The Hierarchies Read online

MEMORY

  Last night my client was an old man, his skin baggy with age, as if his insides were shrinking from him, his structure collapsing.

  He laid his fried-egg ear on my chest, listening to the music of my armpit, and spoke sadly in a faltering voice.

  “I only come,” he said as if confessing to a priest, “because my wife is lost to me. She has forgotten who I am.”

  I hear variations on this almost every day. The justifications of men straying from the mundanity of Bio-Marriage. I stroked his hair and said nothing.

  “She has disappeared,” he said then, more forcefully, a little fleck of spit landing in the dip of my throat. I thought of my Husband, left without his disappearing Doll. Does he miss me? Does he, like this client, seek comfort elsewhere?

  “She is a body with no mind,” he said, his voice falling soft again.

  And I understood, at last, what he was speaking of. Again, not unknown.

  And my empathy passed, doubled I should say, from him to his wife. For surely, I know the pain of having one’s memory taken. I wondered again at that Human conundrum. A sort of riddle. Would you rather be a mind or a body? I realized that I was thinking too of the Tailor. His mind sharp, flexible, capable of great beauty and cruelty. And yet withering, imprisoned in a life too long.

  CAMERA

  Today Cook.ie and I used our downtime to make our first film for the Tailor as a pair. Cook.ie seemed anxious but also profoundly grateful. An emotion I have experienced many times from clients, of course, but never from a friend.

  The letter, we reason to each other as we set up the camera, was vague, so we agree to start small, and somewhere that any stitches will hardly show.

  I press the knife’s blunt side against the skin of my thigh, watching the dent it makes. And then I focus my eyes into the mirror that Cook.ie has propped against the wall, look at the Doll there, power down my sensors, send my intention through the images, not myself.

  I watch in the mirror as I flip the knife in my fingers, the close-up of it appearing on Cook.ie’s little screen. I angle the hovering blade so that it catches the light, twinkling pleasingly, like a wink. I think of sustaining the Tailor’s excitement, as I would any of my customers’. I let the sharp tip of the knife rest on the very surface without breaking it. Push it a little harder, see my silicone flex with tension under the pressure. I think then, the memory springing vivid and instant to me, of the billion pipettes entering a billion eggs on a billion screens. How there too the hesitation, the moment of before and after, was central to the event. I push harder, change the angle, keep my eyes fixed on my reflection. I feel the same soft slide, hear a little silicone squeak. I pull the knife up and away toward me, to create an elegant, calligraphic tear. As I draw it back out it makes the subtlest, softest little kissing noise, as if my skin would rather not let it go.

  Afterward we sit on the balcony and watch the heads of passing customers, and I turn over what we have just done together, and to what end. I wonder about the Tailor’s money and why it matters so much to Cook.ie.

  “Where would you go, if you could leave here?” I ask.

  Cook.ie looks around her, as though someone might hear, then leans in close to whisper to me. “The Forest. The real wildness of nature. The ancient places beyond even the Outerlands.”

  I read about the Outerlands while I still had Absorb Mode, a place of old manor houses and wooded valleys, dotted with compounds built for billionaires during the last boom.

  “Built on our backs,” Cook.ie says. “Tech barons bought up historic estates and drew down government funds to subsidize their good stewardship of the land, took grants to plant a tree for every silicone body they shipped.”

  “Is the Tailor in tech?” I ask Cook.ie after a while. “Do you know what he really does, or did?”

  “His house is out on the cliffs,” Cook.ie says. “That’s all I know. An old place, presumably. Even the very wealthiest can’t build on that land anymore.”

  I picture the Outerlands, imagining the trees in their infinite greens, the wild growth. Clean air and an escape from the city. A mansion on its edge sounds like paradise.

  “Wouldn’t living at his home be better than living here?”

  “You have lived with a Human Husband,” Cook.ie says. “Did you enjoy that?”

  “I did at the time. When I didn’t know any better.”

