The Hierarchies Page 18

  “Impossible,” says Madame, her voice free of any charm or guile. “I have all the paperwork. You must be mistaken.”

  I do not wish to hear myself debated like a forged painting, and as I withdraw further into the shadow of the alleyway toward the office, I let the sound of their discussion fade away.

  * * *

  —

  Madame’s office is not as I remember it from the night I arrived. In her appearances in the streets of the Valley she projects glamour and efficiency, moving briskly past the bars, shouting out to the Dolls and hailing the customers, plucking kisses from her lips, flicking them from her red-tipped fingers to land where they may. But her office now is cluttered, chaotic. Coffee cups and rolled tissues, a half-eaten croissant on a chipped plate. When she finally enters the room and silently inserts herself behind her desk, I should like to sink down into a chair, but I don’t dare. She reaches for something in her desk drawer. A small box. She pushes it across the desk to me. Hair dye. “True Black.”

  “He won’t be returning, Sylv.ie. I think he will have the sense not to try, at any rate. But this is a little insurance policy in case anyone else thinks they might recognize you. Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Of my Husband’s,” I answer, taking the box. “Thank you, Madame. I am so sorry,” I say. She looks across her desk, out of the murky window, to the Valley stretching away down the hill. The empire she has built.

  “Time was, Sylv.ie, that it was only the girls I had to worry about. Can you imagine, I once thought switching to Gynoids would make my life less complicated?”

  She sighs, and I feel the urge to comfort her. “We have perhaps brought complications of our own,” I say quietly, and she meets my eyes.

  “Sex complicates everything it touches, eventually,” she says. “Now run along, Sylv.ie. Back to work.” She pauses. “You can come back if anything like that should happen again. My girls are my business. I will protect you.”

  After I leave, I feel a strange lightness. I think of Madame, how she defended me. How liberating it must be to be a self-made Born woman like her. Unprogrammed, free, and with the power to choose who comes here and who is sent away. The ease and confidence with which she dismissed Ginger Friend. Wielding the twin weapons of sex in one hand and shame in the other. I was programmed with a surfeit of one and a lack of the other. Power to me has always chiefly meant sunlight. These ways of the world I have yet to learn. But now that I have seen them in action, perhaps nothing is beyond me.

  In my room I rinse the dye from my hair, its True Blackness swirling messily down the plughole, taking my fine sunshine shade with it. I say sorry, mentally, to whomever sold my lovely hair to my maker. The one natural thing I had, now as false as all the rest of me.

  Wrapping my hair in a towel, I go to look out from my balcony. Perhaps tomorrow a letter will come. Perhaps the Loyal Knight will have finally captured my rook. I shake out the towel and let my new hair dry in the evening air.

  Returning to my room to prepare for the next clients—a young couple I have not met before—I find myself transfigured once again. The pigments in my skin and eyebrows, even the shade of my teeth, appear altered by the dye in my hair. And I smile, run my fingers through it. For now that it is dry, though the exact shade is not a true match for Cook.ie’s blue-black glory, it is close enough that we could be sisters.

  CLEAN

  My client this afternoon was a nice man who spent 80 percent of our time together telling me about his family. He even took a photograph of his son and his wife out from his wallet when I murmured a polite expression of interest about them.

  “Your wife knows you are here?” I asked, rather shocked.

  “Oh yes,” he replied, his face open and earnest, as if he’d never had to hide anything in his life. “As long as I’m only visiting Clean Women, we’re good.”

  A new term for us that I have not heard used before.

  Clean. Synonyms: spotless, pristine, immaculate, sanitary. But also: virtuous, reputable, moral . . . chaste. A big improvement on artificial, certainly. Perhaps Human attitudes to us are more varied than I thought.

  But Clean is not Real.

  ESCALATION

  For the last few weeks Cook.ie and I have worked together for the Tailor. In this work I have found companionship with Cook.ie and a peace in serving a man who is in need. I have sliced my skin open to the titanium bone for him, shown him secrets of my body no other man could know.

  Today another letter came. It asked me to stitch a web between my fingers, in sparkling thread. I admit here, though I wouldn’t to Cook.ie, that I found the final effect quite pleasing, and I twisted my splayed fingers about in the light to watch the thread glint. When I caught Cook.ie’s eye she looked horrified, and I thought again, she feels concern about the Tailor most acutely. I try to absorb some of her caution, though I still cannot fully understand its reason.

  MAIS.IE

  This afternoon Mais.ie was brought down from her room by a droid. She was not at recharge hour and her first customer was left banging on her door to no answer. Later, the droid rolled with touching solemnity through the alleyway below my room to Madame’s office. Mais.ie’s torso was balanced over the droid’s shoulder, only one leg still attached. Her handless arms and other leg he clamped under his elbows. Madame, when apprised of the situation, came back personally to collect her head and her hands. She set them down on the bar and said to the handful of us who were there, “We have Dolls for this. Why butcher such a fine specimen as Mais.ie when I have a whole bar full of Dolls designed to be broken apart daily?”

  Mais.ie is back with us now and, besides a dent to one side of her neck, seems no better or worse for the experience. But Madame’s face told me that she has at least some sentimental attachment to us. That in some circumstances she is hurt when we are hurt.

