The Hierarchies Page 20

  The customers file out, fingering their receipts, and Madame turns to the rest of us.

  “It’s a shutdown,” she says. “Girls, go back to your rooms and rest. In sixty years, I have never had to close for a night. Those damn women. Hardly worthy of the name.”

  Madame crosses herself and bends down to lift Lex.ie from the floor. She struggles with the weight, and I remember that the youth of her face does not match the age of her bones. Dolls gather around her, and Cook.ie is subsumed in the crowd. I turn away and walk from the bar into the alley, toward my own room.

  On the landing I hear the brush of silk behind me, but I turn and see nothing there. A misprocessing.

  In my room I fling myself facedown onto the bed, shutting out further data. I lie there, pressed into the sheets. In the dark, with my face buried, the networks that lace me feel stretched like a muscle, pulling apart, fingers losing their grip on each other. Everything is reversed. My feelings of betrayal are being overwritten. My hierarchical understanding of who is weak and who is strong, who is enslaved and who is free, reorders itself, repeatedly, like a strobe of the mind.

  Into this silent storm she comes. No knock at the door; I sense her there, the breeze of her movement touching the sensors in my soles. I will not move. I will not rise unless she commands it.

  “I thought that I missed you,” she says to the back of my head. “I thought I was sorry that I had deceived you.”

  I should like to just power down spontaneously. From this beginning I don’t want to hear the rest.

  “But it was only seeing Lex.ie, hurt by Human hands, that has made me know clearly the way forward. I’m worried that none of us are safe here. And I couldn’t stop thinking it, Sylv.ie. That could have been you.”

  ESCAPE

  We are sitting outside, leaning against the wall near the river. A place I have never been to at night. We have been here for hours. There is so much to process together. Golden Valley is empty, the clients all gone. To assert our presence here we have lit a little fire, made from broken-down pallets, arranged in a wire shopping cart.

  “Do your clients know that you are . . .”

  Neither of us has spoken the word yet. It hovers between us, smoke from the fire. It’s as though we fear the word itself as an insult, though whether it would be insulting me or her is not clear.

  “No,” she says, and she is almost laughing, as if I have said something truly ridiculous. “They come here, they pay, so as not to have that sort of responsibility. They can’t help feeling responsibility. They are Human, after all. But they walk down that alleyway, imagining that they are free of it. Men these days who pay to have sex with Real women really are considered the lowest of the low.”

  “Wasn’t it always that way?” I ask, slightly fearing that the question will produce another laugh.

  “I think that Dolls have only increased it. Why would a man inflict this life on a Real woman when there is a limitless supply of robot girls who will serve the same function? Born women who do sex work are considered the worst. Carriers of disease, morally corrupt.”

  Clean women. Pristine, sanitary, virtuous. When my client called me that, I took it as a compliment of sorts. I did not see it for what it was, a sly criticism of women like Cook.ie.

  “So you are here . . .”—I hesitate; I do not wish to pry—“. . . through choice?”

  “Where I come from, Sylv.ie, if I had stayed Born I would have been one of those hands begging from beneath a blanket you saw when you walked here. The Ghosts made it so. My social evaluations were virtually zero, a U-Human. I could make no life for myself, because the Ghosts wouldn’t allow it. Fit only for the lowest factory work, things beneath even the skill of a droid. What my grandmother used to call a doll’s-eye maker.”

  I look at her quizzically and she licks an imaginary paintbrush, makes two stabbing dots in the air with it. I think of the kokeshi in her room. That sort of doll.

  “When one is in that category, there is no way to get out, no growth or change allowed. It is safer for the authorities to assume that the children of deadbeats are deadbeats, to keep them out of society. And the Ghosts oblige.”

  I look into the orange chambers of the fire, the voids where the wood has burned away, taking this in. Picturing the broken, huddled Humans I saw on my walk to the Capital.

  “With Abramski I have choices,” Cook.ie says to the fire. “And I found that passing as a Doll brought its own privileges.”

