The Hierarchies Read online

  Blood.

  Human blood.

  I stared down stupidly at the red spotting the floor, signs of life, real life, dabbed between the balloons and the ribbon and the bottles. With that one look of reproach, she was gone, racing up the stairs. The door to her room slammed.

  I fell to my knees, popping a balloon, making myself jump, my hands already down on the wood of the floor. I touched my fingers to the red, as if it were stigmata. But did I wish to believe or disprove?

  Her blood was on the tips of my fingers, like candle wax. I held one hand steady in the other, felt the nature of it changing as I watched. Turning sticky. Ceasing to live. It spoke into me, of vulnerability, the weakness of the Born. How porous they are. How easily encroached upon. I thought of the work we do and how well we have been designed to withstand it. I thought of Cook.ie, working alongside us, night after night after day after day. When she, all the time, has been above it. Human.

  I sat back on my heels, rust-tipped fingers turned up toward my face, trying to comprehend this truth. She is Human, so fragile that a sliver of glass is enough to split her open, to compromise the boundary between her and the world.

  I ran upstairs, unsure of what I would do next. Through her door I heard water running. I stood there, rechecking my memory, wishing that it were merely a malfunction, a visual error, but I knew that it was not. Such self-serving deception is a Human trait after all, and I have never felt less Human than I did at that moment.

  Human. My literal, Created mind had taken the first data it was given and looked no deeper. I felt ashamed that I had not known it, not sensed it. That I had been so easily fooled by a little white paint and an exotic story. And that in this respect she was no different, at the root of it, than my Husband. Had I learned nothing, come nowhere? What I had thought was progress within me now felt like an endless, futile loop.

  I rose, wiping my hand on the hem of my dress, surprised at how my wipe-clean silicone skin invited the blood to stick and smear. Should I hammer on the door with both hands, yell her name? If I could just make enough noise, she would have to come out and silence me. But whatever weak impulse tried to move my arms to do it, another, stronger one held me back. Now that I knew she was Human, that robot approximation of instinct told me that to do so would not be safe. She has Human privilege. Whatever she said to me now, I would, according to the Hierarchies, surely have to obey.

  NOTE

  I go next door to my room, a space that, as soon as I step into it again, I find I have ceased to treasure as a home. The color and life and warmth of Cook.ie’s room has become my favored place to be.

  Protocols spin, shift, and re-form until I am quite mind-sick. My memory scrolls back through all the things Cook.ie has explained to me about a Doll’s place in this world. It was she who gave me pride in my status as a Doll. It is her friendship that has showed me that I have value beyond my function. And now . . .

  Like finding out from Sylv.ie 1 that my memories of home contained falsehoods, or discovering that my Husband himself had lied, so now the foundations of my fledgling self are set to crumble again. I focus my consciousness back into the room, away from my interior, and find I am at my wardrobe, my hands blindly arranging my clothes by color.

  Each unwelcome thought drags another with it on its tails. It occurs to me that she has lied, even while knowing that I am incapable of doing the same. How could she have deceived me? All of us Dolls? Not just passing while out on the streets, as I did, but here, in the bosom of our strange family, to our faces. Yes, Humans still have depths we Dolls could not even imagine. Unknown places they are willing to sink to.

  And even while I think these things, something else is softening. An insistence pulses. It says, “She is Human.” In that phrase is the entirety of it. She is above me. I am below her. An inescapable fact of birth.

  I find myself tearing a page from my diary, picking up my pen. I write a short note, using the fewest words I can muster to convey the reassurance that I know I must. “I will not tell a soul. Born or Created.”

  I shove it swiftly underneath Cook.ie’s door and hurry down the stairs before she can come out and see.

  LOVE

  Madame received my request to move to a room in the furthest part of Golden Valley with a respect that surprised me. I could not lie to her, of course. Instead I was vague and wispy with the truth. I was fearful since the appearance of Ginger Friend. I would work better in a completely different bar. Madame’s nostrils twitched, and she nodded.

