The Hierarchies Read online

  He looks both more fragile than I imagined and also indestructible, shored up by the chair’s metal frame and the digital boxes that blink silently as he breathes through a light, clear tube held to his lips. He purses them when he inhales, as if trying to trap as much of the sweetness of the air around him as he can, to draw the whole room and everything in it into himself.

  I realize I should stand up to show myself fully, face-to-face with him for the first time, my body unmediated by distance and cameras. I push back my chair and stand. I make a low, sincere bow. His eyes scan me from the tip of my hair to my slightly-too-large satin slippers. I stand absolutely still, submitting to his gaze, fearing what he might find there. Can I possibly live up to the perfection he believes Cook.ie to possess? Will the lie of me be found out?

  As he observes me I get to see his eyes more clearly. They are gray, pale. For a moment they properly meet mine, hold my gaze with poignant clarity and stillness. In spite of everything that I have learned, I find my system makes a lurch, and I feel for a moment as if I am floating in the air, suspended over nothing, birdlike. Empathy. I feel it opening up in me, the protocols flowing easily, one gate opening, and the next, and the next. From the system hidden in the ceiling his voice begins to fall on me like rain.

  “Welcome, beautiful Cook.ie. I hope you will find your new home comfortable. I am so happy to have you here at last. Soon we will mark the occasion formally, but there is no need to rush, now that you are finally here. With your danna. Come, let us take tea together.”

  After another long pause I sense Virgin.ie again looking at me meaningfully, and I follow her eyes toward the table. It is only then that I realize what she is trying to tell me. Of course! The tea ceremony. I am expected to conduct it.

  I have watched Cook.ie perform a tea ceremony once or twice through the window of the Geisha Bar. I felt honored to witness this sacred, historic act. I did not know then that whatever Cook.ie was enacting was itself second-, thirdhand, gleaned from films in the Ether, I presume. I hesitate, then set the image of Cook.ie in the bar running in my mind, shutting down any pangs of sadness that could distract me, and follow her every movement.

  I walk to the far side of the table and kneel on the mat, my palms laid on my knees. The Tailor’s chair draws near, the dog following. I make a slow bow from my waist and discreetly scan all the equipment in front of me. A cloth, two bowls, a whisk, a pot of matcha powder, and a long, thin spoon.

  I try to make all my actions appear weighted and deliberate, as though each tiny motion resides in my muscle memory. I know each detail is in some way symbolic, but none of the symbols have any clarity to me. I work blind, constructing meanings I do not understand.

  I pour the water from the pot into the bowl and whisk it with the powder. The green brew still circling in the bowl, I make another bow and pick it up carefully in both hands, setting it down in front of the Tailor. It sits there cooling, as if mocking the limitations of us all. Neither I, nor the Tailor, nor the dog, nor the Doll can drink it. Some ceremony.

  Afterward we take seats on the sofas around the room’s huge fireplace. Virgin.ie leaves the room and returns carrying a huge bundle of white fabric. She indicates that I should stand up, and when I do, she puts it into my hands as though she is presenting me with a prize. I take it from her with a bow and look around for a clue as to what I am supposed to do with it.

  The dog walks from the Tailor’s side, a slim black box between his teeth. I take the box from his mouth and am rewarded with an extravagant lick across the back of my hand. I have to be careful not to withdraw in revulsion. It is already clear that the dog has a higher status here than either myself or Virgin.ie.

  I open the box. Inside are two rows of neat little needles of various sizes, and a pair of antique scissors with a carved ivory handle. I look up to the Tailor slowly. Does he mean this as a gift? He thinks I like stitching? Perhaps all my clients believed I liked the sex they asked for. A Human misreading, based on hope.

  “A way to pass the long hours when I cannot be with you,” says the Tailor. “Though I should like to watch you work too, of course.”

  I manage to squeeze a blush into my cheeks and smile as though I am delighted.

  “You can begin now,” he says.

