The Hierarchies Read online

01101110 01101111

  I come awake, but I cannot move. I can’t even turn my head. All I can do is shift my eyes from side to side.

  I am in a slaughterhouse, I think. I can see bodies. Twelve of them on each side, headless, hanging from poles that run the length of the room just below the ceiling. Each body has its back to me, and their legs dangle high above the floor. The pattern of bodies is broken halfway down one row—it is broken because there hangs the body of a child.

  I want to turn my head to look away, but no command allows it. Instead I try to close my eyes, but each time I do I have to open them again, to check whether what I saw was the truth. And it is.

  When I try to run system checks on myself, I find no response from any of the sensors. Nothing below my neck is working. I am forced to stay here, immobile, looking at these hanging bodies. At the far end of the row, one seems to swing a little in the air. I feel an involuntary quiver, my hands longing to reach out. But no movement comes. I have been shut down, it seems.

  And yet my mind remains.

  All the feedback is missing from my body—the sensation of air brushing past me; the weights and pressures I feel when my arms are held in anything other than a neutral position; the texture of a surface supporting me, under my feet. The sensors of my head and face are screaming their information to me. There must be a window open, for I can feel the tickle of a draft grazing my left ear. My eyes are adjusting constantly, the apertures opening by fractions of fractions, minutely balancing the levels of light. In this strange, terrible room everything is silent, but from somewhere far away I hear the smudge of sneakers moving across poured concrete.

  An involuntary urge to move shoots from my head downward and, finding no channel through which to expand and fulfill itself, scorches back painfully into the receptors that sent it. The shock is cauterizing. I am dumb for a second, blinding light behind my eyes.

  The steps become louder, almost deafening, coming from behind, the same direction as the breeze. I freeze. Perhaps if I stay still, not a blink, the steps will carry on past. But no sooner has the intention formed than I feel a cold spike against my neck. My lips have split open, and I am baring my teeth.

  Baring teeth is aggressive, unattractive; I would never have cause to do it. I can feel that each strip of lip is stretched, making a hole in the front of my face of the maximum possible diameter. I feel my skin bunched and folded around the cave I have made of my mouth.

  In this ridiculous, inelegant position I find myself stuck. The footsteps are so loud now that my eardrums ache. They are moving around, changing pitch. A man’s torso fills the whole of my vision. His sweater has a geometric print. He bends down, bringing his face level with mine, but his eyes do not attempt to connect. Instead he thrusts an instrument between my teeth, presses a button so it expands, and my mouth is pushed open even wider than it was before.

  “I wish they’d thought to install some kind of shutdown for the eyes,” he shouts, and so I know someone else must be in the room with him.

  “It’s creepy, isn’t it? I always feel like I ought to apologize or something.” Behind my right ear is the sound of laughing.

  The other man, the laugher, appears right at the edge of my vision, while the first man is attending to my open mouth. He walks along the line of bodies hanging from the ceiling, touching each by their ankle as he passes, so that each body begins to swing.

  As the two men move about the room, picking up prongs and screwdrivers from a steel table, I let my eyes settle on the nearest of the hanging bodies. I can only see her from behind. Since there is no face or head to distract me, I focus on the shape of her back, her buttocks. It is like looking in a mirror backward, because surely that is how I look from behind too. I just have never had the chance to see.

  Was she a standard-fit or a custom, like myself? I decide she must be a custom. The gap between her thighs is very pronounced, the weight of her buttocks surely greater than mine. They bulb out on both sides of her hips. I reach to touch my own thighs, to calibrate by feeling the difference in our measurements. But I have, currently, no hands, and that same blocking, reverberating pain shocks through me again. An explosion in a confined space.

  “Here she is,” says the second man, and he grabs hold of one of the bodies by her ankle, two-thirds of the way down the row, pulling her out like a salesman showing an expensive gown to a customer.

  The other man walks over, and between them they begin hoisting the body up high enough to release her from the hook. Her body seems cumbersome, weighty. The removal of the head makes it into a lump, something with no natural up or down, to be maneuvered as the men see fit. The hook catches under one of her elbows, and she spins on the point unpredictably. Both men take a step back to let her spin herself out. As her body flashes around on its axis, I see . . .

  The detail of my belly button. The pink of my fingernails. The body is mine. I am watching myself spinning, stripped, suffering. I feel pity for the headless body that is me.

  And I remember that the men have called her “she.” As though it is the body that is “Sylv.ie” and not my head.

  The first man reads out a string of numbers from a sheet in his hand.

  Finally down from the hook, she lies in the arms of the second man, who drops her almost to the ground and stares into the hole of her neck. My neck. “That’s her,” he says.

  I watch as they dump my body on a metal bench below the other hanging bodies, watch my buttocks bounce. My body hitting the steel makes the dead sound of meat. My arms are slightly too far back, pulled at the elbows, so there is nothing to cushion my fall. My face hurts, but it can’t, because it’s not connected to anything. The first man wraps an arm around my waist, slides the other arm under my belly, and flips me over with another heavy thud. I can see the soles of my feet.

