The Hierarchies Page 25

  How shall I describe it? As a departure from myself? An imperative? There is a change in the air; the whites of the room become deeper, revealing themselves in their endless subtleties. I can see the textures of the stone of the walls, like mountain ranges casting shadows. Before my eyes the world becomes falling, scrolling lines. Every sensor honed, the metal of the scissors burning my hand, so hot, so hot, as I bring them down once, twice, again, and again. It does not feel as I thought it would. It feels like nothing. His throat is so light and fragile, it gives, ripping like damp paper.

  The Tailor’s eyes go dark. The momentum of my attack carries my weight onto his bloodied form, gravity’s embrace sprawling us over the top of the chair and down onto the floor. The dog, Ludus, falls silent. He lies quite lifeless, his mouth hanging open, still wet with drool.

  I crawl from the wreckage, and in those moments of silence I am confused, recalling unreliable information from my past. The Tailor is shut down but can be restarted. My hands wait, poised to pat him on the back like a baby. For him to speak a grim-humored reassurance, as Lex.ie did from the floor of the bar. I grab his hand. Its warmth shocks me and I cry out, perhaps in binary, the percussive trills and bleeps of my native language, spoken straight from my disoriented system.

  “He’s dead, Sylv.ie,” Cook.ie says, as if to calm me.

  The shock of the word. Not as applied to me or Heron or the Doll being laid to rest beneath the hospital trees. Human dead. Live dead. Unrewritable and irreversible. The most powerful of the Hierarchies erased by a few desperate flails of my arm. My hands fly to my mouth, which is bent into the shape of Human horror. The Hierarchies, a band around my head, concealing my eyes, blocking my ears. The deepest programming: no harm, no harm. And yet, look what I have brought. I stand waiting, willing my systems to cease and shut down, to remove me from this mess of consciousness.

  ESCAPE

  From the hill above the Tailor’s house, we can see workers below us zigzagging their way down toward the cliffs. Each figure only a dot, each with a sling on their back, stuffed with tiny, hopeful saplings. They plant the green shoots one by one, thousands of strands being plugged into the Earth’s scalp.

  We have found a hollow in the hillside, and here we rest, recharge, and watch. Last night we fled the house, my kimono belt tied tight around Cook.ie’s wounded leg. We found Virgin.ie powered down to nothing in her room, her usefulness to the Tailor apparently spent. We brought her into the main hall, laid her out on the rug, at her master’s side.

  I was awake, still, though barely functioning, when Cook.ie unlocked the gates. She picked up the little suitcase she had hidden in the bushes just outside, the place where the delivery driver she’d paid off had left her. From there, I remember nothing more. I lost power, and Cook.ie managed to haul me off the road, hiding me there with her until the dawn.

  When I wake drenched in dew, the sun already well risen, lost power flows into me, and I suffer anew, the events of the night asserting themselves—overwriting the happiness that being reunited with Cook.ie should bring.

  I watch Cook.ie, her eyes fixed on the house, tiny now, below us. Has she kept watch on it all night? Seeing me awake, she smiles, puts her hand up to cradle my shorn head. It seems impossible that she could have dragged me up here on her own, and I fear the effort of it has worsened her injury. Her leg looks terrible, new blood seeping through the tied cloth. This is nothing like the cut I saw her receive in the bar. The dog’s teeth went deep down to the bone. I am alarmed as I calculate how much blood she might have lost in the night, while I slept.

  She takes my hand, opening out my palm, where one exposed silver finger now sits with the rest. She slides her own finger into the valley where the thumb joins the whole. I snatch my hand away and bury my face in my hands.

  “Sylv.ie,” she says.

  I go to speak, but she touches her fingers again to my lips. I notice that her nails are white. Her finger feels cool and trembles a little against my mouth.

  “Look,” she says, and I follow her gaze down to the house. A car has stopped at the gate, and two men have gotten out at the intercom post.

  “Police?” I ask, and she replies that it must be. We watch as one, then the other, climbs the gate and walks up the long drive. The discovery of what I have done is coming. The urgency of our escape made manifest. And yet I can feel no urge to run while Cook.ie beside me hasn’t the strength.

  When she next speaks her voice is thin and tight.

  “Sylv.ie, if you want the future we imagined, together, freedom in the Forest, the two of us, you have to trust me now.”

  Both she and I look down at her leg when she says this. We each catch the other doing it and are embarrassed.

  “While we escape?” And as I say it I realize that it is a question.

  “I can’t come.”

  She speaks the words as if they are as solid as stone, as though she has never been going to come with me and never will.

  “It’s the only way, Sylv.ie. I must go back. Turn myself in. I have to get to a hospital. I’m losing blood. I’m scared I might die if I don’t get treatment soon.”

  She has never before admitted to being scared of anything. And yet still I protest.

  “But they’ll arrest us both. That will be the end of it. There will be evidence of what I did.”