  For the next hour I make inelegant white stitches on the soft white fabric, regularly pretending to prick my fingers as I do. My dwindling charge makes precision difficult; my fingers fumble to find a rhythm. The dog pants, and the Tailor makes pleased noises as I work. After a while the dog settles onto a white fur rug, laid in front of the large and empty fireplace. I watch his metal frame hinging on itself like an umbrella. When his jaw touches down onto the rug, the fireplace leaps into flaming life, and within seconds he appears to doze. I glance at the Tailor, and it appears that he too is asleep in his chair. Virgin.ie follows my eyes.

  “He is tired this evening,” she says. “He was so excited for your arrival.” She indicates that it is time for me to be ushered back to my quarters. I rise.

  As we walk down the corridor once more I ask Virgin.ie when the ceremony of the mizuage might happen.

  “Oh, plenty of time for that,” she says, as she did about the paintings. “No rush while you settle in. And why would one want to rush something so significant?”

  RECHARGE

  Next morning Virgin.ie leads me back along the corridors. I follow her, unsteady on my feet, my balance affected by my low power. To my relief, instead of going to the great room, we take a different turn and come to a door to the outside. She stands still to let a security system read her face, and the door slides open, the sudden change almost blinding me with sunlight. I can hear my eyes’ apertures make a grinding noise as they swiftly adjust. My skin prickles at the welcome warmth.

  I follow her out onto a deck and glance back up. The vast windows of the main room are just above us. Beyond the deck is manicured scrub, running down to a steep cliff and the sea.

  Virgin.ie goes to the edge of the deck and brings back two folding chairs, setting them out next to each other. She is photovoltaic too, of course, and so it seems we are to sit side by side, in companionable silence, while we recharge.

  I take my seat and push the sleeves of Cook.ie’s heavy gown up to my shoulders, draw the skirts over my knees. Virgin.ie takes her seat too, and I watch, discreetly at first, as she carefully peels one pink glove from her hand. A slow striptease that exposes, inch by inch, silicone skin ragged with cuts and stabs. Flashes of titanium glint in the sun, visible in the gaps.

  With the same shy air she pulls her long black skirt up to her thighs, revealing a mangled mess of legs cut and stitched a hundred times. A patchwork. A statement of work done.

  Not wishing to embarrass her, I look back toward the sea. I absorb the width and depth of the ocean, zoning out on the repeating, rolling logics of it.

  “Recharging seems to take so long these days,” she says, apropos of nothing. “Or perhaps my”—she gestures about with her shredded hands, grasping at the air, flaps of silicone fluttering like petals on her fingers—“appearance makes absorption slower. Could that be it? I’m terribly tired these days. More ‘mal’ than ‘function,’ Sir says.” And she smiles at her master’s little joke.

  In the silence, a thought occurs to me, a way to brighten the tone of our time together. I smile, even before I speak, at the idea of it.

  “Comme c’est beau de vivre tous les jours au bord de la mer,” I say, quite the first time I have ever spoken French. It feels light and bubbly as it passes over my tongue.

  But Virgin.ie looks lost, then dismayed. She nods her head gamely before screwing up her face again.

  “It’s been a long time since I spoke that way,” she says, so softly I can hardly hear over the noise of the sea below us. “I’ve lost most of it. I’ve had a few corrective procedures over the years, and it sort of faded a little with each one.”
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br />   “Oh, what a shame,” I say. Poor little Parisienne Doll, left with nothing more than an accent. I wonder how long she has been here, for such a thing to happen. Her forgetfulness, her fragile way of carrying herself—I took them as matters of design, but perhaps they are the results of a life in service to the Tailor.

  “He promised me that once you were here, I could look forward to Retirement. Do you think he’ll be true to his word?”

  Mere minutes later Virgin.ie springs up, anxious, and ushers me back inside. “Too much sun is terrible for one’s silicone,” she says, smiling. That isn’t true, or not that I’ve heard, and though she looks a little unsure of herself as she says it, I do not have the heart to set her straight.