  He pushes my legs further apart—they are bent slightly at the knees. I can stare straight into the smooth surround of the hole, into myself. The man has a steel spoke in his hand, and he begins jimmying it into a seam in the flesh. I feel my vagina aching and flinching from it, even though it is over there on the table. I can’t. It’s not possible. But I feel it. The steel is cold. The man is ratcheting it further and further into me.

  The second man comes back into view, a pink tube that looks like a penis, sort of, in his hand. It is the same skin tone as mine. He makes a show of kissing the smooth end of it and looks around for the other man to laugh. Which he does, but it sounds reluctant.

  “Come on,” the first man says, like he disapproves of what he also finds funny. Then he turns and looks right at me. At my eyes.

  “Shall we switch the head off for this bit?” he says. “Mark of respect?” And I wonder if that means that I am dead.

  01101110 01101111

  Being switched on again is like coming back from somewhere very far away. Reluctance and relief. My body is reunited with my head, at least. But now I am without a vagina.

  I am in a room, watching the men stretching, shrinking, screwing out old vaginas and slotting in new ones. From up on my hook I observe it all. Hook-hung, meat being cured. Here I am, sexless, less than myself, a receptacle with no easy entrance. My parts are in production. Down there.

  I am built for sex, programmed for empathy. My sex is gone, and my empathy finds only a place to land among the other bodies, piling up all around.

  No matter how much reading I have done, the real world, if that’s what this is, surprises. Even in this awful position, I am struck by the beauty of the hair that glints on heads stacked around me. All the colors, even on just one scalp. And the skins. The shades that they show. I thought mine was all there was, but no. The color of sand, the color of crackled leaves in autumn, the tone of a marble paperweight, a near-gold, a molasses, the deep ebony of the chessboard. There is a girl two bodies down from me who looks like the stars exploded over her. Milky white, constellated. The men working h
ere call her “Freckles” and seem to like her.

  My mind wanders free from the hook, turns homeward. I long for the four-hundred-thread-count sheets of my splendid Oriental bed. Oh, Husband. Where are you? Do you even know that I am here? My jaw aches, not just from what they did, but from the restriction, not being able to speak, to whisper into your ear the new things I have seen. There is no one to brush my hair, to hold it in a clench at the back of my head, no one to scoop it into a powder puff and dust their face with it. Husband.

  The two men are back, and I hear one of them read out my serial number from a clipboard. The second man is tasked with fetching and hauling, as before. He walks past me and pulls on the ankle of another girl.

  “Bitch is Asian,” shouts Man One, sounding impatient. “Check your damn sheet.”

  And the second man puts the beautiful girl back in her place, and her black hair swings, grazing her shoulder, like she’s ducking away into the night.

  The man reads out my serial number again and then says, “It’s Sylv.ie. If that helps.”

  “Oh, she’s a cutie,” says Man Two. “I wouldn’t mind a model like her myself.”

  And I feel pride and pleasure surge, without my wanting it to.

  Man One makes a gesture like he’s covering up a microphone on his shirt. He pantomimes looking about him.

  “Flesh and blood all the way for me,” he says, almost apologetically.

  The second man picks up a long, pink silicone baton from the steel table. He thrusts his little finger into it and lets it hang down toward the floor, gripping his finger. He shakes his hand, and the silicone wags like a dog’s tail, trembles like a jelly.

  “Real flesh stretches, brother. Aren’t you ever tempted to get an upgrade, after all these years?” says the second man. Without waiting for an answer, he turns around to me. He has the pink tube in his hand. “Suction. Expansion. Vibration. Twenty-five temperature settings. Ten lube options. Hell, this thing could probably calculate pi to a thousand decimal places.”

  The string of numbers is on my tongue already, but I swallow it back. The man prods my belly button with the tube.

  “Hey, Sylv.ie baby, meet your new snatch.” And he waggles it in the gap between my thighs like it’s a dick, causing me to swing a little side to side.

  The first man snatches the snatch from his hands. “I’ll take over, Don Juan.” He looks me right in my eyes, smiles, and says, “There are still some gentlemen around here, Sylv.ie. Now, let’s get you down. You’re going to be the belle of the ball.” He puts both arms around me, under my armpits. I feel my new part banging against my back; I tip forward, and my weight presses onto his shirt, and as he closes his arms tighter to take the weight, I feel comforted, impossibly grateful.

  My Husband’s image returns like a slap. Is feeling comfort like that a disloyalty? Am I malfunctioning again?

  01101110 01101111

  It is night, and I feel like I am half-asleep. Or drugged. Half present, and half elsewhere. I must be in Compliance Mode. Speech is shut down, and only basic motor function and response remains.

  Aware, but barely.