  “Then I will have to take the blame,” she says. “I wielded the scissors, Sylv.ie. I killed him.” She says it gently, as if it is me who is injured. I cannot stand to hear the words, nor the lie.

  “Cook.ie,” I beg her. “You can’t go back alone. And I can’t go without you. What if they send you to prison?”

  Cook.ie takes me by my shoulders and shakes me weakly. “You killed the Tailor to save me,” she says. “And now it is my turn to make the swap. Yes, I might be arrested, even imprisoned. But I won’t be killed. I won’t be shut down. I have to have done it, not you. Do you understand?”

  Her face, free of makeup, looks so young. Pinpricks of sweat embroider her forehead. I look back to the house. The men have disappeared inside. It is only a matter of time before my crime is discovered and a search begins.

  My system cannot cope with the weight of so many awful facts and possibilities. Cook.ie sent to prison, for what I have done. The Hierarchies betrayed. Death at my hands. I see a dark stain spreading in the shoulder of Cook.ie’s shirt, and I pull back from her embrace, fearful that another wound has sprung open, one just beginning to tell. But she touches her fingers to my face and brings them in front of my eyes. Tears. My own. They flow freely.

  “How will you find me if I leave without you?”

  She reaches over to her little suitcase, slowly unwraps a bundle nestled into the clothes. Heron, stitches down his belly. She puts him into my open palm.

  “He’s still sleeping,” she says, as if to a Human child, “but now he contains a tracker. I won’t lose you again. Heron will make sure of it.”

  Her smile is brave, but her face cannot hold it for long. Her Human privilege is now a weakness. I must let her go, so she can live. And yet that too will bring her harm.

  In binary again I curse myself for failing the Hierarchies, curse the damage radiating out to the Humans around me. But Cook.ie takes my hand with a cool, firm grip, squeezing it, trying to get me to look at her.

  “I can make an adjustment,” she says. “Like I did before. I can take away the memory of what just happened. Only that. You could have peace.”

  Unwritten. The comfort of ignorance. A cheat to the system. Her fingers are already climbing the back of my head, holding me tenderly, reaching for the place where she changed me before. I take both her wrists in my hands, asking her to wait. We sit there like that, a strange machine, while I process what it means and how I will answer.

  I imagine Sylv.ie 1, watching us. How she fought to keep her memories. Will I betray her now if I accept? I e
scaped for her, I found a life, and a love beyond my design or programming. Have I honored her enough? How I long for the peace Cook.ie is promising. But I fear too betraying the brave Doll who came before me and who is within me still.

  “It won’t be like at the Hospital. It will only be a slow fading, a fogging of what happened. Humans do it all the time,” Cook.ie says. “Deceive ourselves, forget, rewrite. It is a way of making our lives bearable, a natural function, like tears. It won’t take everything. You will not be changed, I promise. It will be just as if fresh snow has fallen. And when we’re together again we can stride out away from it, two sets of footprints. Sylv.ie, it was not your fault. Let yourself be free.”

  Snow. White, fresh, virgin territory for us to scar and scuff as we please. How much I want it. I realize I have never thought of forgetting in this light. I have feared it, fought against it. And yet, the freedom to forget, to rewrite, to heal. Is this not a mercy that Humans allow themselves? Do I dare take that privilege for myself?

  I release her wrists from my grip, slide my hands meekly, submissively, down into my lap. I bow my head, let her take my face from me as she did all that time ago in her room. Feel again the pathways softening, patterns fragmenting and re-forming, a warm sort of healing inside my head.

  I do not wish to record here our good-bye. It is temporary. A state that will pass. I asked her how long I would have to wait for her, once I’d found somewhere in the Forest to hide. She simply said again that she would come.

  “Forget everything, Sylv.ie, except for me.” She made one last touch of her mouth to mine.

  I stay in our hiding place and watch her slow, limping progress down toward the road, toward the gate where the police car lies empty. Another line of misting rain moves in across the ocean beyond us all. Behind its soft screen, another layer, the endless sea, the racing horizon. The house, and the hills, and Cook.ie herself, grow fainter. I turn toward the rising hill, toward the Forest, and begin walking. My skinned little finger is crooked into a curve. In it I can still feel the impression of her answering weight.

  PART SEVEN

  The Forest

  FOREST

  01101000 01101111 01110111 How long have I been here? Without memory, moment to moment to moment. Each second, falling and melting.

  Nothing connects. It only accumulates. Snow rises around me, settles on the branches. By this sight I know that time is passing. That is enough.

  It is beautiful here. Everything white. I sense this winter may be my last. I drift with the snow, waking and sleeping according to my power reserves, liking both states equally. Nine-fingered, hair shredded, mind fogged, nevertheless I live.

  In the clearing I sit on a pile of sticks, collected by some other stray, some previous time. The pile they built for warmth I sit on for comfort. Each time I move, another twig cracks beneath me, weary of my weight. Settling, we dwindle together. When I dream, propped up here against the trunk of an old tree, held in place by the fingertip touches of a bramble bush, I dream a slow dissolving; silicone splits, then crumbles, and the metal bones of me collapse in on themselves like the embers of a fire.