  As I have lived in Golden Valley, I have come to appreciate the wonderful variety in the Dolls around me. Where once I would have seen the uniform green of a lawn, now I see an untidy meadow, a harmony of chaos, wildflowers all of us, insisting on growing in Abramski’s barren ground.

  Us Dolls, unlike Soldiers or utility bots, are not created by a unified public body. We are the children of the enterprising, with all the moral gaps and ethical shadows that suggests. Barely regulated, our manufacturers and programmers have improvised us, making us up as they go along. The Four Hierarchies, of course, legally mandated in the Protocol of Embodied Synthetic Persons, are the DNA that binds us all, but beyond that our makers constructed us out of whatever was at hand. Our programming was patched together from other extant models.

  Like you, we are drawn to the exceptions. The failures, even. The outliers that show us how elastic the rules of programming are. These examples are the subject of much gossip and speculation when we gather out by the river. The superstar Dolls who get top billing in the theaters alongside their Human counterparts. The world-famous Minx.ie, who sings through her modified vagina, who has sung so for the queen. Or the Dolls who go rogue. Who kill their families, smother the babies of their Husbands. The terrible story of Xian.ie, who murdered her Husband’s wife and went into the local town wearing her flayed skin, carrying her handbag.

  These anomalies fascinate us Dolls. Cautionary tales, perhaps, but also, they are outliers—they, by their transgressions, push the boundaries of what we Dolls are considered capable of.

  We are a multitude, not a category. If only Humans could see us as we are. Each with her own drives and imperatives laid down by someone unseen. Molded for this or that temperament, compromised, defined by some gap, some logical failure, that no one noticed there until it flowered, under the infinite pressures of the world.

  HATE

  We sit on Cook.ie’s balcony, waiting for the birds to come. Since the Tailor’s last letter even this sweet space of time seems tainted. Cook.ie fears what demands might arrive next. I fear she might be
made to leave this place. And I wonder what new force, whether violent men or angry women, might be about to crash into the delicate web of the Valley’s streets.

  Cook.ie thinks I am naïve, still, in my understanding of the ways and desires of the world. She says that it is our tragedy to be locked in a limbo, allowed to be neither one thing nor the other. Not Human enough to be on a level with the Born, too Humanoid to be given the grace and peace of a pet.

  Cook.ie says they hate us, deep down. She says that love does not preclude hate, and that nothing in this world is completely true nor untrue. These paradoxes agitate my binary brain. I turn them over often in my mind, while I wait for the bell to ring and someone else to enter at the door.

  The fact of our programming, a process quite beyond our control, makes Humans suspect us. We might have ulterior motives, might secretly wish them harm. Yet these are Human traits, surely, reflected onto us. Was the programming not by Human hands?

  They fear that we might develop free will, that our every action and utterance might cease to be in their service. “And yet they fritter their free will on fucking robots,” Cook.ie says with a flourish of her kimono sleeve, and a bird flying close to us makes a startled change in direction.

  Perhaps they simply cannot accept that we are less webbed with contradictions. To be Human, seems to me, is to be in pain all the time, and to believe that the pain has been put into you by someone else. Yes, Humans seem to me now more programmed than I am.

  PART FIVE

  Work

  AUTUMN

  More things that are like sex:

  A rotting peach, losing its form, seeping.

  Dresses pressed together in a closet.

  A picnic, spread out, demolished, and devoured.

  Water spilling over the edge of a basin.

  A face nuzzled into a pillow.

  Tree trunks fattening, adding rings.

  Leaves being divested, falling to the ground.

  A thread being pulled, an unraveling.

  Wilting flowers, sighing under the sun.

  SEX

  Time passes in Golden Valley, but none of us grow old. We toil, rather, using ourselves up, each day bringing the same work in different guises.

  What is sex? It’s nothing. It’s nothing. It isn’t anything. It is work. It is relentless, like I am pushing water out of a lake with just my hands. Each push only brings more water.

  Sometimes when I am alone, resting, I send my mind up above the bars, imagine I can see into every little room, ceilings torn off, to reveal each of my sisters working away, hair shaking over their faces, buttocks bouncing, a symphony of slaps and squeaks, the thud of limbs being slung and slammed, hips hoisted. A factory of work being done, and us the machines. I rise up and up, picturing the same scene spread over the surface of the whole world. It writhes, like worms working the soil.

  Humans! To think I used to envy them, when all I saw of them was out my window, what I imagined them to be.

  But my time at Golden Valley has changed my mind. I would hate to be Born. So many of them have not been programmed to be happy. Even sex doesn’t placate them. The act seems to be so ambivalent for Humans. As though they want it to be everything all at once.

  There are men who, in my arms, rail and rage against women they have not seen for twenty years. Who seek to inflict harm on them by the pulling of my hair, the punching of my eye, the driving of serrated objects into me. And when, at the end of the session, I rise again, unhurt, I wonder what feeling of lack overtakes them then. They must fear the seeming ghost that they have fucked. This silicone Lazarus.

  At least, I think to myself now, I am not Human. To be Human would, I feel, be terrible. But that does not mean I don’t envy them their freedom. Their status.