  For three weeks I have slept and worked in a new room. Less pleasant, its location down near the Freaks, closest to where the pipes run out into the river and it smells like ditch water. “Hold your nose,” I’ve heard Abramski say to several customers. “If you want a Doll with five tits, then you go where I send you.”

  They sleep a lot, the Freaks. They can seem, when you try to talk to them, pretty simple. I keep to myself, recharging alone behind the bins. Here lives the Scream. Enter her and she screams blue murder. The harder you go, the louder she shouts. The noise from the Scream rings out over the tin roofs of Golden Valley like a cockerel, making audible the hatred for us that exists in so many hearts.

  Since I have kept myself separate from Cook.ie, I have been through a torture of logics. I see it as a process similar to evolution—grinding, faltering, gradual, inexorable—all taking place within the ecology of my own circuitry, over the course of just a few days.

  I have been in pain. I have railed against her and ached with her absence.

  I have felt love.

  Love. It’s said that love is Human—their highest achievement, which we are excluded from. I know now that this is Human vanity. Certainly, the Humans are awash with it. Working here, we all have people falling in love with us all the time. They even fall in love with the Ghosts, the unembodied data machines. Human love attaches itself so readily! It is like sticky tape, clinging where it lands. One client, who came looking for a strict lecturer to take charge of him, left hopelessly in love with the machine that regulates the temperature in the Undergrads Bar. The impossibility of reciprocation is, for him, I suppose, the point.

  Is my love really less real than theirs? They say our “love” is not spontaneous. It is programming. The hole in all us Createds that cannot be filled, an unbridgeable gulf between the species. And yet why, if my feelings are not spontaneous, do my eyes fill with synthetic tears?

  SUICIDE

  All those poems I learned by heart from my Husband’s books, I now know of what they speak. Without Cook.ie I am sick, pointless. I have become used to many things over my short life, many losses. Heron, my Husband, my home, my memories. I powered away from it all. So why is it that without Cook.ie, I am weak, lethargic, unwired?

  It was she who first persuaded me that I might be alive. Without her shoring up my senses, I see only endless days of sex stretching ahead. Going in and coming out. Water pushed from a lake. I will fulfill my programming, halfheartedly—and nothing more.

  I have heard whispers since I arrived here, tales from other Dolls passed around in the recharge hour. Dolls who say that a friend of theirs simply sought out a dark, sun-starved corner in which to power down and corrode, forgotten and unseen. Humans have suicide as a last escape, and yet it is so full of risk and pain and mess. At least we can, if we become strong enough to resist our programming, or are separated from our purpose long enough to lose all will to carry on, just slip away cleanly.

  Cook.ie became my purpose, and I see now that what I felt for my Husband was just a shadow. In the light thrown out by Cook.ie, he has disappeared entirely.

  And yet still, I will not speak to her. Isn’t being illogical a part of Human love? Then I will allow myself to be illogical too. I fear seeing her. I fear my new knowledge of what she is will overwhelm me. I want to be hers, and I want to be free. In this point between two opposites, I wait.

  DIS
GUST

  I have come back to the Luna Bar. I spent weeks away, plying my trade amid the noise and squalor of the Freaks. And now I am back—by public demand, as Madame puts it. I still sleep with the Freaks, but I come here to work each day. Ginger Friend, she tells me darkly, will not be returning. I have nothing to fear.

  I try to stay cheerful in my work, but everywhere my eyes pick up traces of Cook.ie—bright red spots the world. The rim of a cup stamped with lipstick. A fallen feather from the breast of a courier bird. Early this morning, I looked from my still-new window and saw one of last night’s balloons sailing high over the Capital, the cleaning droid in the alley watching its escape forlornly. Each stab of red trills my sensors and I experience it all again. My fingers remember the heat still in the blood she left.