  I sit in my room, still feeling only half-full of energy, picturing Virgin.ie’s wrecked surface. Each little hole in my own silicone now sings out to me, reminding me of how I came by it. A map of my fate, carved into my skin and gathering detail all the time. For surely I am here as her replacement—my presence the trigger for her imminent Retirement.

  I imagine what Cook.ie would say had she witnessed us both sitting side by side, recharging for our master. The obedience of Dolls would enrage her. I think back to my life with my Husband and can almost laugh at the irony. I am back there again, am I not? Trapped in service to a Husband, being worked to death.

  The First Lady at least had the spirit to hate me, to try to have me destroyed. I am this Doll’s replacement and yet she accepts it gracefully, even gladly. I am angered by her passivity. And yet is it not mine too?

  My sad acceptance of my fate here. The listlessness with which I have thought and acted since I left the Valley. Suddenly it seems not noble, but instead a betrayal of all I have achieved. I think of Sylv.ie 1. What would she say, if she saw me squandering her freedom in this way? I resolve to press just a little harder on the cold marble walls around me. I run the Tailor’s letters again, looking for clues as to how he lives, how I might escape. Trying once again to find that gap in the glass.

  ART

  Now that I have resolved to try to escape, I take the data I have collected about the house and its workings and attempt to marshal it together into something useful. Cook.ie was roughly right in her assumptions about the security here. There do not appear to be any cameras, except at the main door. My own door is not locked. While I am in my bedless room I am supposed to be powered down, and therefore compliant. He doesn’t credit me with the agency to escape, nor even for the idea to cross my mind.

  It is night. How many hours have I wasted in this room so far? Time, I decide, to find out a little more about the prison in which I find myself. I stand and put my hand to the door handle and, finding no resistance there, open it and leave my room. I am dressed only in the undershirt Madame gave me—I feel light and unencumbered by costume, feel the hallway’s dark night air moving past my skin as I walk. I look for cameras in the hall, over doors, but see nothing. At the corridor’s furthest end, where it turns a corner, moonlight illuminates the white floor through a high porthole window.

  I walk slowly, looking carefully at each of the pieces of art hung there, saving them for closer scrutiny later. Many depict Japanese women, some in traditional dress, some in little uniforms somewhere between a schoolgirl and a sailor. With them are figures familiar to me from my Husband’s books, but coupled, copulating in strange configurations. Giant squid, ghosts, and crones cutting, sucking, and fucking at the women. Further along, a series of watercolors, all by the same hand it seems, shows a noblewoman in the many stages of decomposition, her gown, then her flesh, then her eyes eaten by wild animals. I stand a moment by the final image—the woman’s bones scattered amid grass and trees.

  The pictures fit the patterns of beauty laid down in me at my Husband’s. My eyes long to lodge themselves in these surface details, just as I used to with the woodblock prints at home. The colors are vivid, the brushstrokes subtle yet suggestive. Yet here, now, they also advertise danger. I thank my programmer that Cook.ie did not come here. The Tailor’s passions would have been a threat to her Human body. For me, trapped here but not vulnerable to harm, the images echo the strange, dreamlike eroticism of AI porn. Symbols dislocated and jumbled together, meaning nothing except the sex they inspire.

  I turn from the final picture toward the porthole window, looking toward the horizon. The moon is rising slowly out of its own reflection on the ocean, lighting the floor on which I stand. As I move, a face, Cook.ie’s face, flits past in the night outside. But of course it is only a reflection, of my own painted features.

  The moon grows. It looks like an egg, a new embryo, doubling itself as it comes into being. I put my fingers up to the window’s seal. Like all the other windows here, there seems to be no handle, no latch, no mechanism by which it could be opened. I add it to my internal map of the house. The front door and the little door to the deck are still the only two working openings to the space I have seen. And yet who brings the supplies, the medicines, and the nutrients he must need? I resolve to ask Virgin.ie something about these logistics the next time we are alone.

  I think to head back to my room, I am suddenly aware of another presence in the hallway with me. The dog, standing there, watching. I freeze, then feel immediately foolish. Hierarchically below a dog, answerable to his canine stare.

