The Hierarchies Read online

  THE FIRST LADY

  At last, a fine day, after a week of low-hanging clouds blown in from the Capital. Today the sun is so high, the air so clear. The warmth of the rays checkerboards the floor, making chess of my every step.

  The baby has been brought out early, and for a while Heron and I watch him, scrunching his hands and mewling below the lace canopy on his cot, as if he is trying to draw all the world toward him. The First Lady crosses the lawn, flattening the grass blades, droiding about with a logic known only to her. She has the basket she collects flowers in over her arm, a pair of sharp scissors in her hand.

  The sunlight, so powerful, has topped me up to the brim, and a restless energy fills me, my feet carrying me to the bookshelves, to the desk, to the table by the window, and back again. Heron speaks occasionally, watching over the garden. Perhaps his attention has been caught by a real bird gliding close to the window. I hear the noise of the droid, all those floors below. It draws me back toward the window, to watch him work. When I do, the little scene below makes me laugh out loud.

  The First Lady, the droid, the dog, and the baby are all on the square of green, each making their own distinct movements. The First Lady stalks the borders, crossing where the droid has just mown, the dog pacing a line behind the baby’s cot. A queen, a knight, a pawn, and a king-in-waiting.

  “Look, Heron,” I say, and he turns his head downward and burbles his delightful bird nonsense in agreement. It is so soothing to watch the droid mow the lawn. He begins at the edges and works his way toward the center, like he’s resolving a puzzle.

  The First Lady straightens up and looks at the flowers laid in her basket. She touches her fingers with such delicacy to the blooms, turning some, shaking them free, before laying the scissors across the stems and turning back toward the house.

  She and the droid pass whisper close, each ignoring the other. She passes the cot and places a single stem on top of the baby’s blanket. I watch, delighted, as he picks it up in his little fist and swings it about, petals falling onto him. Although I admire the grace of the First Lady, there is something satisfying too about seeing the unembarrassed grasp of her son, the destruction that he brings to learning about the world.

  I take a seat, thinking I will watch the last perambulations of the droid. I invite Heron up onto my hand, and together we lean forward toward the glass. The droid passes behind the cot, and my eyes, as so often before, delight at the effect of the grass brightening from dark green to light as his blades pass over it. It is like when I smooth my hand across the velvet of the chaise, leaving a swath through it, swish.

  My eyes return to the baby. His fist is smushed up against his mouth, his eyes screwed nearly shut. The flower and its stalk that he was just waving are nowhere to be seen. I recalibrate, look deep and close into the grass around his cot, and see no sign of its having been dropped. When I bring my wide-open eyes back to him, I see his head trembling side to side, and a slight tremor in his spine, lifting his head from the softness of the blanket. The longer I look the more certain I am. There is a change coming over his body that I have not seen before. A stiffness, a panic.

  Carefully, my own hand a tense talon, I transfer Heron onto the top of his cage and lean further forward in my seat toward the window. I keep my eyes calibrated to take in the tiniest scraps of information. A red flush passes over the baby’s forehead, and then a paleness follows, as if chasing it away. A pall, like smog over the sun, is sickening his complexion.

  At this moment, an area of my wiring that I did not even know was there buzzes with life, and I am on my feet, my fingertips pressing the glass. I beat my fist on the window, to make either the dog or the droid look up toward me. But each cuts their own mysterious path across the lawn, unaware of what is happening beside them.

  For a moment after my fist has struck the glass, making only a dull thud that is absorbed back into the room, nothing happens. The garden is suspended. A dragonfly drops down between branches, accentuating the stillness around it. Then I register movement at the edge of the scene. The First Lady running across the immaculate lawn, arms out, toward the cot.

  Her back to me, she leans over and raises the baby up into the air. He is soft, inert, as if set to Rest Mode. I focus on his face, visible over the First Lady’s shoulder, and see only a peaceable blankness there. The First Lady, her back still toward me, her face hidden, flips him swiftly over onto his stomach and, to my amazement, hits him firmly on the back. Once, twice. Again. His little bottom jiggles in his fleecy baby suit, and then, clear as a bell, a single cry.

  She turns him to face her, holding him under his freshly flailing arms, and I see his face, changed again, full of red fury at being restarted so unceremoniously. The poor thing. I almost want to laugh at his obvious indignation. A Human laugh, I would dare to venture. A laugh mixed with relief. The First Lady finally seems to relent, softens her stiff arms, and lays him down onto her shoulder. I watch her bend her knees, bouncing them both, turning a lazy half circle on the fresh green. And she looks up.

  What story does my face tell? The traces of laughter, the furrow of concern? My palm is still flat to the glass, my forehead tilted onto its cool surface. But as her eyes rise from the arena of the lawn and meet mine, I recoil. There is accusation, as if I have been caught spying on something that is not my concern. I have intruded on her privacy. I press my hands together in a gesture of apology, bow my head slightly, and withdraw.

  TUNING

  The events in the garden weigh heavily on me. For one, I cannot help but wonder how the baby felt when he was restarted. If his conception was a switch being flicked, what of the pause I just witnessed? Where did he go?

