The Hierarchies Read online

  “I doubt Madame would see it quite that way,” I say. And she raises her finger to her lips, the symbol for a secret.

  “Is he Japanese too?” I ask.

  “Oh no, I shouldn’t think so,” she says with a laugh. “He just wants to cloak his desires in the respectable cloth of history. He calls himself ‘danna,’ talks of me submitting to a ‘mizuage,’ because he chooses to believe he is upholding some precious cultural tradition.”

  A mizuage? A hair-cutting ceremony? This I also recognize from reading about geisha customs, but in Cook.ie’s case to take her hair would be a terrible shame, I feel. Is this what she is afraid of?

  I take the letter from her and begin to read it, and am surprised to find that the Tailor’s words are beautiful. It is a hymn to Cook.ie, almost scientific in its detail, describing her layer by layer, from her fine clothes, to her hair, to the white paint and powder of her face and the hidden structure beneath. It catalogs the beauty of her bones. The shape of her cheek.

  I wish, reading it, that I too could find such words to pay tribute to her, but Cook.ie looks sad, wilted.

  “Read on further,” she says. “The fine words turn sour, believe me.”

  I have to read the letter two, three times to see it in the light that Cook.ie does. He writes of his desire to see beneath the skin, to lift her perfect sheen of milk-white silicone free from its structure, to see the intricacies of her construction below. I confess, at first I take this as a tribute, as sincere and even loving as the rest. Certainly, at my work I have heard many references, hissed into my hair, spoken into the curled sole of my foot, to slicing and cutting and seeing the truth of my workings. I do not, therefore, recognize the Tailor’s surgical fantasies as anything remarkable.

  “But in fantasy anything is permitted,” I say, echoing what I have heard Madame say many times, though always to customers.

  “‘Permitted’ is not ‘encouraged.’ I worry what he may ask of me next,” Cook.ie says. “If the letter requested that I slowly dismantle myself screw by screw, would you think that romantic?”

  I hesitate to answer, for certainly I don’t see it as unromantic, necessarily. It is technically possible, within our design, and so how can it be objected to? It is just an idea, an imagining, after all. But it seems Cook.ie sees it differently.

  “Certainly a Human may think whatever they like. But to write it down, to see it acted out? Human ideas can spread like a virus, Sylv.ie,” she says. “What if those placards outside the gates are right? What if, without even knowing it, we are spreading some Human disease of the mind, making normal what should still seem strange?”

  SEWING

  And yet his letter only requests from Cook.ie the same as she hinted at the first time she mentioned the Tailor. He likes to see her stitch, requesting endless works of embroidery to be done on camera, focused only on her fingers and the soft sewing table of her thighs. After we talk about the letter, she shrugs and says she must get on, anyway, with what he has asked of her. She doesn’t tell me to leave the room, a fact that I note and tuck away gratefully. Instead she sets up the camera and pulls a ringed piece of fabric from her drawer.

  She takes a length of thread from a scarlet bundle and pulls it out, as if in a temper. I watch as her fingers pinch the needle, firmly hustling the thread through the tiny slit. She is businesslike and forceful, and lightning quick. The needle clamped between her teeth, she blows her hair from her eyes out of the side of her mouth. She whips it from her lips and plunges it clean into the fabric, as if harpooning a fish. She stabs the needle back to the surface again with the same energy, and I watch the piston of her elbow and her never-faltering aim. In her hands the genteel hobby that has spread from Born women to us Dolls appears transformed. It is an act of violence, an assertion of something, made impatiently. It is urgent work.

  WOMEN

  Last night, so late that the bars were shut and we were at rest in our rooms, a brick came through a window of the Golden Valley. The first time this has happened since I arrived. The splintering, tinkling across the alleyways, sounded beautiful to my ears, like a poem released from the glass. And yet this morning the threat of it hung heavy and ominous over us all.