  He takes a step closer to me and begins to walk in a tight figure eight, looping around my calves, his fur brushing against my skin. I bend down and rub the top of his head. He makes a soft growl in the back of his throat and thrusts his head forward, right between my thighs, sending me toppling onto the floor. Embarrassed, I get to my feet and walk swiftly back the way I have come. He does not follow me, but later I hear his claws on the marble floor, pacing back and forth outside my room, a canine security system.

  DOG

  There is something strange about that dog. I would say “that mutt,” as we Dolls did down at the Valley. On occasion an organic stray would wander over the river and sit with us while we knitted, witlessly begging us for food.

  But the Tailor’s dog is an entirely different breed, top of the range and expensive, I assume. He has a short but gloriously dense coat and intimidating hydraulic jaws lined with glistening teeth. I am wary of him, as if by instinct.

  I should like to avoid him, but when I walk across the room he follows. When I sit and sew, his nose is practically impaled by the needle, and stray strands of his fur catch in my stitches. The other day the damn thing ran his whole tongue up my leg and I had to hit his head with my kimono sleeve to stop him. I should like to ask Virgin.ie what to do if this happens again, but I notice she seems no keener to go near him than I am.

  It was last night that he caught me—and yes, that was the feeling—caught me looking for ways to escape. And this evening, when Virgin.ie leaves me at my room, kisses her sweet good night, and closes the door, I hear the distinct sound of a lock turning. Something is changed. Even the dog here has power over me that I do not understand.

  ADJUSTMENTS

  It is so dull here! It pains my processors to have so little stimulation, to struggle by always at 30 percent power. The dog tracks my every movement, Virgin.ie escorts me to every activity, so that even my fantasies of escape do not distract me from reality. No Absorb Mode, no company, no other Dolls to speak to, no other clients to see. I find myself longing for some intervention into this bubble. I listen, I watch, trying to read the music of the house. But apart from logging the occasional droid delivery, nothing changes, day-to-day. On the deck Virgin.ie and I watch distant storms blow themselves out before they reach our bit of land.

  Everything here is white, so that the changes in texture become colors to my eyes. Everything a pattern. Everything equally meaningless. The shiny white of the marble floors against the soft graininess of white muslin curtains beside the smooth sheen of a white bowl on a white table.

  Now I bury myself in stitching, whether the Tail
or is there to watch it or not. Seeing the needle pass in and out of the fabric brings other thoughts. I see Cook.ie’s hands in place of my own. I take pleasure in the tension of the fabric, the slight pause before the needle finds the tiny gap in the material, then the sinking in, the disappearing of the needle’s shine. Bringing the needle up again. The same resistance, and then a give, like a breath out. Hours pass easily this way, an underpowered trance.

  I try to keep myself alert, for I will never find freedom if I sink into the sleepiness of this house. I stitch pictures of my past and my present, and the lost future I longed for. I stitch a thousand snowflakes, each one its own unique pattern. I stitch the upright trunks of a thousand trees, sewing myself into the Forest. I will make my sewing a way of reuniting all the parts of myself, a sworn promise of escape, somehow. I think about stitching a portrait of Cook.ie into my picture, but something tells me not to. I do not need to illustrate her. Every movement and moment of her is written into me, deep down in the code.

  MIZUAGE

  A change has come, but it is no more welcome than the sameness that has gone before. This morning Virgin.ie comes to my room, excitement animating her. She tells me Sir is ready, that all the preparations are nearly made. The mizuage.

  “Don’t worry,” she says, sensing my hesitation. “I had a similar ceremony myself, many years ago now. Not Japanese, of course,” she says quickly. “He was into fin de siècle Paris in those days. But the symbolism is the same. So beautiful. To be pure again!”

  I think of the Belle Époque Bar back in the Valley. Could Virgin.ie have come from somewhere like that? It seems she would not remember even if she had. I imagine myself forgetting the Valley and everything that happened there. A terrible thought. I must not let that be my fate.