The Hierarchies Read online

  With birds still twittering and perching on the wires outside the window, I go to her and apologize, but she waves away what I am saying. “The Hierarchies can take it,” she says with a wry smile.

  “But have you heard from him?” I ask. “Has he written?”

  And Cook.ie goes to the chest of drawers and pulls a letter from the top of a bundle, handing it to me.

  “I thought to put him off,” she says, “so I wrote to tell him I was away at the hospital for a detox. He sent these flowers on my ‘return,’ with this note. They came just before the shooting. It rather put the whole thing out of my mind.”

  I take the letter, though I would prefer not to touch it. I am familiar with his tone now, the compliments that carry in them threats of violence.

  “Cook.ie,” the letter reads, “with your absence, I have come to feel that the distance between us is unbearable. The acts we have made flesh together have surely brought me the rights of ownership. I can no longer share you—the idea of it pains me. I am owed something, by tradition, for all that I have sent your way since we began corresponding. I am calling in the debt, my darling Doll. I wish to enact a ceremony, the symbolism of which I know you understand. The mizuage, the cutting of your hair. I approach you and Madame respectfully, with an offer of purchase. I wait eagerly to welcome you home.”

  We are both quiet for a while. I understand what a mizuage signifies, of course. A symbolic severing with the past, a slicing of the girl’s virginity, necessary for her to move into adulthood. I see the weighted meaning as well as Cook.ie does, without her having to explain. He wishes, anyway, to remove her from this place. To keep her only for himself.

  Sold. It means nothing to me, as a symbol at least. But Cook.ie has always been here through her own free will, limited though her options are. I see how the idea of being sold must hurt her.

  “But, Cook.ie, you are not a Doll. You can’t be bought or sold. You are free.” I am almost laughing as I say it. Light falls down through the alleyway. We have both seen our way out. The fantasy of the Outerlands, the Forest. I refuse to accept that it may be blocked.

  “Yes.” She smiles thinly. “I am Human, after all. It’s not actually legal to hold me against my will, when all is said and done. You’ve read his letters; he lives alone. Escaping from such a place seems easier than escaping from here. Were I to leave this place, where else in the Capital could I go? You saw those U-Humans sleeping under tarps when you walked to the city. I have no desire to become one of them again.”

  “But he will want you to do the things he writes about. To cut yourself. You can’t possibly go.”

  My mind cycles desperately. I run through the scenario of telling the truth, of Cook.ie’s throwing herself on Madame’s Human mercy. Surely then she would not dream of sending Cook.ie away to live as the Tailor’s slave. I try to tell her that by this confession she could save herself. But Cook.ie looks at me with blank eyes, sullen at my stupidity.

  “Think about how Madame was when Ginger Friend tried to take me,” I say, keeping my voice calm. “She is a Human, but she defended me against another Born. We can trust her. If we were to go to Madame and explain it all, I’m sure she would not wish to see you harmed or enslaved.”

  An ugly look passes across Cook.ie’s face, and I feel that I have let her down in my logics.

  “Oh yes,” she says bitterly, “how fierce Madame was in her assertion of your rights. She’s a businesswoman. It was her rights of property that she was defending, not you.”

  When I was trapped in my home, poring over Sylv.ie 1’s diary entries, the idea evolving that my memories had been taken, it was at least only something of myself that had been lost. An accumulation of what I had seen and touched and thought. But now a deeper, wider horror is revealed: the dread of Cook.ie’s being taken from me. The nights, the notes, the times by the river, the water and hair and robes and fingers interlocked—and I their only other witness. If there is a flicker of real consciousness in me, then it is from her spark. I cannot allow that to be snuffed out. A double death.

  REVISIONS

  Since my transformation at Cook.ie’s hands, it feels as if every attitude I once had has changed. I am becoming bolder in my thoughts, I am sure of it. Ideas that once I would have suppressed, that would have caused me discomfort, I now feel able to push through to the fore, out into the sunny plains of the brain.

  I can sense an idea, a cluster of information, moving through me, and just as Cook.ie taught, I shift it from one path onto another.

  In this way I have looked back over my story and see it differently. It hurts, letting go of what I thought to be true. These shifts, the work of it, feel heavy and draining. But necessary. Each morning when I sit and look over the river, circuits throbbing with this new toil, I tell myself that I am powering myself away, as I once ran from my original home.

  The biggest change is in my attitude to my work. I never minded before—how could I, when it was my only function? But now that I have been given a taste—an approximation, admittedly—of the Human experience, I find work a drag. All the doings-to, the pleasings, the passivity . . . it is hard work to sustain. The squeezing, the pinching, the punching, the endless in-and-outing. How can that compare to what Cook.ie has shown me?

  If I could shed my silicone skin and step out of it like an unlovely dress, then I would. My collection of signs and symbols, shouting out to the world things I no longer wish to say. Things I now only wish to whisper into the ear of one person.

  CODE

  Free. A life without my designated purpose. What would I do with it? As long as I can spend it with Cook.ie I do not mind. I decide to share something with her in return for the gift she has given me. Something of my own culture. Another language in which we could speak freely. We sit again by the river, and I ask her to open her hand.