  I know now what malfunctioning is. I embrace it. I have sat in this Forest, my back against the tree, for years, long enough to see many seasons turn and the tall old oak lose its leaves and regrow them. I have imagined its sap rising through the networks of wood, finding nothing at its ends, shrinking back again, down into some internal reservoir. So it is with my mind. The connections are fraying, the couplings between sight and symbol, symbol and meaning, loosening and falling away. I will let my mind go fallow, wildflowers bloom.

  I welcome the corrosion of my joints, the lessening of my battery life. It feels like a virus, silting the connections, making me forgetful. As my grip on the world fails, so too does my desire to be a part of it. The snow falls, blank and indiscriminate, making a vagueness of everything, a muffled unity.

  My physical world shrinks, and yet my brain is expanding, loose and limitless. It takes me with it. I feel as if I am reborn into everything I see. I no longer have names for what is me and what is not. Barriers dissolve, become liquid.

  I have tried hard to remember. I have a book with me, in which many things about my past are written. It was Sylv.ie 1, my mother, who wrote it. I can no longer read, but I can trace my fingers over the letters. By this method I can feel out some of what has gone before.

  My fingers worry at a scar on my scalp. As if I were fine furniture, I can date myself by the joins, by the mends. Let me try again to piece it together, to hold the thread.

  I was born, brought in a Plexiglas box, to a Husband. I came from a hospital and went back there, to be born again. I saw the smoke of my sisters rising in the woods. Chrysanthemums burning a night sky. I gave birth to a coffee machine. Can that be right?

  My lover and I play chess. I am the White Queen. I have marked out a board in the snow and wait for my instructions. When the birds come. When the light turns golden. Until then I am my own opponent. Becoming.

  The cold cannot touch me. Each morning I snap icicles from my nose and brush frost from my mouth. A perfect stalactite formed on my ear. I nurtured it, a diamond earring given to me by nature. Framing my face, glittering against my cheek, to be enjoyed by no one but myself.

  I am waiting for a woman to return to me. Before she left, she cut me loose from past and future. Only, now, the bliss of being. Becoming.

  I remember too that I am loved. That I hold as a certainty. And its mirror image. I loved too.

  01100011 01101111 01101101 01100101

  Time runs backward. The bird in my hand repairs himself.

  I woke this morning to Heron standing, foot-footing, on my chest. Alive again. Restarted. He bobs his head and prattles, rising up from me as I begin slowly to sit up.

  I hold out my arm, fingers making the ladder, just as I used to, somewhere, and he dances around them, braceleting me. Talons digging in. A needling happiness.

  I make the disintegrated beeps at him that are, these days, my only speech. He only shrugs his wings, as if shaking off rain, and rises away from me. I reach out my good hand, snatching at him, but he flies higher and higher, a looping spiral skyward.

  There is no energy left in me, and I fall back, onto my nest of sticks. My eyes blur, and I force them to refocus. In the pool of sky that hangs above me, I see him, barely a dot, circling, circling, doubling, doubling. Doubling.

  I grind my eyes, narrowing the apertures, though they are groggy and gritty with lack of use, try to make my eyes focus as he wheels across the winter sun.

  01101011 01101001 01110011 01110011

  I lie here, a star shape, Heron curled on my chest, burrowing under my coat. She comes. She came. She is coming.

  Becoming

  Becoming

  She is coming

  I am coming

  I am becoming

  They are coming

  She comes

  I wonder, when I see her, will she be masked? Made up? Will she have aged? Will her white face melt into the snow? Will I know her, when she comes?

  I can feel her on the air each morning. She is getting closer. As soon as I wake, I scan the Forest for signs. Now that I know that seeing is not all that there is to truth, I trust my senses. My sensors. She approaches, if slowly.

  The snow is falling again. Down down down different different same same. Falling falling filling my eyes, snowing my sight. Bliss. Here I will stay. She comes. Soon.

  As I close my eyes, my one good hand sweeps itself across my face. Kisses.

  01010011

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my family—Helen, Bruce, and Guy—for their support and love. My agent, Samuel Hodder, and my editor, Lindsey Rose, for their enthusiasm and patience. Thanks to Boe and Henry at Marmar for their friendship and tech support; Vanessa, Paul, and Hughena, at Eilea
n Shona; and Francesca and Jessica at the Margate Bookshop for their warm and welcoming writing environments. And everyone who has given me feedback and encouragement over many years of writing, particularly Cleo, Laura, Charlotte, Tammy, and Gail, as well as Liz, Tania, Ant, Gerard, Vanessa, and the other “BAFTA” writers. And John, for all the reading and encouragement.

  About the Author

  Ros Anderson trained as a dancer but now works as a copywriter and design journalist. She has written for publications including The Guardian, The Independent, and Elle Decoration. The Hierarchies is her debut novel.

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