  Worse, I could see that the baby was coming to harm, and yet I was unable to stop it. Thank goodness that the First Lady realized what was happening. But still, I feel as if I have failed in my role. I find myself in a heightened state. There is an extra layer of alertness that has been introduced. Perhaps what Humans recognize as anxiety. Where before I would try to shut out any noises I overheard from downstairs, now I find that I tune in to them, in case another emergency might arise. The fragility of the baby has been brought home to me—imagine one’s life being in danger from something so flimsy and pretty as a flower.

  Processing this, I wonder whether I could be of more help, to my Husband and the First Lady, if I was allowed a little more freedom to move about the house, outside of my room. I could be on hand to watch the baby when the First Lady is doing other things. I would sit in the corner of the baby’s room quite happily, while my Husband didn’t need me for anything else. The more I think about it, the more sound this idea seems to be. And I should so like to see the baby up close, unmediated by glass.

  When my Husband comes to see me I am eager to share my idea, expecting it to please him. But he seems irritated.

  “Out of the question,” he says without a pause. “She—we—wouldn’t feel comfortable with that. She’s getting on just fine.”

  “Of course,” I say, and bow my head to show I accept what he says. And yet, something still nags at me. Perhaps he has not understood that my intention is purely to be helpful. He was not there when the baby swallowed the flower, after all. Perhaps he doesn’t even know about it.

  “But, I do spend so much time alone. I was thinking it might be a help. To the First Lady. That is all.”

  “I know, Sylv.ie, I know,” he says, drawing my head to his collarbone, and his free hand slides up my thigh. “But please, try and see it from her point of view. As a woman. So much of their role has been . . .” He pauses, as he often does when he’s searching his vocabulary for a word with less sting than the first that came to him. “. . . shared. With you Dolls. Being a good mother means more than it ever did.”

  He tilts my chin up so he can look into my face, to see the effect of his words. “It’s not easy, Sylv.ie, for me, to keep all these demands balanced. To keep you bot
h happy. You can understand that, can’t you? For me?”

  DREAMS

  I accepted what my Husband said. And yet something in me insists I should remain vigilant, if only from a respectful distance.

  Last night I had the strangest dream. Usually when I am powered down but not switched off, I dream of the data I have been exposed to that day. It runs like fluid through me and surrounds me, all at once. But it is not visual. Not as I understand Human dreams. And certainly I have listened to enough of my Husband’s to gather what those entail.

  But last night, out of this field of dark data came an image. The horizontals and verticals formed into a picture of my own face, newly minted, encased in a box, just like the baby. I felt myself being passed from one set of arms to another, as he was in the first moments he arrived.

  My eyes were closed but suddenly started open, as if I too had been restarted. I recoiled and found myself, truly awake now, sitting up in bed with the blankets rumpled. I sat there awhile, trying to keep hold of what I had seen. Why would all that data have coalesced into one picture like that? And then, far off in the house, somewhere below me, I could hear the faintest trace of the baby’s crying. A door banging, someone getting up. The First Lady, I think.

  CRYING

  For three nights now the Capital and the whole of the suburbs have been plagued by the most dreadful electrical storm. The windows have been blanked out by relentless rain, leaving me nearly starved of power. I got myself ready each evening, but no one came to see me. The droid didn’t even come to clean.

  I was relieved, if anything, as during those three days I did not feel quite myself. I was jumpy and jangled; each fork of lightning sent a little unpleasant pulse through me. Is it overly romantic to suggest, just as Humans do about the moon, that it was my wiring yearning for a similar but infinitely more powerful source?

  This morning the rain had cleared and I could see to the bottom of the garden again. The whole place was a jumble of dropped leaves and bent fencing, a row of Ultra Dahlias ripped right from the ground and flung about. I was watching the First Lady in the middle of it all. A young branch had fallen from the willow tree and appeared to be completely tangled in the droid’s wheels. She had him lying on his side on the grass, her foot pressed against his body, while she tried to haul the branch free. She was exerting extreme effort but with no results, and after a while she kicked the droid in sheer frustration. I felt a little sorry for him, thinking that perhaps the storm had sickened him too. For all I know he might have been malfunctioning like mad all weekend.

  The First Lady slumped down onto her haunches, defeated, and then I saw her touch her finger to her ear, begin speaking into the phone on her wrist. And that is when I heard it. The clearest, most eloquent sound that has ever passed through my sensors. The baby crying alone in his room below.

  I race through the protocols to find what I should do, yet a definitive answer eludes me. I know what my Husband has said, and yet I am also certain he does not have the full data. For wasn’t it a situation just like this that brought his son to danger before? And if he had the complete picture, would he not wish me, even urge me, to help in this instance?

  The First Lady has her back to the house, her hand on her hip. She is at the bottom of the garden, gesticulating into the bushes. The cry comes again, and once again I run the protocols and . . . find that I am on the stairs already, following the sound of crying like a data pulse through the house.