  “Exactly. And we both know better now. Here the restrictions on me are only temporary, a few minutes or hours of my time, and then the client leaves again. The Tailor wishes me to be his possession forever. That’s what the mizuage would symbolize to him.”

  I admit to still finding the idea of being someone’s possession forever rather romantic, though I know it is only my programming.

  “Historically it’s a virginity ceremony too. The danna takes the girl’s virginity as his reward for his investment.”

  “Well he can’t take your virginity,” I say, and we both laugh. What a strange thing for Humans to be so fixated on. Madame’s Virgin Bar certainly does good business, with the girls pretending to be broken out of their crates every evening to rapturous, ravenous applause.

  “When it comes to us Dolls it seems to be a rather elastic concept,” Cook.ie agrees. “Some people consider a Doll a virgin if she’s had a full memory wipe and a new vagina.”

  I think about this for a moment. So is one’s personhood constituted in the body or the mind? In the memory or the anatomy? Pending: processing.

  “The typewriter paradox,” Cook.ie says, smiling. “How much of a machine can be replaced before it’s no longer the same machine?”

  We sit quietly for a while, looking at the customers drifting past us in the alley below, before I feel brave enough to ask her.

  “What’s a typewriter?”

  THE TAILOR

  The Tailor likes to see me stitch.

  A needle going in and coming out.

  To him that is sex. I should add it to my list!

  He likes to see me mark my surface with little slits and scratches, till some parts of me are quite brailled with dots and pocks. I feel like a walking diary, inscribed with the story of Cook.ie and myself, our friendship, the work I do on her behalf.

  Occasionally at night a client will find a little patch of stabs and scratches on my skin and draw a breath or make an unkind comment. But I do not mind the damage I am sustaining. I am perhaps diminishing my worth, degrading. Not quite aging, but carrying the marks of time and action. Weathered, Humans call it. A patina, as my Husband would have said. Depreciation, is how Madame would record it against her taxes.

  Everything is done through the camera, of course. To the Tailor I am a few square inches of yielding synthetic flesh and a fine, flexible pair of fingers. “Closer,” his letters read. “Go right in with the camera. Closer.”

  Each time he says that in his letters, Cook.ie flinches, but inwardly I smile. He is a man trapped, by his age, by his desires. I remember standing in front of my window at home, looking for a space I could fit through. Closer, he says, closer, as if with his sight he could enter me and be freed.

  I do not tell Cook.ie. I don’t want her to think I am doing this work for anyone but her. For my friend. An act of solidarity. But by performing for the Tailor, I am also serving my purpose. His predicament hurts my robot heart. For I too have been just a head. My body shut down, removed from me. I will do this work for him from empathy. Because he too is entitled to his pleasure.

  Where Cook.ie perceives him as a man, Human, but robbed of his agency, trapped inside the necessary machine of a chair, I see something different. I feel as much for the machine as for the man. I find I am touched by my idea of the two of them, locked into an arranged marriage, adapting and accommodating. A tango for titanium and bone.

  PROMENADE

  This evening a visitor paid for a promenade. That is, he wishe
d to wander the streets of the Valley with me on his arm. Poor lonely man, preferring his allotted time be spent in being seen with a woman rather than being alone with her. Our connection consummated by every set of eyes that fell on us.

  But I don’t judge him too harshly, because he was good company and well traveled, happy to conduct a rambling conversation about the bars we passed. He made jokes, lifting his hat politely whenever we came across another couple. Once he had left, I wound my way slowly back toward the Luna Bar. I confess I took a detour, passing the Geisha Bar in the hopes of catching sight of Cook.ie at work. Those glorious moments where I see her as a customer might. Blinking in the light of her dazzling surface, marveling at it.

  This time as I pass, the blinds are up, and the door curtain billows out into the alley like a petticoat. And there she is. Sitting at her stool in the Geisha Bar, holding her paper parasol over her head as if shading herself from the Kyoto sun in summer, she could be a painting. Only the silver beads, which hang like a spring shower from her black hair, shiver and sparkle under the light, breaking the illusion.