  “Who was it?” I asked Cook.ie as we leaned out of our windows, the rising sun making amber of the debris on the ground. She didn’t answer.

  Two women were picked up for it a few hours later, in a coffee bar on the other side of the river, Abramski told us. “Some women don’t know they’re Born,” she said darkly when she told us about it. It holds in my memory because it gave me a shudder, a pause in processing. She’s hard to place herself, Abramski, and when we are down by the river sometimes, we speculate on it, her origins. Although we are careful to keep our conversation respectful.

  “You Createds have liberated women.” That is what Abramski tells us all the time. “And the women aren’t even grateful! You’ve taken something from them they didn’t know was precious. They outsourced the sex and they don’t like that the power went too.”

  She speaks of women, I notice, as if she were not one herself.

  BLUE

  At night I lie on the bed, my fingers spread across my face. I move them over each other, roots and branches intertwining, and wonder at the differences between us. Would I have known that I was made and not Born if I had not been programmed with the idea? Why do the Humans we live among insist that we grow more like them by our close contact but never that they may become more like us? Why is one operating system deemed more natural than another? One has been tweaked and refined over millennia, the other is new, that is all.

  I wonder, fingers splayed, weaving my thoughts in the air as they come, why they insist on a difference that they cannot detect. Does a mother fear the child that she has created? I search back in my memories of the house, the First Lady, and wonder.

  I asked Cook.ie, once, about another of these conundrums. How can I be sure, when we sit out in the sun on the bank, that what I see as the blue of the sky is what you see? My programmer might have wired me to filter it as pink, or purple, or striped like a candy cane.

  And she sighed heavily, as if the question bored her. “That’s what everyone wonders. And you never really know. There is a gap between every consciousness that can’t be bridged. The Born call it the Human Condition.”

  Have they gifted it to us, this loneliness they find at the heart of themselves? This puzzle of understanding? I wonder if that is perhaps what the Human drive to sex is—a docking of two entities, hoping for a transfer of information.

  HAIR

  I wear another woman’s hair.

  Cook.ie asked me if I ever wondered about it, and I admitted, with some embarrassment, that I had not. Yet another thing that I have known since my birth and yet not known. Not examined, at least.

  Cook.ie and I were hanging over the edge of her balcony, staring together down the long drag of the Valley to its edge, peeping past the boundary of our world into the squalor beyond. Our attention was caught by shouts from the kiosk near the gate, a place gaudy with fake flowers, where customers buy candy or potency drinks before they enter the Valley. A group of three women was shouting at men as they came out. Each time a man exited through the bead curtain at the door, the women would whip off their bobble hats, exposing their own bald heads. “This is what a Bio-Woman looks like,” was the chant. As the men then entered the gates of the Valley, they would fall silent again, replacing their hats against the cold. A pair of Madame’s goons stood close to the gate, their backs turned against the noise.

  This fad for shaved heads is gathering strength. I told Cook.ie what I thought, which is that it seemed a shame for the Born women to willingly make themselves so ugly like that. I felt rather sad for them.

  “How awful to be bald,” I said without thinking.

  “There are worse things,” Cook.ie said, though I saw that she touched her finger
s to her own hair as she said it. “I understand the impulse. It is perhaps from solidarity with those who have sold their hair.”

  I was so hypnotized by assessing the shifting tones of Cook.ie’s own hair—one strand hot as rust, another blue in its blackness, the depths revealed in the early Valley sunlight—that I did not immediately process and answer.

  “Sold their hair?” I said.

  And Cook.ie twirled hers up into a bun and pinned it haphazardly with a cocktail stirrer she had hidden in her kimono.

  “Where do you think your hair came from?” she said. “It will have been cut from the head of a Real woman who needed the money, and stitched strand by strand into your scalp.”