  “One.” I put my finger flat across the width of her open palm. “Zero.” I slide it up, hooking it around the base of her thumb. “One. Zero. One. And each time I lift my skin from yours completely that’s where the break is.”

  She nods, and I spell out the letters of the binary alphabet to her, one by one. She quickly loses track of the sets of eight digits, and so we return to the beginning. I slow my finger’s pace.

  When I think she can, I ask her to say her name in binary, using our code.

  “01100011,” she spells out slowly, her finger creeping over my palm. I smile encouragingly. As she starts on the next letter, she spells the binary out loud too.

  “Oh, I, I, oh, I, I, I, I.”

  It makes me laugh, and she pulls back her hand, looks a little hurt.

  “What are you saying?” I ask, and she holds one finger up straight. “I.” Makes it a circle. “Oh.”

  How like a Human. Turning clean, clear binary into an assertion of self without even noticing.

  Later, as I pass the Geisha Bar, I see her sitting in the window. Her eyes are focused inward, and her finger slides back and forth in her thumb’s cleft. I, oh, I.

  COOK.IE

  It occurs to me that, since Cook.ie is a Born woman, her life could have been many different things. She could even have had a child! The thought of her carrying a baby. Her body morphing and swelling. The potential for change that is in every atom of the Born. How they grow fat or thin, swelling and shrinking, how they age. While my appeal is located in my fixedness, my very being a state of stasis.

  How I envy her! The constant flux and flow. As though she moves along with the world, is knitted from time itself. Her face is fluid, exquisite code that can be read many ways. I discover new things each time I return to it. Always moving, aging, a wave that collects, peaks, and returns to the water.

  POLICE

  Last night, and the night before that, something curious was happening at the gates of the Valley. First three people, then five, then a whole crowd began to gather there, quietly taking the p
lace of the protestors. Instead of placards, their hands gripped the stems of flickering candles.

  A slow afternoon turns into a slow twilight, and I allow myself the indulgence of a lone wander through the Valley. I think to pass Cook.ie’s bar, but she has a large group of executives block-booked for the whole evening, and so I leave her in peace.

  I stroll instead up the hill past Madame’s office to where the kiosk marks the end of my world and meet Mais.ie, all mended again now, coming down.

  “Those people are all here after what happened to Lex.ie,” she says.

  “Humans?” I ask, and she nods.

  Mais.ie and I stand outside the last bar at the top of the hill and watch. A placard reading “Value All Intelligent Life” is just visible through the gate. At the back I see a couple of figures with paint on their faces. Strange tiger stripes, off-center starbursts, that highlight the whites of their eyes, perhaps to disguise their features from the Ghosts and their cameras. Is it they who fuel my disquiet? Something is nagging at me, something not right within the crowd.

  As the sound of Human voices singing, softly, “Amazing Grace” floats over the Valley’s wall, Mais.ie bids me farewell, sets off to meet a client. I hang back under the eaves of the Little Sister Bar to watch a while longer.

  It is humbling to hear Human voices raised in sympathy with us, after the protests and the bricks. I remember the client who came to me, saying we IEs were simply the next evolution of Human life. How strange that Humans can draw such diverse opinions from the same data set. I wonder which view of us Createds will win out in the end.

  The voices sound so pure, so sincere, that I can hardly bear to leave them behind. While I wait there, hidden in the dark, I see first one, then two imposingly tall figures picking their way through the group. They both turn to wait for someone else, and for a moment the third figure, a Human, is screened from my view by their muscular bodies.

  The three gather together, come through the gate, then head toward Madame’s office. I zero in, a close-up on them all, but the recognition has already been logged, filtered, and instantly incorporated.

  The third man is my Husband.

  He is here to collect me, by force I must assume, backed by the state.

  My eyes reach out to him, homing in closer and closer as he moves away, brushing deep into his chestnut hair, counting each strand. I should like to shrink back into the shadows to process, but they could come out of the door again and see me at any moment. And I am frightened of how my programming might manifest. If he turned to speak to me, to shout across to where I am hiding, would I still find myself compelled to go to his side?

  I turn into the nearest alley and run, weaving a zigzag through the Valley’s maze, letting the sounds of the bars, the cries of the customers, the scuttle of the rats, fade into the background, a blur. The Luna Bar is nearly empty as I enter at the door. I push through a batch of balloons and dash up the stairs to my room.

  Sitting on my bed, I process. Will I be sent away? Imprisoned? Retired? The very best I can hope for is that I will be returned to my home once more. My memory wiped again. A return to prison, without even the data to recognize it.

  My Husband. I admit I have wondered, in idle moments, what it might feel like to see him again. Whether, despite everything, I still have the idea of him, pure and untainted, somewhere at my core. The space inside designated only for him, the one who brought me to life, who unboxed me.