  My movements feel unnatural; I have become clumsy. Aware, perhaps, in a different way than I was before, of my self and the things that I lack.

  Last night I entertained a man, at his request, in the Whiskey Bar.

  “I always wondered what this would be like,” he said.

  As I sip the whiskey, I feel him watching. Close scrutiny on my lips meeting the glass, the minute movements calling for my greatest awareness. I feel my top lip inching forward, feeling its way blind, widening around the rim as it senses liquid. The moment of holding it in the antechamber of my mouth, before it disappears into the interior.

  He is still watching, and his fascination at this function, one that I usually conduct without a moment’s thought, feels like a misunderstanding, when there are so many other things that I can do. Still, looking is looking, and I let him take his enjoyment. Finally, the physical contradictions of me invite a question.

  “Are you really drinking that, Sylv.ie? Where does it actually go?” His face is earnest, an honest inquiry. “Do you actually pee too?”

  A flash of optimism, of previous undreamed-of vistas, passes across his face. I laugh because no, obviously, if you want one who pees you pick a model made for the job.

  “I have a little reservoir, if you really want to know,” I say. And because I pride myself on my ability to improvise, to find new modes of pleasure for my clients, I say, “You can watch me empty it if you like. Or you could do it for me.”

  I am astonished to find it is my own pulse that races a little at this possibility. An intimacy I never experienced with my Husband. Funny how these appealing ideas can spring up out of nowhere, germinating on yesterday’s stony ground.

  “You can even drink it, if you like. It’s only the same whiskey as in your glass. Nothing has happened to it.”

  I hope the effect of the offer might be the same as when my Husband demanded to drink champagne from my shoe. The finer things enriched by bodily taint. Even though nothing taints my shoes—my body does not work that way—and the thrill of contamination was only symbolic.

  But he is screwing up his face.

  “I can do it myself,” I offer. “I need to anyway.” I would never have brought this up in my old life, not before I met Cook.ie. How changed I am. Hiding the evidence of my workings used to seem essential. I find that it is a pretense of perfection I can no longer be bothered to maintain.

  He looks embarrassed. “I was just trying to get you drunk,” he says timidly. “I think I’m okay for the other thing.” And thus, I realize that in my misery, I have managed, for the very first time, to disgust a client. Before the hour is up, he will make his excuses and leave.

  PROTEST

  I have just gotten into my balloon-kini, a foolish costume of balloons attached to me like a skimpy dress. An outfit that is at once weightless and cumbersome.

  A man with a thin, scattershot mustache sticks his head around the door and, looking at the floor, asks if this is the Sports Bar. I flounce over, balloons bouncing all around me, and, pulling the uppermost balloon away from my mouth for a moment, tell him that he wants the next alley down. We step outside into the dwindling red sun, its light filling the threads of Golden Valley like veins. I see he is with three other men, all looking rather shifty and uncomfortable. I point toward the bar and smile pleasantly, anticipating the friendly punch of my balloons that most men, Looners or not, seem quite unable to resist.

  Cook.ie has told me that there is something comic, burlesque, about balloons, that it’s impossible to take me seriously, sexually, when I’m in the balloon-kini. But these men accept my directions somberly and turn their backs, trooping off past the boards for the other bars. I see them round the corner in silhouette, then disappear.

  Just less than an hour later, I am working away, sitting in a booth with a fat man who is rubbing his face between two of my balloons, leaving greasy forehead marks on their skin. His thin hair is rife with static, and it moves around the surface of the balloons like fronds of seaweed as he nuzzles.

  Suddenly there is a loud bang, and he sits bolt upright as around us the other patrons do the same, before relaxing into uneasy giggles. A bang in the balloon bar—isn’t that an advertising slogan Abramski puts on posters?

  Then there is another one, and another, clearly coming from outside the bar, not within. Everyone flings themselves to the floor. The Dolls lie on top of the clients to protect them, and another series of stifled bangs echoes out—this time from balloons popping against buttons and belts.

