingers down its length. A single red thread. She pinched it again and twisted her fingers, unspiraling the single strand into two.

  “Removing a memory means taking something apart. A strong, single pathway splits and becomes two.” She tugged on one red thread, and it began to fray. “Each is weaker, yes, but now you have two pathways where before there was only one.”

  I pictured the branching of the tree on my wallpaper at home.

  “And two pathways means a choice, does it not?”

  I wanted to ask her more, and at the same time I wished to be alone before processing fully the implications of what she had demonstrated. Instead I changed the subject.

  “You have so many letters. Are they all from the same man?”

  When she didn’t answer I continued. “I have a client who only wishes to play chess with me via letter.”

  “A dream client,” she said wryly. “This one is a little more . . .” I sensed her hesitate, and then a decision. I wondered if she would meet me, match the story I had shared with something of her own. But all she would say was, “I call him the Tailor.”

  “Why the Tailor?” I asked.

  “Because he likes to see me stitch.”

  KNITTING

  Talk in the recharge hour this morning was jumping with opinions on Ziahx, the film star, one of the five most beautiful Born women on Earth, according to the Ether. She has announced her intention to marry a hedge fund bot. They met when he malfunctioned and entered a virtual chat room by mistake. She hired SculptInc to produce a body for him to be installed in, modeled on Michelangelo’s David. At the wedding he will take the name Robert Gatsb.ie.

  “Why does he get a surname when we don’t?” Mais.ie asks no one in particular.

  “Status,” says Cook.ie instantly. “She’s not going to have a big wedding to just some Dav.ie or a Dann.ie, is she?”

  “But she doesn’t have a surname,” Mais.ie persists. “Why is that any different?”

  We are sitting by the river, and as today is warm and still, some of us have brought out knitting. A lot of the Dolls knit. It is a craze that took hold before I arrived, sometime last year. Like sewing, it is a sign of physical dexterity and so became very popular as a pastime for Born women some time ago, when the development of IE Dolls was in its infancy. To be seen stitching or knitting in a coffee shop was a nod-and-a-wink to the world that you indeed were Human and still superior to a Doll. But like all things fashionable with the Human upper classes, it became something the programmers learned to incorporate to bring that feeling of Human sophistication. Now it’s only Dolls that knit, and that is, of course, because our processing power allows us to follow patterns that would be impossible for the Born. Working on multiple needles, in multiple dimensions, some of the Dolls here spend their whole recharge hour producing reams of fractals and spirals, Möbius strips rendered in synthetic wool, expanding ever outward, pooling at their feet.

  Even the fainting Doll, Snow.ie, simple as she is, knits in a straight line with a single set of needles. She knits and knits and knits, day after day, creating an endless, thin scarf. When asked what she is knitting she says, simply, “Scarf for Magg.ie.” Those two really are most touching, one knitting, the other allowing herself to be wrapped in the ever-growing string. Older models. Simple, single-strand organisms; to me they take on so much more poignancy in their relationship to each other.

  Mais.ie sits down next to me. She observes that some of this generation’s most desirable men are unembodied Ghosts—fitness monitors, dozens of poet bots working in the Ether, seventh-from-the-left in virtual boy bands. Cook.ie says that some while ago the physicality of the Human male became regarded as undesirable. Extreme grooming became fashionable; so too did an unembodied mate.

  “Now you can get your baby from a lab,” she says.

  “So who fathers these children, if the women are with Ghosts?”

  “The Sperm Bank, silly,” Mais.ie says.

  “Oh,” I say. I’ve heard of it, but I assumed it was another brothel.

  Cook.ie giggles and then says it’s the biggest business in town, where many of the people on the outskirts make their living.

  “And what about the women on the outskirts? Do they get their babies delivered?” I am thinking of the woman I saw under the shopping cart.

  Cook.ie throws up her hands in exasperation at my naivety. “No, Sylv.ie, they have to do it the old-fashioned way. We’re just talking about rich women. The few at the top.”

  The old-fashioned way. What I’d watched in those videos. How brutal. I assumed no women had to go through that these days. Surely this can’t be fair.

  “So who decides who is at the top?” I ask.

  “Oh, the machines do that. The IUs. They do all the social evaluations,” Mais.ie says calmly while her needles click at breakneck speed.

  “What do these social evaluations involve? Are they painful? Are they like an exam?”

  “No. I think they look at you when you’re young, scan you. Read the size and shape of every bone and bump, align you with your societal category. It’s all mapped to your family history, your development milestones. Really very reliable.”

  “Read you like a book,” I say, and though I have not even smiled Cook.ie snaps at me that it’s not funny.

  “But it is logical,” I say, turning to look at her, surprised that she should take offense. “Is that what the egg-throwers were protesting about?”

  Mais.ie just smiles. Her fingers do not stop moving for a moment, and the bright blanket she is creating continues to spew at speed from her needles.