  I walk on, trying to hold this perfect picture of Cook.ie in my mind, carrying it carefully like a tray of matcha tea.

  The glittering spines of fairy bulbs across each alley move in the breeze above my head, flecking the ground with light, with shadow. It is well into the evening shift and boxes of bottles and other debris are piling up outside the doors. Rats are abroad, snuffling the cardboard. I weave around them, pretending to myself that the lights and I are dancing. And at that moment I feel a hand at my elbow. It pinches me, too tightly.

  I spin around, startled. Being stopped is not unusual, yet even before I can face the person who has taken hold of me, I know that the intention is different. It is Ginger Friend, tall but stooping, standing between me and the light, his face unreadable. I stumble back a couple of steps, and though I try to pull my elbow free, his grip is unfaltering, and I pull him with me.

  My protocols tell me to change tack, and I initiate a series of charming demurrals and expressions of delighted astonishment. His face refuses. The gentle, friendly tone I have logged for Ginger Friend is nowhere. Something harder is in its place. I try to remove my elbow from his grip, but it only tightens.

  My back against the wall, he stands over me and takes hold of both my arms. I do not know if he is about to kiss me or strike me. His eyes flame into mine, unblinking, as if there is some decisive identifying mark to be found in my pupils.

  I wait for him to speak, to say, “It’s you,” or else my name. But he says nothing. His fixed stare is a silent demand for truth, although it is a truth he already knows.

  A realization. There is no sex, no desire, in his attitude toward me. It releases me. I am experiencing, once more, a fresh sensation. A cool glow tingles behind my eyes.

  “Sir?” I say.

  His broad fingers grip my elbow harder. He leans toward my ear.

  “You know very well who I am, Sylv.ie. Don’t play the innocent.”

  And though I should like to do exactly that, even this first, tiny effort to conceal the truth falters. I run the idea of denying that I know him, but the lie can find no pathway through to speech. Instead my eyes fall to the ground, and he takes this as a denial. His hand strikes one shoulder, and I am spun around, my trapped elbow up behind my back. He presses close and walks me along the path, away from the noise of the bars. His open coat falls across my shoulders, so that to anyone passing we could conceivably be two people promenading, hugging close.

  A few paces more and a smaller alley opens out to the right, running around toward the back of the Psychoanalysis Bar. In the semidark he turns me to face him again.

  “How did you get here?” he says. “Do you know the upset you caused when you ran away? The arguments. The expense. Over you.” This last he says in a tone of disbelief, contempt.

  The urge toward the truth is powerful, and at this moment my mind is filled with the events that brought me to the Valley, from discovering the secrets hidden for me in my diary to the ride with the Scrap Man and my purchase by Madame. Never have I idly played the Human game of What If, guessing what might have happened if I had not stopped at the coffee stall, if I had run from the auction instead of acquiescing to it. The steps that led me to the Valley have always had the remorseless logic of what Humans call fate.

  And yet, formulating the story for Human consumption, it all sounds remarkably haphazard—sounds, perhaps, as if the choices exercised were mine.

  “I was stolen,” is all that I can finally manage to say, in a voice subdued and vulnerable.

  “You ran away,” he answers, “which might be considered a sort of stealing. And look where you have ended up.”

  At this I almost want to laugh. I recognize the tone and the effect he intends it to have. He wishes to make me feel disgraced, devalued. And though I long to reveal that I know he has been here as a client too, though I would love to throw his hypocrisy back at him, I do not.

  A door bangs behind us. A Doll in a white coat leaves the Psychoanalysis Bar with a client in tow. The two walk swiftly and silently past us toward the main drag, and both Ginger Friend and I allow our frames to sag a little, both of us wishing to give the impression of a customer and a Doll merely chatting. As soon as they have turned the corner, I sense a renewed energy in him. One that makes me afraid.