  The door to the baby’s room is open, but everything is quiet again when I reach it. I take a tentative step inside. The baby is there in his crib, but his face is smooth, peaceful now, and the little fingers of one hand drum softly on his own cheek, making a little old man of him. So amusing, so touching. The shadow of the older self already cast on the infant, a story waiting to become clear. His skin looks as flawless and malleable as silicon, and on impulse I lean down to him, just to touch my cheek to his, for comparison. Or perhaps as an expression of sympathy.

  I think about seeing him restarted that day on the lawn, and I wonder what this means for him. Whether it has shocked and upset his system. It can’t have been pleasant, and I wonder, do babies remember everything, even if those memories are only stored as moods, impressions, fears?

  My hair, trailing into the cot as it swings over my shoulder, brushes against him, and he gurgles a little laugh as it tickles. I draw back, surprised even as I am delighted, for I didn’t mean to disturb him, only to check that he was unharmed. His eyes blink open and meet mine. I feel him taking in the sight of my face. I imagine I can feel it sinking down into his wiring and settling, establishing itself there as fact.

  Does he wonder who I am, this previously unseen member of the family? I think of how, not so long ago, it was me taking in my Husband’s face for the first time. The baby is only a short while behind me in his development. Perhaps in time he will come to think of me as a sort of older sibling, one who has shared similar experiences, constructed life from the same set of reference points.

  “A-do-be-do-be-do-be-do,” I say to him, just as I would to Heron, and he breaks into a wet grin. I dip my head down into the cot again, let my hair dangle over him again. “A-do-be-do-be-do-be.” This time he laughs out loud, a chuckling, chickenlike noise.

  I stand back up, glancing out toward the garden through the open window, but from here the view is only of the trees and the wall. As I can hear no noise I must assume that the First Lady has finished her call about the droid. And though I am certain that she would, on balance, be pleased to find me checking on her baby while she was indisposed, I withdraw from the room quickly and quietly, and make my way back up the stairs.

  REPERCUSSIONS

  I have miscalculated. My fears for the baby. The storm. Perhaps I have unbalanced myself by ingesting so many conception videos. Invited a malfunction down into me, like a sin.

  I heard nothing from downstairs before my Husband came, had no warning of the mood that he would arrive in. But as soon as the door to my room opens I can tell by the very vibrations of the air that he is angry. He closes the door firmly behind him and instructs me to sit down on the bed. While he speaks, he keeps one hand clenched. A signal of tension, or a precursor of violence? Surely not. He thrusts the fist forward and opens it below my nose.

  “What is this?” he demands, and for a second I am relieved that he is asking me something so easy.

  “My brooch,” I say, but on the B of brooch the implications are already exposed to me. I was wearing it this morning, attached to the sweater I put on from the night before. I stupidly, automatically touch my fingers to the place on my chest where it ought to be.

  He turns from me and flings it onto my desk, where it skids and clatters against a beaten-copper dish full of rings.

  “So why did my wife find it in our son’s room? Did you put it there? Tell me the truth.” I am taken aback by this, for surely he doesn’t think I could tell him anything else.

  I explain, emphasizing to a fair extent, I think, why I was compelled to go and check on the baby, confident that once he knows the truth of it he will be placated. And yet my confession seems only to make him more angry.

  “You stay away from him!” he shouts, and I wonder if the First Lady can hear it downstairs. He takes a step closer, lowers his voice. “What is the matter with you? Have you been hacked? It’s bad enough to have you staring down at my wife every day, judging her. You can’t possibly know anything about what it means to have a child to look after. She is outraged, and so am I.”

  I bow my head, because he is right, of course.

  “The child is barely formed. He is vulnerable to every little thing he comes into contact with. What, do you think I want him growing up thinking a robot is his mother! Stay away from him,” he commands to my scalp. “Stay away from those windows. My wife would have you sent away at once if anything like this occurred again. And now, thanks to your behavior,
I can’t even spend the evening with you. In fact, I couldn’t bear to anyway.”

  He slams shut the door before I can even begin to apologize. I walk over to where the brooch has landed and pick it up. It is the haughty little art deco cat. I turn it over and see that both its eyes, the tiniest darling little diamonds set into the sleek black enamel, have been gouged out.

  I power down to Absorb Mode. I am alone in this world, in a way I have never felt before. How I wish I had been hacked; then I could have someone other than myself to blame.

  Yes, that day that the baby was brought, I was watching. How could I pass up the chance to see something so fundamental to the family that I live alongside? The family that I allow, in my way, to operate healthily. My Husband was becoming a father, and I could watch the moment. I watched when his wife, having bent over at the baby with such closeness that their noses touched, turned and edged the bundle into his arms. She touched her fingers to the curl of his hair, as if reminding him of her centrality to the moment. And my Husband looked down at the baby’s face as if staring into something of incomprehensible depth. The mystery of replication. Of a life that does not end with oneself.

  I meant no harm by my looking, nor by my offer of help. Did not see that there was any harm to be had. It is true, I have enjoyed standing at the window. But now I fear it was another misjudgment. For has it soothed me to watch my Human counterparts cutting fresh flowers, drinking wine, and watching the sun set with the grass under their feet, the baby on their laps? No, it has only sparked in me a hunger to truly experience all the pleasures of the world of which I am clearly not a part.

  PART TWO

  Doll Hospital