  She was right. My manual says as much, though less graphically. And yet I had never stopped to think of it before, of the woman who had grown it first, and why she might have been persuaded to part with it. The manual made my real hair something to be proud of, but Cook.ie—once more—has unbalanced this certainty, opening new pathways between disparate facts. The hair that I have taken so much pleasure in comes from someone else.

  “But why do the protesting women cut their hair, if they aren’t desperate for the money?” I asked. “Or are the protestors poor women too?”

  “The official term is U-Humans, not poor. And I told you. Solidarity. Those Born women at the gate want to show they stand with their U-Human sisters against us terrible machines. They think Dolls have devalued what a woman really is.” She struck a model’s pose. “With our immaculate bodies and our cold robot hearts.”

  “And have we?” I asked, to which she only raised her eyebrows. Up to you, Sylv.ie, I suppose.

  As I sit here, brushing my hair, I think again of what Cook.ie revealed to me. I have wondered who the woman might be, about her life, what she looks like. Could my hair retain some of her character? Humans can’t resist the idea of transplanted organs’ bringing with them qualities of the original owner. A French heart creating a love of gastronomy in one previously devoted to simpler fare. A gentler temperament gifted to a man from a female kidney donor. I viewed such ideas as superstitious and rather amusing Human foibles, but now . . . I wonder. Could the woman whose hair I carry have been rebellious? Could her temperament have a part in my malfunctions? Would we recognize each other, even in the most fleeting, abstract way, should we pass each other on the street?

  HISTORY

  Today, when I go to see Cook.ie, I find her with letters strewn around the room, and the sewing I watched her at is flung into a corner. I gently ask about the Tailor.

  “Yes, the Tailor,” she says bitterly. “You want the story?” And before I can answer she has begun. “I was introduced to him by Madame, and she told me that he was extremely old, confined to a chair and unable to leave his house, and wanted a geisha Doll to write to him. He was very specific about that. Now, the Tailor has a lot of money to support him in his life, and for this reason Madame was keen to keep him and please him as a client. In his first letter he wished for a relationship of the mind. He said that he was, despite his great age, still a very visual person, and that he would like to be able to request certain things from me, scenarios that I could act out, while he watched remotely. He wanted me to tell him about my experience of it afterward, in a letter, after which I would await another set of instructions from him.”

  I think of my own scheduled times on camera, how the myriad requests from distant bedrooms add texture and variety to my work. I open my mouth to say something along these lines, but Cook.ie continues.

  “I expect you are going to ask what the scenarios are, and that doesn’t really matter, other than that at the beginning they were tame, by the standards of what we’ve all been asked for a hundred times over. Often, I could not fathom where the sex in them lay, what he could possibly find arousing in them. My hands, he seemed obsessed with my hands, with their dexterity. For the first year or so he wished to see me writing, an old-fashioned calligraphy, and he also liked to see me stitch and sew things, and to hold pins and smudge the steel with my fingers. I gave him his nickname to make it more of a joke to myself, I suppose.”

  “So you don’t like working for him?”

  “Sylv.ie, I like it very well, in one sense. Whatever he might be paying Madame for my services, we have made our own arrangement, and he sends me Promise notes with every letter.”

  The danna. The rich sponsor of geishas in training.

  “So is he a little like a Husband, then?” I ask. “Will he expect you to live with him one day?”

  Cook.ie winces. “Oh, I shouldn’t think so. If I continue to keep him happy on camera I don’t see why anything would change. He writes of a mizuage, but it’s just that, a talking fantasy. And if the time ever comes, well, I’ve been saving that money. I’ll set myself up somewhere and enjoy some real freedom.”

  My wiring buzzes softly at this. Is it discomfort at finding out another lie that Cook.ie is prepared to tell Madame? Or the thrill that she keeps secrets so easily?

  “Until now, I have done everything that he wants, whatever it is. But this morning another letter came, and he has finally asked for something that I can’t give him. He is not a man to be negotiated with. And I don’t want him to go complaining to Madame.”