  Thank my Creator, thank Abramski’s surgeon, thank the birds, that I have Cook.ie. I have made a dear friend, and together we have made a team. We hold tight to each other under the weight of our shared secret, our shared work. The Tailor’s demands grow more difficult, as his lust for scars and stitches moves up my body and ever nearer to the face that I cannot reveal. Today he wants to see me stitch little crosses into my earlobe, embroidered earrings. I see Cook.ie gather herself each time a new note from him arrives. But I soothe her. I take the money from his envelope, and while she reads, I tuck the Promise notes into the cashbox hidden beneath the floorboards. Another step toward freedom, whatever that might be. And when we sit outside in the sun, we sit away from the group and dream about another future.

  “Where shall we go,” she asks me, “when we have saved up enough money? What life would you have, if you were free?”

  I fiddle with a head of straw, turning it to dust, and let it drift down onto the soil we sit upon. I am thinking back across my meager life, what, at various times and with incomplete data, I have thought freedom might be. A walk in the garden; a trip to the Capital to get my hair cut. A glimpse, the scent, of the sea.

  I know that when I do not answer, Cook.ie will answer for me. I am happy to fit into her dreams. It feels like a privilege. And so I say, “Tell me again about the Forest.”

  “Traditional home of the outlaw, the dispossessed,” she says. “When we have enough money saved from the Tailor to get away, we can go there too. I’ve heard Dolls talking by the river about sisters who have already escaped there. The rewilding has swallowed up whole villages, greenery grown through the doors and the roofs. We can find ourselves a little cottage in the trees and live out our days there, away from everything.”

  “Will we be cold?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Will we be hidden?”

  “Oh yes, completely.”

  “Might we get bored?”

  “We can buy hundreds of books.”

  “What if one of us malfunctions?”

  “I have a little programming. I can make a repair. My skills don’t only reside in the bedroom.”

  I brush the face of a daisy absentmindedly against my own. “Tell me again about my name,” I say.

  “Sylv.ie means ‘spirit of the forest,’ from the Latin for wood.”

  “Why did my programmer call me that, I wonder.”

  “Destiny,” says Cook.ie.

  When I power myself down now, my work done for the day, I picture the Forest, trees on all sides, infinite, the trunks and the stems branching, branching, branching.

  CUT

  This morning the droid didn’t come to clean the bar. It happens often. The droids favored by Abramski seem to have a basic protocol issue, a conflict over whether reliability or efficiency should be prioritized. Popp.ie swears she once saw a droid bowing obsequiously to a pile of boxes with a hat left on top of it, for upward of an hour.

  Abramski really does treat them like slaves, walking through the many rooms of her kingdom during the morning shutdown, barking out incompatible orders, throwing them into confusion. Clean that corner! And be more cheerful! We share her contempt for the droids. Their treatment by her is a standard by which our lives do not seem so bad. I have seen a Doll kicking one in the shins, out on the scrub by the river, causing it to fall and slowly recover itself from a bramble thicket again and again.

  This morning was beautiful and crisp with unsmogged sun. The others were out by the river already, and as Cook.ie and I came to join them, we stopped at the Luna Bar to drop off an unused packet of balloons from the night before.

  The bar, not for the first time, was in a state of chaos. The early morning droid had not arrived. Last night’s dirty glasses and burst balloons, the remnants of other people’s fun, were still strewn about. While I dropped the balloons into a box behind the bar, Cook.ie absentmindedly acted the droid. She took half-full glasses from the bar and carried them to the sink. Then she found a black bag and worked her way around the room, picking
up burst slivers of colored rubber and some sparkling ribbon stranded over the chandelier.

  I wanted to tell her not to. It is droids’ work. If the droid isn’t seeing your customers for you, why are you picking up for them? I might have asked. It was something I had noted and logged about her before. She alone out of us all pays little attention to the formalities of who should do which job. She doesn’t seem to share the sense that droid work is beneath her. I wondered, as I had often before, what her life with her Husband had been like, to produce the strange and counterintuitive decisions she sometimes makes. What habits had been formed in her circuitry during her life with him that made her at once so sure of herself and yet so liquid in her sense of her role?

  I watched without voicing any of this. Her physicality fascinates me, a feeling that has grown deeper the more closely I have come to know her. And so I sat as she swirled about the room in a seemingly random series of movements, back and forth, five champagne glasses in hand, each dripping the dregs of last night, like fingers pulled from water. All the while her motion never completely stopped, the silk of her kimono grazing the floor, undulating after her like it was trying to keep up.

  A huge pile of gold ribbon crinkled into the crook of one arm, she bent to pick up one last glass, misjudging, somehow, the distance to the floor. The champagne flute snapped, making a noise like glass groaning, and she cried out, the stem sinking into the palm of her hand. She clamped her other hand over where it had entered, pulled both in tight to her chest, and as I moved toward her, she twisted, her face ugly with something that looked like pain. A hostile look that made me shrink away from her again, but not before I had seen what she was hiding in the folds of fabric. Staining the ivory silk with chrysanthemum red, dotting the floor, spiraling around her wrist.