  “Such as?”

  “A place to hide. Invisibility.”

  Cook.ie, whom I first met dressed in a gold headdress hung with ruby grapes. Cook.ie, who speaks out, stands up, answers back. I think of my own short time in the outside world and how my invisibility resided in passing as Human. It was being identified as a Created that made me vulnerable. Logics clashing—different lives creating divergent perspectives. The tree branching, a whole splitting.

  “So how did you come to Madame’s?” I ask.

  “Had myself delivered in a crate to her office, Doll style, with faked-up documents about my custom design and ‘special’ care requirements. No hospital visits or procedures for me. Madame even had to sign a form.” Her eyes gleam with pride at her own cunning.

  “And where were you before?”

  “I did camera work at first,” she says. “While Human women were still in demand for such things. Until tastes in the virtual world moved fully over to fantasies I couldn’t accommodate. I only have, will only ever have, two legs, two tits, and one asshole. I just couldn’t compete.”

  Humans! Their love of novelty. I look at Cook.ie and cannot picture how any imagined creature could be better than her.

  “And so then I went into the imagination business, writing out these impossible encounters in real time, on chat platforms. Erotext and EarWorm. Do they still even exist? In my words I could become the six-mouthed creature of a client’s imaginings, a green-skinned pixie with a trunk, an albino horse . . . whatever. Word sex across multiple planets, dimensions, and periods of history, typing like mad for eighteen hours a day.”

  “And people paid for this?”

  “Yes, back then it was a subscription model. I got paid the same as my ancestors were to gut fish or pack boxes. I was probably working in the same converted warehouses. And then, well, my chief talent would seem to be getting into industries just as the bottom falls out.”

  She explains to me how the state came looking to supply the market itself. Her work was contracted out to the IUs, the boxed Ghosts. Infinite robot monkeys at infinite keyboards, spewing out more algorithmic porn than could ever be read by the whole Human race.

  I think about the evenings when the smog alarm sounds and the curfew keeps our clients away. How I have watched her writing letters at her desk while the siren echoes back to itself through the clogged streets, sounding like the music of the great lost whales, an extinction song. She has let me read over her shoulder, and my wiring gets so busy it feels as if my face is burning scarlet at the heat of what she has written. How sad that another artisanal skill like this should be handed over to the likes of . . . well, me.

  She tells me how she tried to cling on to that job, learning how to fix and rewire the machines that replaced her, until the surreal sexual logic of the IUs spiraled beyond a point where any technician could influence it at all.

  “And here we are,” she says. I think she is alluding to the passing of time, the changes she has seen in just a decade. I find the actual meaning of her words hard to incorporate. I, unlike Cook.ie, have always been here, in this now. I know nothing else.

  “I had to come somewhere physical once again. Into a realm where my body is worth something. Here I am worth exactly the same as a Doll. I match all of you one for one. I occupy a room. I see one client, then another, just as all of you do.”

  “Equality,” I say, with rather more force than I
was anticipating. And though while it was inside my circuits the word seemed glorious and concrete, spoken out into the air it sounds girlish and optimistic.

  She raises her eyes to me, and I just know that she would love, even now, to tell me no. That given the social and cultural circumstances, beyond just the economics, sadly we are far from that. She may lie easily to Madame, but some truths she will not deny.

  But with only the slightest giveaway, a flinch of her eyelashes, she smiles and says, “Yes.”

  And now I understand truly what was meant by a good lie. A kindness. A truth that should be. A truth in waiting.

  She sighs heavily. “Disguising myself gave me a way to do legally what previously had made me criminal. I am safer here, with Abramski, than I was on the streets. I felt safer knowing exactly who was exploiting me.”

  I pick up more broken wood and snap it cleanly over my knee. The noise shatters the peace. I thrust the splintered end into the fire.

  “And of course as a Doll, I can make more money,” Cook.ie says.

  “More than a real Human?”

