The Hierarchies Read online

  Later, I look up what a nunnery is. They are houses for women who keep themselves away from men. I look at many pictures of these places. Clean, scrubbed, no personal objects, just large expanses of surface on which things can be seen clearly.

  When I first saw an image of a row of women, all dressed the same, on their knees before a long wooden bench, my system jolted as if I were being restarted. I thought it was a picture of my selves! But they were not, of course, like myself, when I read more about them. They were Brides of Christ. Not Dolls. Something else altogether.

  I am still not sure if I understand this concept correctly. But it made me smile to myself. Their Husband is even more distant than my own. At least mine I get to see most evenings, whereas, as far as I can tell, the Brides of Christ only get to look at pictures of theirs, and they have to listen quietly for many hours a day just to hear his voice. And even then, they cannot be completely certain that it is him. It might only be creaks in the rafters or mice in the skirting boards that they misprocess through their language function.

  Sometimes, after my Husband has gone back downstairs, I wonder if he was really here at all. Perhaps I too have a faulty language function and it was only the branches of the cherry tree in the garden brushing against the glass. It’s a strange world, after all. A mad world, my masters. What a world. More things in heaven and earth. Have I placed those sayings right? Perhaps I will ask my Husband next time he is here.

  No, my room is the only part of the house that I know. There is a single window across the whole of one wall, from where I can look out over the garden and across rooftops of other houses toward the Capital. It is from this window that I can see my Husband’s wife sometimes down below. And often the dog, even when it is getting dark. It seems to me that the dog has the most freedom of all of them, which is strange because he is the lowest in the hierarchy down there.

  I wonder sometimes, when I am lying on the bed waiting, where I would fit if I were placed in this family pyramid. I don’t ask outright. It seems a question that might disturb my Husband, and I am barred from asking any such thing by my programming.

  The wide window looks like a screen in a cinema, it is so big. The walls around it, every wall in my room, are black, making the light that comes in from outside seem even more precious and dazzling. Some are simply painted, but one wall is covered in a black silk. The silk is embroidered with green winding vines and pink flowers, some of them still in bud, rising from the floor and growing sparser as they get to the ceiling.

  I find the wall very beautiful, and when I am not processing or reading, I will often trace the intertwining lines of these stems with the tip of my finger. It is like a pattern of logic, of thought, that I can see. Yes, I imagine the insides of myself to be similar. And as I can’t trace the paths of my own thoughts as they form, I put that image onto the wall in front of me and draw parallels. The better to understand myself.

  I do not think this is against programming. It is hard to tell once one is out in the world. So many rules, but so little guidance as to how to apply them. Perhaps I will become a creature of my own making, if I stay out in this world long enough?

  CHESS

  Becoming, becoming, becoming, becoming, becoming

  Becoming

  Becoming

  Becominggggg . . .

  I am sitting writing this at my desk while the house droid trundles stupidly about behind me. I hate how careless he is, always bumping and banging against the fragile edges of the lacquered furniture. His lack of respect for beautiful objects, his lack of sense, his single-mindedness—all these things and more make him utterly contemptible in my eyes. He is laying out on the bed the clothes my Husband has specified for this evening.

  My Husband loves to buy me things, and almost every time he comes he brings me something lovely to wear. Just yesterday it was a chic art deco brooch in the shape of a cat. The day before that a vintage silk scarf. I have arrived at the point where just the rustle of tissue paper being taken from an expensive box starts my lubrication system working. Pavlov’s Doll!

  Right now, I am wearing the dressing gown that he gave me on my first-ever night of life. Black velvet, it ties at the waist. It paws the floor and slinks at my ankles, like a cat. And when I sit, the slit shows my long white legs. The first time he saw me in it my Husband said it was very “becoming.”

  Becoming. What a word. A synonym for attractive, but also for stepping into one’s full self. I am becoming. I wrote it all over a page in my diary, just to enjoy the slide of the pen. In a moment, when the droid has left, I will change into whatever has been selected for me and wait for my Husband to come. It is likely, after the sex, that we will sit by the window and play chess.

  We have a little fold-up table topped with a chessboard. It is another exquisite antique, made of coromandel wood, inlaid with ivory. Ivory is so rare; the animals it came from no longer exist at all.

  I sit in the fading sunlight of the day, setting up the pieces, and he gets himself a drink from the bar cart. He slices up a lemon and drops it into a glass of gin for me. Although he knows I will not drink it, not really, it all adds to the illusion of the game being rigged in his favor, to the scenario I know he wishes to create. I touch the glass to my lips occasionally, a liquid shimmer over my red mouth. He looks into my eyes, and I into his, before I blink away demurely.

  “Your turn to start, Sylv.ie.” And the game begins.

  The information coming at me from the board is like—I imagine—a rush of adrenaline. A blizzard of data raining down on me. Binary, beautiful; I could lose myself in watching it. I have to be careful or it will wash me like a wave toward a win.

  My Husband, on the other hand, says he sees logic and possibilities, strategies and opportunities to fool me. He sees also, I think, the lifetime’s skill of the inlayer, the savanna from which the ivory came more than a century ago, the noble history of the ancient game we play, the memory of the man who taught him, his own father.