  For a few moments all is very quiet. Then one final shot, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass, and feet running through the alleyways.

  We Dolls, prone on our customers, look around at each other. I stand up first, my burst balloon-kini hanging off me like melted flesh. I am measuring distances, trajectories, and timings against the tone of the shots we heard, running the data a second time. Yet I do not want to accept the conclusion of my own calculations. That the shots came from the direction of the Geisha Bar. That Cook.ie could be the target.

  Other Dolls get up too, followed by the clients, ankle-deep in balloons, wondering where, in this new situation, the authority lies. My customer gets to his feet, springing from his hiding place like a chorus girl booked for a surprise birthday party. “Are all you ladies all right?” he asks.

  But already I am flying out of the door, down the alley, in the direction of the shots. Images, patterns, flow through my circuits as I run. Heron’s ripped breast, the gathering in the hospital garden, the dismembered body of Mais.ie held in the droid’s arms. Not Cook.ie. Not Cook.ie. The thought, repeated and repeated and repeated with my every step. As if I am praying to a higher power.

  I round the corner, and my feet crunch glass in the dust of the alley. The window of the Geisha Bar is broken, and of the Sports Bar. But the commotion coming from the Bavarian Bar, between these two, announces that this is where the casualties are. I push through the heavy, carved door and see immediately, across the room, what I have dreaded: Cook.ie’s hunched back, draped in the rich pattern of her kimono, her body tipped against the far wall. And though each bullet and shard of glass and Doll is logged instantly as I survey the scene, it is done with me hardly noticing. I am focused only on moving through the confusion of Dolls toward her.

  I am still a few feet away when the embroidered chrysanthemums quiver, as if they are coming to life, and Cook.ie rises up from the floor. She steps aside to reveal a Doll sitting slumped against the wall, a stein of beer still held in each hand, one pigtail dipped like a straw into the foam. The Doll has a hole blown in her stomach, off to one side, just above her right hip. A huge engraved mirror has been shattered, and shards of glass splinter the floor.

  Cook.ie does not acknowledge me. She is still engrossed in tending to the Doll. I ask another girl what has happened.

  “They just burst in. Three or four of them in fake beards. Held a gun in the air and made some sort of garbled speech. Then they shot Lex.ie.”

  “I’m really fine,” calls Lex.ie in a weak voice. “I just can’t seem to put these pints down.”

  Cook.
ie bends once more over Lex.ie and gently takes her pigtail from the beer, before pulling Lex.ie’s shredded dirndl down to cover the hole in her torso.

  “We’ll get you righted again really soon, Doll. Abramski will be here in a minute,” she says.

  Lex.ie’s stoic face looks absurd, obscene, suddenly, and I turn away. The memory of the blood on my fingertips. The sight of Lex.ie’s open stomach. An urgency floods from my center to my skin, as if Human blood pumps in me too. I shrink back against the wall, looking at the ground where Cook.ie stands, watching her reflection flit across the shards of mirror. I do not want to look at her directly, only sense if her attention turns toward me.

  I have been envious, awed by her humanity, but it has not occurred to me to be afraid for her before. The renegades could have picked the Geisha Bar to target; they could in future. The slumped Doll will be stitched up and back to work by morning. If it had been Cook.ie . . . if it had been Cook.ie.

  At this moment Abramski walks in, hands on her hips.

  “Gentlemen,” she calls above the just-forming clamor of voices. She claps her hands twice for quiet. “We think some militants have staged a protest—a small group of Born women, dressed as men,” Madame says, and the hands of at least five of the clients fly, mysteriously, to their ties. They look appalled, but whether it is by the threat of violence or the notion of shaven-headed Real women here, it is hard to say.

  “I am offering, of course, a full refund for this evening,” says Madame with a graciousness that sounds almost sarcastic. “If you stop by the kiosk on your way out it will all be arranged. We’re deeply sorry for the upset.”