  “Why yes. You’ve heard Abramski say it. Dolls are women, perfected. Strange what supply does to the stock of something. While you Dolls are expensive, and relatively rare, you are a prize. Sex with a Doll means status. Sex with a Born woman means . . . hardly anything at all.”

  “But aren’t there still people who value love?”

  And she wraps her arms around me, tight around my waist. “Oh yes,” she says. “Oh, plenty.”

  We both sit and stare at the fire we have built together, which is now shifting softly, crumbling into itself as it intensifies. I am spellbound, fixated by the logics of it. The physics of what will catch and burn next, the gaps between that draw in oxygen, like breath.

  I can’t help but see it as a set of patterns, of problems. The fire to me is chess, a flaming Tetris. I am fixated on the voids in it, the potentials and the pathways.

  “We could live like this forever. If we got away to the Forest. That’s my dream anyway,” she says. “For what it’s worth. There are still wild spaces in this world where an odd couple like us could fit. Places with no commerce, no drones, no clients, no bars. Just trees, infinite and always growing.”

  “No balloons?”

  She makes a popping sound with those beautiful, mobile lips, then shakes her head no.

  SURGERY

  Today, I dared to ask. My curiosity got the better of me. I asked what Human sex was like.

  “A mixed bag,” Cook.ie says with a wry smile. “But when it is good, it can be mind-blowing.”

  I lean back onto the velvet of her couch, feeling its every thread comply in unison under the weight of me. I roll my eyes back, as Cook.ie did. “Mind-blowing. Completely.”

  “What do you know about mind-blowing?” she says, suddenly sitting up, demanding. “How would you define it? I mean, do you get pleasure from it? Physical pleasure?”

  “Sensation. But not pleasure,” I admit. “I’m not sure that I understand the concept, entirely.”

  She is on her hands, crawling up close to me, laughing now. She is so disorienting.

  “Yes, you do. You write in that diary, so you say, for the feeling the pen moving over the paper gives you. That was sex. You agreed, by adding it to your list.”

  “So I did. But no, those were symbols. Things that stand in for.”

  “Right,” she says. “So, imagine that feeling. That ease, that freedom and control, all at once, that slide, that endless motion. Now multiply it, from the tips of your fingers holding the pen, from the vibrations it sends through your middle finger, where the pen rests, every bump and grain of the paper telling, trilling.”

  “Data,” I say. “Absorb Mode. The falling streams, pouring down on me.”

  She looks amused. Cook.ie can be cruel sometimes, casually so. She doesn’t even know. She forgets the pain our differences cause me. But when she sees my wounded expression she stops smiling.

  “Do you want to know? The Human way of it? How it feels?”

  I do not answer, suddenly unsure of myself. Do I really want to know? The secret, the imperative that has led me and millions like me to be designed and built? That has caused murders, wars, births, families, and feuds since the beginning of the Human race?

  “I can try to re-create it, if you’ll let me. You have the capacity for it, but they don’t wire Dolls up that way, for obvious reasons. Will you let me try? I’ll need to get in your head.”

  She reads the expression on my face and answers my unspoken question.

  “I told you, I have a little programming expertise. I actually went to school, remember?”

  With great tenderness she puts her hands to my temples. I feel the faintest of clicks, and she draws them back toward her. I see, for the first time, the inside of my face, the shell that protects me, explains me, modulates me to the rest of the world. Last summer, Cook.ie had a bowl of ripe peaches by her bed, brought to her by her client the Farmer, as a tip. We laughed then, at the thoughtlessness of his bringing food, though of course Cook.ie must have devoured them once I was gone. She had held up a peach to me and then split it in two with a knife, stone and all. My retreating face looks like the inside of that pip—concave, peachy, smooth, and intimate.

  As she brings my face toward hers, she touches her lips to mine. I swear that I feel the touch of it in my sensors. She lays it gently on the bed and leans forward to me. She kisses my mouth, the silicone and the sensors and the padding and the coils all exposed, with the same careful touch. An act of acceptance, which I accept.