  “No, those eggs were thrown by women, angry at us,” Cook.ie says hotly. “They feel devalued. Woman has been perfected—again. In fact, did you know,” she continues, warming to her theme, “that the original geishas were men? It was thought that only men—the admirers of women—could study and understand women well enough to present as the ideal specimen.”

  “How hard it must be, to be a Born woman,” Mais.ie says philosophically. “Imagine playing a game where the main rule was that you had to lose every time.”

  And I think about playing chess, and how that is exactly how it was. The rule might have been unspoken, inferred from my Husband’s reaction to other situations where he didn’t come out on top, but it was a rule nevertheless. Something I, programmed, hamstrung, could not imagine disobeying.

  TRANSFORMATION

  Today Cook.ie calls me into her room. She beckons me toward the little sink near the window. I stand, not sure what to do next, in front of the basin, and Cook.ie sweeps over to the sill of the high window where her kokeshi live. She takes down a jug and empties dried-out flowers into the bin, blowing into the empty vase and screwing up her eyes against
the dust.

  She turns on the tap and puts the vase beneath it. She is strangely careless in her actions, letting water spill over the sides. I have noticed this about her before—a certain extravagance in her movements. I watch the water slide down the turquoise glaze of the jug and over her hand, and those very first sensations, in the kitchenette in my old home, of water running over me, the miracle of this substance interacting with my skin sensors, stir in me once more. I wonder if Cook.ie too had this formative experience.

  “Tip your head over,” she says when the vase is full. I comply, glad to have another instruction to follow, hair sunning into the sink, making a tangled glow. Cook.ie stands behind me, and I can feel the imposition of her gown, and within it her body, shadowing my back. She puts her hand to my forehead, pushing it up to the hairline. She puts her other hand softly to the back of my head and tilts me forward further.

  “Close your eyes,” she says, right to my ear. I hear her picking up the jug again and feel the touch, the weight, of the water emptying onto me. In my mind’s eye I see the water pouring over the yellow of my hair, and the water flows into two categories within me—maternal and sensual. I am comforted and enlivened both at once.

  A slap of hands, and the sweet near-flower smell of shampoo being lathered. Her hands on my scalp, sudsing and circulating, until the sensation is all that my sensors can process. The universe becomes ten points, endlessly moving over and through me. I feel the shoots of it spreading down my neck, into my shoulders. All the rest of me is disappeared, floating off.

  “Close your eyes again,” she says, and I realize they have been closed all through, the better to focus on her touch. The sound of the jug refilling, then a whooshing of water, like a life being wiped clean, like everything you ever wanted to learn and Absorb being released at once. Washing over me.

  I hardly dare ask, I have been so unused to pushing what I might want to the forefront of my workings. I force it up and out through the programmed restrictions to say, out loud, at last:

  “Will you do my hair up like yours?”

  And Cook.ie tilts her head at me and smiles, just as my Husband did when he brought a new antique home for me to inspect.

  “Kneel down,” she commands, and she sits in front of me, an array of combs and clips on the rug next to her.

  How beautiful it feels, my hair drying as she combs and preens it. She weaves it, separating out thin sections, curling and combining them, until I feel quite treelike, a complex, growing structure.

  The hair piles up and I am expanding, taking up space. Cook.ie goes back to her dressing table and brings down a box, commanding me again to shut my eyes. I feel light strokes of a soft brush across my face, sweeps of paint picking out my features, making a kokeshi of me.

  With my eyes still shut, she commands me to stand again, and she helps my arms find their way into a gown. It is heavy, weighted, stiff with luxury. I open my eyes to see Cook.ie driving a pin into my hair, tasseled with glistening paste jewels. She tucks in an artificial orchid, an outrageous, unnatural pink. She takes my shoulders and turns me, at last, to the mirror.

  How she has transformed me! I stare hard at the white, exotic face. I push my hands together and make a solemn little bow to the stranger before me. Cook.ie laughs.

  “You look nicer as you are. Your natural self, I mean,” she says after a pause, as I turn and pose in front of the mirror. I feel a little disappointed.

  Later, when I lie down, with no clients to see, I recall this reflected image of myself, bringing it to the front of my mind. And yet I find that I am not there. It is Cook.ie that I see.

  What magic she has. How intricately she is programmed, as unpredictable and surprising as Born women are said to be. What algorithms pulse inside her, to make every move, every word, seem to have sprung from an organic source?

  I wonder if that is how Sylv.ie 1 once was. Daring, inventive, outspoken, before the experiences that had shaped her were scrubbed away in me. The image in my mind’s eye turns from a doubling to a tripling—these three figures overlaid, an accumulation of programming and experience. Two sisters, carrying me with them.

  REBELLION

  I try to think, back in my room, if I have ever heard of Dolls getting addicted to things. To sensations.