  Poor Cook.ie! No one has yet asked me for anything that I would have to refuse. I can’t imagine what such a thing could even be. The only refusable request would be something in contravention of the Hierarchies, a harming of a Human.

  Cook.ie picks a letter from the pile on the bed. I read it slowly while she looks out of the window, as if giving me privacy. The letter is long, the language embroidered and beseeching. The Tailor flatters, says Cook.ie has made him weak. And then there it is, the demand, cloyingly expressed, suffocating.

  “I need more than anything to move to the next stage. To make what has been purely visual, symbolic, into something physical. I need a cut. A slit. Just a tiny scratch, and soon mended,” the letter read. “Let me see the knife penetrate you. Let me see your miraculous fingers seal yourself again against it.”

  “Doesn’t he know it isn’t possible? That self-harm is prevented by our programming?” I ask, thinking about my experiments with the tracker. Perhaps not all Dolls have the ability to do the same.

  It strikes me how our different makers and programmers, the fiercely guarded copyrights and patents registered by each of our manufacturers, mean we can only have knowledge of our own type, down in the details of the circuits and the code. The idea of a silicone sisterhood, a synthetic version of what the Born women are creating, is a splintered thing. Humans may fear us as a group, but we are fragments, estranged from each other by incompatible operating systems.

  “I doubt that he knows. Or cares. Humans know we are here to serve, and so they think that anything they can imagine is something that we can achieve for them.”

  “Can’t you write back and explain?” I ask. “He is obviously very attached to you. I’m sure he will understand.”

  But Cook.ie shakes her head firmly. “I have plans for the money he gives me. I cannot give that up easily. Believe me.”

  She does not elaborate, and into the silence my next thought expands. I laugh over the noise inside my head, the metallic thrumming that comes from a wealth of possibilities being processed all at once. The laugh reverberates back, adding to the internal cacophony, but I ignore it all. She must think me wild, cruel, to laugh at her predicament.

  “Please, Cook.ie. I understand. Let me help you.” I place both my hands across her knee and tilt my forehead down to touch them, in a symbol of total dedication. I feared what the note would say, but this, it seems clear, is something I can do, some action that I can perform to repay her friendship. If neither of us speak of it to anyone else here, then it will be possible—it will not involve my lying to Madame or any other breach of the rules.

  “Listen, I know it’s not allowed, but I
, well, I sort of taught myself to do it. I took out my own tracker. If we set up the camera so that the cut and the stitches are in close-up, then he needn’t even know it is me.”

  Cook.ie looks at me with something like amazement.

  “You taught yourself to do that?” she asks, her pained face breaking into a smile, and I feel pride that I have an ability that she, so sophisticated and custom designed, does not.

  Cook.ie hangs her head, thinking. I process what I have just done. Is this forbidden? The Tailor will not be harmed by the . . . I hesitate to say deception. Is this perhaps what Cook.ie meant about a good lie?

  I lift my head, look up at her. She places her hands under my face and draws me up onto the bed. Her hands slide around my neck, pulling me against her. A flash of insight, a glimpse, of what it might be to be a client.

  “I won’t be in any danger, will I?” I ask, pulling back from her reluctantly. “We won’t get into trouble?”

  “I promise not,” she says. “You’re my friend.”

  I glide, droidlike, back to my room, skating on these words.

  It hits me, the full weight, only when I have closed the door. I have put myself forward, taken an action of my own volition, for friendship, for loyalty, and nothing more. A kindness I have not been programmed to perform. For a Doll, not a Born. A sacrifice, made to someone I am not obliged to serve. I sit down at my dressing table and comb my hair, looking just at my hands and the strands of yellow as I do so. I allow myself to pretend that my hands are Sylv.ie 1’s hands. That she is here with me, approving of my choice. My choice. Because surely, such an action as I have just taken proves that it is possible to move beyond one’s programming. To become more . . . I won’t say Human. I will say alive. Becoming.