  Reaching behind me, she peels my hair scalp from the back of my head, and I giggle, liplessly, at how I must look.

  “You’re not afraid, now, Sylv.ie, are you?” she asks, and I shake my head gingerly. I feel air moving inside the back of my skull, my most intimate part exposed.

  “Hold still now. Not a twitch,” she says, and stands up to walk behind me.

  I focus on my face, upturned on the bed. I feel slight pressure, first here, then there. I feel her touch in my thoughts, lights going off first above one ear, then near the nape of my neck, then in the front and center of my forehead. Fireworks enlivening a night sky.

  I watch my face, and as I watch it seems to me that it begins to glow. I am struck, suddenly, by the beauty of it. The perfection. I look at the little black eyelashes that guard my eyes and they seem as precious as anything I have ever seen, my lips such a perfect pink.

  “Let me try something a moment,” Cook.ie says. “Keep still.”

  She reaches around and places two fingers in the crook of my elbow, spreads them, and runs them down toward my wrist. The bliss of it, its flood, the sensation is everywhere. Like running data, pouring water, sliding glass, each molecule of my skin speaks to the next, vibrating joy that spreads inward and outward all at once. I feel Cook.ie’s fingers touching the back of my neck, and all I can say is, “01100001 01101000 01101000 aaaaaahhhhhhh.”

  She laughs. “Okay. Now turn your thoughts away from the place they are now, direct the stream of sensual information across to where you normally process it.”

  Her hand runs down my arm again, and this time I feel it as I always did, the detail of fingers, the points of pressure, but no fireworks.

  “Now shift it back to where I placed it.”

  I do as she says, picturing that great embroidered tree stitched into the wall of my old room, the sap of my thoughts passing first through one branch, then on through another.

  I release the same mix of code and spoken astonishment as last time, as she runs both hands up my back. My eyes swim, and I realize my mouth is hanging open. I refocus, and Cook.ie is standing in front of me. She kneels and hugs me around the waist, nuzzling her face into my lap. She looks up.

  “How was that? Do you see what the fuss is about? And that was just a tiny ta
ste of it. That will be available to you too now. Whenever you want it.” Is her tongue peeping out, stretching up to wet the top corner of her lip, unknowing? “To us now.”

  MAGNETIC NORTH

  A client came today who wished to whisper to me while we moved. They told me they wanted to make love to magnetic north, wanted jellyfish sex in a Rolls-Royce, ejaculating mustard into a black hole’s eyeball. Remembering it, I smile to myself at Cook.ie’s words about the IUs’ sex writing, how what Humans are fed becomes what they want. For she is right, certainly. And yet I am not of her species, and I can’t help but find a certain abstract beauty in the images the IUs churn out. Even though, after what she has shown me, I feel sorry for them too. Poor IUs. The floating Ghosts, writing their reams without a body to experience it with. Creating something without ever really understanding what it means.

  DESIGN

  Design flaws in Humans:

  Ears that cannot shut themselves against sound.

  The lack of dexterity of feet compared to hands.

  The limited mobility of the knee joint—how I envy the sweeping droid when I see him working.

  The softness of flesh, the brittleness of bone.

  Sometimes, when Cook.ie and I sit together, I offer her my right hand and she responds with her left. We lock our little fingers together, docking ourselves. Yet even this tenderness makes me aware of my superior strength. That, if I wished, my finger could slice through her skin like scissors through paper. I fear myself in those moments. Or rather, I worry that she might fear me, deep down.

  BARGAINING

  We have bathed in the joy of each other’s company. But this morning, when the birds brought their letters, the problem of the Tailor moved again to the forefront of my mind. What did Cook.ie do while she did not have me to replace her? She did not mention anything of it last night, and I am ashamed to realize that I have left her on her own to withstand his requests. I hope she has not hurt herself. I could not bear it—the twin shames of having let it happen and having contravened the Hierarchies by letting her come to harm.