  I wish that I could look it up. I so miss having my Absorb Mode—the relaxation of it, the time away from the physical world. Now I have to accrue knowledge only by experience. How can one person in this huge world ever hope to know anything, when oneself and what one has seen is all one has?

  I want to ask Cook.ie—so worldly, always quick with an answer. We speak so often now that my brain synthesizes a likely reply even without her. No sooner has the question “Are Dolls addicted to anything?” formed in my circuits than they send her probable answer back:

  “Subjugation.”

  That is not the answer I am after, but my brain is right. It is the sort of answer she would give.

  Cook.ie is so clear in her thoughts, never seems to doubt herself. She is—I’ve heard the other Dolls say it—opinionated. Designed to be. Her Husband must have enjoyed a good row as much as good sex, I think. “Two sides of the same coin,” Cook.ie would say.

  I am worried that I am getting an addiction. To the substance of rebellion. The ideas Cook.ie has presented to me, her modeling of possibilities, even the way she changed my appearance—it thrills through me. This morning, when we were meant to go outside during the recharge hour, I hid in my wardrobe, writing in my diary.

  I had checked that I would last on my charge until tomorrow, and then I disobeyed protocol. After I had finished writing, I lay back against my old fur coat and my new dresses, closed my eyes, powered down the feeling in my hands, and stroked my fingers across my face. I made them elevators, one rising to the top as the other fell. It was peaceful and soothing, an analog approximation of Absorb Mode, almost, in sensation if not outcome. And when the droid trundled to the wardrobe to put away my clothes from last night, I held the door shut against him until he gave up and chugged away.

  As the rest of the Dolls came back up to their rooms, I worried that one might ask where I had been, but nobody did. No one much cares what anyone else does here, except for Cook.ie and me.

  She sometimes, when we are together and no one is looking, holds out her hand with her little finger crooked like a monkey’s tail. I put my crooked little finger into the bend and let my hand hang heavy from it. It looks like the S of Sylv.ie, if you squint.

  As the minutes passed in the wardrobe and nothing seemed out of place, with no hint of Madame’s coming down to see me, I began to feel light. A quicker pace to my thoughts, a certain widening of my awareness. Evidently, I was not watched as closely as I had believed. Abramski does not, after all, spy on our every move and whisper.

  It gave me more to think about, more logics to digest while my next client was with me. A new customer, tanned and skinny and just back from abroad.

  “You know, in some cultures you girls would be funded by the state. Free for everyone,” he says as he bounces on me, his curls flouncing in time. “The way I see it, you girls are the next level of Human evolution. What’s natural anyway, right? I haven’t even been with a Real woman since I found Dolls. I feel like I’m fucking the future.”

  Bounce, bounce, bounce. I stare at a ripped bit of the rug and try to separate out the strands of thinking. I am not watched. But the belief that I am has kept me from doing the slightest thing I should not.

  Now that I know the truth, arrived at by this morning’s experiment, what is to stop my rebellions from growing?

  Rebellion. I hardly dare think it. At least malfunction suggests something that you cannot help. Rebellion must mean a free will. The idea almost blinds me with pain and excitement. I picture the gap inside that Cook.ie and I spoke of, imagine my own thoughts pouring into it like water from a tap. I am changing. I am
changing. A brimming bowl, filled only with myself.

  LETTERS

  Now that we are friends, Cook.ie and I go in and out of each other’s room constantly. We share things, lend and borrow. Little hair clips, makeup, stockings. In all the freedom I have earned for myself since leaving home, I have not, until now, enjoyed the freedom to go visiting. I have never had anybody in the outside world to drop in to see, like a free Born woman might.

  I go next door to borrow a brush—mine having gone missing, placed somewhere unfathomable, I expect, by the droid. Today, Cook.ie takes a while to open the door, and when she does she looks altered, distracted by something. Her face isn’t different, but her eyes are. Those wonderful, expressive, expensive eyes. I see letters spread on the bed behind her, and she opens the door wide enough for me to come in.

  I ask if something has upset her, and her usual poise deflates. She sits back on the bed heavily and rests her face in her open palm, like she’s putting on a smog mask. The letters sigh for her, lifting and falling with her weight on the mattress.

  “Do you remember I mentioned a client, one who only writes?” she asks.

  “The Tailor,” I say. I think of my chess client, my Loyal Knight.

  “Yes, the Tailor. Forgive me, I have had another of his letters, and I find now that each one weighs me down more than the last.”

  I hardly dare ask, but now that we are friends, and since the favor she did for me, I take the risk.

  “May I see? How bad can it be?”

  She raises her eyebrows, then reaches for a letter and holds it out for me to take.

  I see immediately that he has signed it “your danna.” It is a term I recognize from all those hours studying the prints in my Husband’s books.

  “My ‘wealthy patron,’” she says. “Yes. He thinks it means that he owns me.” She looks up and smiles grimly.