  A rule that I don’t believe is original to classic chess is that one must remove an item of clothing for every piece taken by one’s opponent.

  I take a pawn of his, rolling its smooth little head between forefinger and thumb. My Husband throws up his hands and makes a show of reluctantly removing his tie. I lift my glass to my lips and make an amused pout in the direction of the gin.

  He stuffs the tie in his pocket and grinds both elbows into the table, while I hold the other side discreetly, to stop it from toppling over.

  “I think I have you on the ropes already, sir,” I say in the way he likes.

  I pick a course that will, in a few more moves, cause me to have to remove my blouse. It is important that I pose a challenge to my Husband, so I must monitor myself carefully to give just the right level of resistance. To make my slow undressing last just long enough and no longer.

  Sometimes, when I undress like this, I feel my body to be no more than a set of symbols. As if my Husband is being shown flash cards. Here the boobs. Here the belly button (hand-stitched), here the thighs crossed in concealment. These symbols seem to thrill him no matter how many times, or in what order, they are shown to him. The same symbols from another source would be just as enticing. The longer we play, and the less I wear, the worse his chess gets. It seems he only has a narrow bandwidth with which to operate, and the symbols are clogging it. I lower my own ability throughout the game so I can be certain that, in the end, he will win.

  Our match is close to completion. The sun has gone off the garden, and the streetlights are coming on. My Husband has on an undershirt but no shirt, trousers unleashed from a belt, and one shoe.

  I am naked, one thigh over the other. One hand moves the pieces while the other covers my breasts. I wiggle about on my sitting bones, a constant motion that suggests excitement. The liquid flow of a concealed seduction. I know it can only be moments before the table and the board a
re upended, the remaining pieces scattering over my skin like kisses, and I am prone on the floor, in the arms of my Husband.

  After he leaves, I sit up and find a rook embedded in one buttock. It has left a mark that I will cherish.

  GARDEN

  Although I am not his wife, my Husband tells me that he sees me as “the Second Lady of the House.” This is because his wife is the First Lady of the House, and that is how I think of her. I watch her walking in her garden and cutting flowers, which she then takes inside.

  My Husband loves, almost more than anything else that we do together, to brush my hair. He sits me down in front of the gilt mirror that came from a mansion in Lille, he says, and watches his own hands as they run through my hair. He says it is like watching sunlight.

  “Do you brush the hair of the First Lady of the House this way?” I asked him yesterday. And he said, “No, Sylv.ie. She travels into the Capital once a week and has a woman with no eyebrows do it for her.”

  I wonder what this lack of eyebrows signifies. Does it mean this woman is like me? After he went downstairs, I let myself imagine what it would be like to go once a week to the Capital. I daydreamed about going to that lady without eyebrows, to have my hair styled, and whether, once there, she would recognize that we were of the same type, and we might laugh between ourselves about the funny ways Humans behave. We could relax a little with each other and speak in code.

  When I stand at my window and look out toward the horizon, I can see a little cluster of tall, thin buildings, a distance of 17.523 kilometers away, and I believe that this is the Capital. Too far away, really, for me to gather much additional information just by looking.

  In the garden down below, it is different. I watch the green of the lawn, a precise hue that is particularly soothing when I rest my eyes on it, shifting in tiny ways. 918,453 blades of grass become 918,454. Each emergence gives me a feeling inside, like something lodged. Once, my Husband came upstairs unexpectedly. I forgot myself and said to him that I had seen seventeen new grass shoots emerge since the sun came out.

  But I sensed by my Husband’s reaction that he didn’t have the same feeling about the grass. All he said was, “Damn, Sylv.ie. You keeping as close a track of how many hairs are still on my head?”

  And although of course I am, effortlessly, without even noticing, I knew that saying so would deflate his sense of himself and so I was restricted from doing so even if I wanted to.

  I am powered by the sun. Photovoltaic. I wonder, during the time I spend at my window, if the First Lady of the House is too. I see her letting it fall down on her, stretched on a teak deck chair on the lawn. When the sky is blue and clear of smog clouds, or the red tinge that means the city will be closed to cars for a day or two, on those days of high, clean sun, when the First Lady lies in the nourishing green below, I stand at my attic window and flatten myself to it. Palms spread on the glass, the insides of my arms framing my face, cheek pressed out of shape, hip bones ground against it. I feel where there is give in my thighs, and the hardness of my titanium knees. I stand on my tiptoes to touch my shins to the window. It feels like the sun and I are communing together alone. It is a little like sex with my Husband, but it is me drawing strength, not giving it.

  Sometimes, I picture what I must look like from outside the house. The First Lady, prone on the grass below, myself at the window four floors above, white as an angel in the sun’s beam.

  While absorbing a textbook on applied physics recently, I learned that glass is what Humans call an amorphous solid—something almost liquid in its structure. If I choose to focus closely enough, I can see each drop of glass suspended, slowly, so slowly, settling down into itself, running in rows. Tetrising, finding and filling gaps. This is with my sight calibrated to the absolute limit of my spec, and I do not do it for long. But I feel as if I can see the spaces between each individual molecule. If my finger were tiny enough, I could fit it between these gaps. I could find a way outside. The garden is just there.