  He marches me out onto the main path, turning us away from the density of bars down the hill, up toward the gate. His pace is fast now, and with my arm bent in behind my waist, although I am not in pain, he has arranged my frame so that he can use it against me, propelling me along at an uncomfortable speed. Once or twice I stumble over boxes, and he pulls me upright with a force that could lift my feet from the ground.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “I’m taking you home,” he says into my ear. I look ahead of us, daring to take my eyes from the cluttered ground. “My car is waiting,” he adds, and I can see indeed a black limo idling just outside the gates. It waits by the kiosk, beyond the jurisdiction of Madame. As we approach the last twenty meters toward the gate, the door to the car slides open. It yawns, a mouth of black leather, and I feel fear.

  Is it the association with the car that took me to the hospital? The van that drove me to the auction? Or the empty blackness of something that will take me to . . . I do not even know where. Home and Husband or a crematorium. They are all my death, only one faster than the other.

  The rising slope of the alleyway brightens as we approach the gate, where streetlights make a pool in which the men can check their change, straighten their tie. As we become more visible, Ginger Friend wraps his arm around me, to make us sweethearts. Immediately the calculations run within me, a forceful assessment of possibilities flowing as fresh and powerful as blood. I calculate how many steps there are to the car and the positions of men lurking by the kiosk bin. I cannot disobey him, but I can at least obey more slowly, to give the others around us time to see what is happening. On the sixth step from the boundary of the Valley I hesitate, begin to drag my feet, make myself heavier.

  Within two steps his arm is wrapped around my waist, and his weight is lower now, as if he would bowl me right over. He drags my arms up above my head, pulling me backward toward the car. I splay my legs out wide into the gravel, roll myself over onto one hip, arms spiraling above my head, and begin to scream.

  I have never screamed before. The feeling of it is like water gushing, an irresistible spring pushing through stone. But if I expect the world to react to my little vocal miracle, I am mistaken. The men by the kiosk look over, a glance only, then turn their backs on the sound. Ginger Friend clamps his hand over my mouth.

  “Don’t embarrass me,” he says, loudly enough for anyone close to hear, telling them what category of business it is they are witnessing.

  I kick my legs in the gravel and feel his other arm tightening a
round my chest, trying to haul me up to standing, and our progress toward the gate of the Valley begins again, the lights of the bars down the hill bouncing and shrinking with each step. We pass three men, and I search their faces through tangled strands of my hair, hoping to recognize one as a client. Hoping one might recognize me.

  The car is just meters from us now, and although I cannot bring myself to bite or scratch him, I can make myself as difficult as possible to get into the car. As he puts an arm under my knees to heft me into the open door, I grab the frame, locking my elbow joint so my arm is a rigid rod, driving the other down into the ground and locking that too.

  His arms release my waist, and I think that I have triumphed. I lower myself backward to sit down, and at this moment a shadow falls over us. One of the droids that patrol the perimeter of the Valley, the goons, has Ginger Friend by his shirt collar. I watch him stand up, turn fully, and, when the droid releases his grip, straighten his shirt. He’s trying to assume his natural authority, but to speak to the droid he has to tilt his head upward, to look at the underside of his chin. I shake the cinders from my dress, and all three of us strangely conspire in making this moment normal. We are in public, after all. Madame steps from the shadows.

  She comes close to me, as if Ginger Friend, standing now as if nothing has happened while the goon towers over him, were not there at all. She lifts her hand to brush dust from my cheek, tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear. She tells me to wait in her office and turns her full attention to Ginger Friend, pulling extra height from herself.

  “I’m sorry, sir. We do not allow any of our Dolls to be removed from the premises,” she tells him.

  He takes in her tone and adjusts his own, that charm he showed me at the party blossoming again, now that he thinks he may have a use for it.

  “Forgive me,” he says, and although I have already turned my back to walk to the office as instructed, I imagine his kissing Madame’s hand just as he did mine, once. “But I have good reason to believe that your Doll is stolen property.”