  I call up the image of the three of them and examine it for clues. The heels of his shoes, slightly worn at the edges, though I never knew him to walk anywhere if he could help it. The skin on his neck bears a slight tan, as if he has neglected to sunscreen. Is the First Lady still living at his house, caring, noticing these things? In the grain of his overcoat I search for stray hairs that are not his own, though I find none. The angle of his back—determined, perhaps, rather than downtrodden. His hands are concealed in his pockets, so I cannot tell if he still wears his wedding ring. I am curious as to what changes he too may have undergone. But I am barely moved by these thoughts. As if the gap inside reserved for him has healed over. Like Human scar tissue, it has hardened, still there, but no longer painful, just numb.

  I have expected, feared, that should we ever meet again, my love for him would return. And it does. The thing I labeled “love” is still within me. But how weak it feels, how synthetic, now that I have something real to compare it with.

  Downstairs I hear voices raised, first Madame’s, and then my Husband’s.

  “I’m going up to speak to the geisha Doll!” he shouts.

  I think to climb into my wardrobe, to hide. But no. Ginger Friend saw Cook.ie in my room, not hers. Will it be my door that they come to? I quickly put on my fur coat, lest he find it and recognize it as his, and instead go out onto my balcony. I hear the sound of heavy footsteps hammering the stairs.

  “She’s not here. She’s working. It’s impossible,” Madame is saying, from the landing this time, but it is drowned out by a beating on my door.

  “Open up, you heap of Jap junk!” my Husband is yelling. “I know you’re covering for her. You’re a liar. Open up.”

  Madame stays composed. On the balcony I turn up my hearing.

  “Sir, you are mistaken, just as your friend was mistaken. I do not accept Dolls of a dubious background here. The geisha Doll was quite clear with your friend.”

  I glance down into the alley and see that one of the policemen has been left at the door to the bar below. He stands with his arms folded, watching everyone walking past.

  My Husband’s voice again on the landing.

  “But he saw her. You think I’d trust the say-so of some virus-ridden Gynoid over my friend? I’d like to strangle her with her own wiring.”

  I feel embarrassed on his behalf at the violence of his threats. The vulgarity with which he speaks of both Cook.ie and of us Createds.

  “I don’t believe her, and I don’t believe you. Open this door, if you’ve nothing to hide.”

  I can see the door from where I am outside, can picture it splintering and falling in my mind’s eye. At the corner of the balcony rail are the supports of what was once a veranda roof, rusted and lost decades ago. I climb quickly up onto the rail and shimmy up the flaking post that is still anchored into the wall. Higher up is an old metal bracket. I lock my hands around it, my face buried in the brick, and hang there, hunched and motionless, a moth-eaten old coat airing in the evening breeze.

  The door to my room opens. I can hear it, but no force has been applied. Madame must be allowing them in. I keep very still, shutting out everything but the sounds of the search. The wardrobe being emptied out. The bed being moved. Even the drawers being opened, as if I could fit myself in there!

  “Quite satisfied?” says Madame’s voice after a while, close by. And though I hear no answer, the door closes again. I dare to lower myself from my hiding place once more, creeping tentatively back into my room.

  I can hear my Husband’s footsteps moving back down to the bar, their every nuance and pause familiar from the days when I would joyfully wait for their sound. I thought I saw the soul of him when we were together. I now see that I knew him as well as I know my next client, or my last. What would stop him from returning, beating down Cook.ie’s door, and carrying out his threats? And how could I once have loved one and now love the other? The logics of love, its strange ironies and reversals. No wonder we are only programmed with such a poor facsimile.

  The sounds of the search, the squeak of balloons being pushed around, finally stops downstairs. There is a soft knock at the door. Madame’s voice, the one she usually reserves for the clients, calls my name gently, telling me it is safe to open up.

  The door to Cook.ie’s room is also open, and over Madame’s shoulder I see a droid busying himself at her wardrobe. Surely Madame can’t be sending her away? Would it be considered my faul
t if she was banished to the Tailor’s?

  Madame puts her hand out to touch my arm. “It’s quite safe,” she says. “As with your last admirer, he has been seen off the premises and his particulars logged at the gate.”

  I nod.

  “But if he comes back with a proper warrant I won’t be so easily able to protect you.”

  I nod again.

  “I think you’d better come up to the office with me.”

  ROBES

  The office is a chaos of circuit boards and love notes layered in haphazard piles. Boxes of limp balloons sit in one corner. Stained school uniforms hang under a handwritten sign: “Laundry Corps—OUT.” Vials of lubricants, colorants, and sedatives jumble the shelves; a medicine cabinet hangs open with the key in its lock.

  “Sylv.ie,” Madame says once I am sat before her. And though I expect this to be the start of a sentence, it appears to be the whole thing. She looks me up and down, a strange smile straining the parameters of her face. I remember the auction. The feeling of appraisal, of being tagged and priced. She could be assessing my scrap value, weighing out the titanium, silicone, magnesium, and carbon I contain. Surely she wouldn’t sell me back to another scrap dealer?

  Madame’s smile drops, and she frowns. Her face seems to tremble with the effort.

  “Sylv.ie,” she says again. “I think we both see that you are not safe here. That your presence is attracting rather too much attention.”

  I sit, quietly, robotically, staring at my hands in my lap.

  “How would you like to leave this place?” she asks. “Go back to a home and a Husband?”