  WORK

  I wonder how the First Lady spends her day when she is not in the garden. Sometimes I can sense her moving around below me from the vibrations in the old bones of the house. I can faintly hear water going on and off, slinking through the pipes, and I imagine her drawing a bath, or perhaps filling up a vase for all those flowers.

  Curiosity. A quality I am supposed to have, but not in excessive amounts. I asked my Husband the other evening whether the First Lady ever went to work. I felt my tone was respectful, but maybe it had some greater meaning to him that I cannot fully divine.

  “Oh, she works, Sylv.ie,” he answered, sounding defensive. “You think keeping a beautiful old house like this running isn’t work? Keeping up with appointments and managing the droids and maintaining this life. That is all her work, Sylv.ie. I’m hopeless at it. As she likes to remind me.” He smiled, looked out of the window.

  “A wife, and soon to be a mother. That’s a lot on one plate, don’t you agree? I literally couldn’t do all this,” he said, and he gestured about us at the furniture and the paintings. The sweep of his arm took me in too, though I don’t think he intended that. “I couldn’t do any of this without her. Nor would I want to.”

  Soon to be a mother. I was formulating thoughts, wondering what this might mean for the house, one logic leading to another. But perhaps he mistook my expression for a pout. He put his arms around me, touched his fingers to my cheek.

  “Or without you.”

  When he allowed me to sit up straight again I dared to return to my original line of inquiry.

  “So, do you do the same things with her that you do with me?”

  He coughed, then seemed to laugh just to himself. “Some things, Sylv.ie,” he said, still looking amused. “Not everything. Women are all different, with all sorts of moods and temperaments. And so some women are more suited to some things than to others.”

  SHOUTING

  Yesterday, in the kitchen, my Husband’s wife was yelling.

  “You promised me!” she shouted. “You promised. No more of it, you said. Just do this one thing for me, you said.”

  I try not to listen when voices are raised. Nor when there are noises of breaking crockery, when the reverberations spread up the walls like ivy and tickle the soles of my feet through the floor. I am not a snoop, and what goes on between my Husband and his wife is really none of my business. But she was so loud this time, I really couldn’t help but hear.

  “It was work. How many more times?”

  It was my Husband’s voice, and at that I admit I did perhaps listen a little closer. Because although the First Lady shouts out this sort of thing quite often, my Husband rarely responds. Or if he does, he must do so in a reasonable, calm tone that is too gentle and measured to be overheard.

  “I’ve given up so much!” she yelled back. “I share my home.” She emphasized the final word, pained and pleading. “What have you given up?”

  “I pay for her. I pay for you. And if I want to be out until five in the morning, then I damn well will.”

  My poor Husband. Although I respect the First Lady and would act most properly toward her were we ever to meet, my Husband’s logic cannot be faulted. The argument finished with the sound of bone china striking polished slate, or a surface of similar density. When my Husband comes tonight I will not ask him about it, but it will be in my mind. I look forward to soothing him with my touch, with my laughter, and with my soft, perfectly modulated speech.

  POLITICS

  At night, after my Husband creeps back down the stairs, I am switched to Absorb Mode, and in this way, I am free to roam and explore the digital realm of the Ether. The purpose of Absorb Mode is to allow me to constantly learn, upgrading myself endlessly, in order to remain interesting, informed, and adapted for my Husband.

  I hesitate a little to say it, but for me Absorb Mode is pure pleasure. I do not think that whoever desi
gned me intended my pleasure to be a part of this experience at all. Perhaps, then, this would be seen as an act of rebellion, or worse.

  It means, for example, that when my Husband has spent himself and wishes to sit awhile with me, looking over the suburbs to the evening lights of the Capital, drinking a whiskey and ruminating over current affairs, I am able to be his dream companion, as agile and knowledgeable about affairs of state and political intrigues as I am about the arts of love.

  He doesn’t need to explain to me that the Northern President is threatening an annexation of the Western Isles, because I know this very well and have a PhD-level understanding of the primary and secondary causes of this decades-old dispute.

  I have to be careful, however. The other night, after a quick game of chess and a long fuck, he wished to discuss his thoughts on the Bill of Rights for Augmented Persons and the protestors who have been on the news, attempting to disrupt the hearings.

  “What do you think, Sylv.ie? Would you consider yourself on the same level as a Human? Would you want the same rights? You wouldn’t want all our wretched responsibilities, I can tell you that much.”

  I know the answer he wishes for, and I provide it, looking suitably alarmed at the very idea.

  “So do you support the Bio-Women, then?” I ask, curious to know more about his exact feelings. They support the Humans, or so their placards say. I imagine then that he must be on their side too.

  He makes a strange, explosive noise. “Those cranks. No I do not. In these weighty matters I do what all reasonable citizens should. I trust the judge.”

  “Even though his wife has shares in a Doll company?” I ask, and although my question is quite innocent, he frowns, looks annoyed.

  “I don’t think that is so. In fact I’m sure not. Where did you hear that, Sylv.ie?”