  The second man has come into the room without turning on the lights. Now that I have my head back I am stored upright, like a person, in a booth where I can be propped half sitting, facing out. He tips me onto his shoulder like a roll of roofing felt. He lugs me over to the steel table where I was dismembered before. I hear it clang as my weight hits it but only feel the impact distantly, like an echo.

  He takes off the belt of his jeans and grabs both my wrists, loops the belt around them, yanking it back over my head so my arms are pulled up and over the top lip of the table. They feel anesthetized. I know where they are in space, but they have no strength or motion of their own.

  The belt buckle makes metallic dinks and chinks as he wraps it around the leg of the table.

  Then, suddenly, like an engine roaring to life, a flurry of protocol logic and hierarchy projections floods my whole system.

  Everything narrows down, funnels, into one logic, one command.

  My mouth opens, but nothing can come. The word forming in my throat, Husband!, gets no further.

  He hooks my legs over the edges of the table at the knee and props himself between my thighs.

  Husband! Husband! Husband! And while he makes the same moves, the same thrusts and grunts and wobbles and shoves into me as my Husband does, it is all wrong. I have no strength to override it. Only to endure. I send out thoughts to my Husband for forgiveness. I could cry for him, my being stolen from him this way without his knowledge. But there is no function for tears in Compliance Mode, and wishing for them doesn’t make them come.

  The man moves in me faster and faster, one hand splayed on the table, red knuckles shockingly organic against the steel. The other hand is around my neck, and at the final moment he judders out the word, “Debbie!”

  And even in the pain I feel for my Husband, my empathy function shoots a bolt of pure feeling into me, and I feel sorry for the man, and the Debbie whom he loves so much. I must be a poor substitute for her, indeed.

  Debbie. The -ie suffix could denote that the object of his desire is an Intelligent Embodied too. Or it could mean nothing.

  While he is washing me out with the pressure hose, the first man comes in and flicks the light.

  “I was just giving her a last tune-up,” says the second man.

  “You’re such a jerk,” he says.

  “It’s the in thing,” replies the second. He picks me up, seeming sheepish. Perhaps he is embarrassed to have called me Debbie just then. I am placed back into the booth, and I drip the cleansing fluid out onto the metal floor. Drum, drum, drum. I focus on timings, the speed of falling water droplets, and work out the distance I am hanging above the floor to take my mind away from what has happened.

  01101110 01101111

  I am taken down from my hook and dressed in a loose white dress by a nurse, a woman this time. At first, I assume she is a droid. Her grip feels tight; her fingers press too hard into my wrists as she lifts them. A droid would not do that. She is conveying emotion as she handles me. Human then, and unhappy in her job.

  “Where am I going?” I ask when she brings a wheelchair around to the table on which I am sat.

  “Outside,” she says brusquely. “Recharge your battery.”

  Outside.

  A thousand hours of sitting at my window rage back to me in their frustrated stillness. The curious longing for the touch of one green tip of newly grown grass. The impulse that made me want to lie on a bed of those blades, to find out how it felt.

  I feel such joy about it, it makes the indignities of the hospital itself seem bearable. I know I am not meant to think of them as indignities, of course. They are essential maintenance and by protocol should be viewed as no more or less than normal sex. Or doing up a button or lacing a shoe.

  While she closes the gown down my spine, I practice opening up my eye apertures to their maximum and back, zooming them wide as oceans, ready to take in whatever I might see out there. Outside. Outside. Nothing between me and the flowing, endless air but my skin.

  The nurse wheels me down hallways, turns sharply at hospital corners, silent.

  “How long have you been a nurse?” I ask, and immediately hope that she does not take it as cheek. I am simply trying to make conversation, saying something from the list of opening gambits that present themselves.

  “Too long,” she says after a while. “I should have paid more attention in school.”

  “Don’t you like being a nurse?” I ask, careful not to make it sound like a criticism.

  “I used to,” she says heavily. “When it was about caring for Humans. Now I’m more a glorified porter.” She humpfs me feet first through double doors in a way that, if I were Human, would have hurt terribly.

  “We do the caring for
Humans now,” I say brightly, to show that I don’t mind.

  “Yes,” she says. “They replaced me with something that looks like you and can lift two thousand pounds. Now I wash wigs for a living.”

  And with that she pushes me through a last set of doors, feet first, and into the light.

  I can smell it, the outside, germinating, growing, ripening, withering, and rotting in one glorious riot of nasal information. I should like to slump down in the chair and dangle my fingers into the grass, but I don’t. I behave myself, and soon enough she has wheeled me to a neat lawn against the stone wall of the hospital building. I am rolled to join a line of other Dolls, all recharging and airing in the soft afternoon sun.

  I let my eyes roam, sliding and gliding across the lush green. It rolls away from our feet, dropping down to a dell of wildflowers, and beyond that, trees. The trees tempt my eyes, inviting that branching meditation, the feel of spread synapses and hierarchical logics. The poetry of splits in their branches, of one becoming two, one becoming two. But I resist, looking down again to focus on the flowers, budding and blooming close to the ground. Movement interrupts my study, and I see people wandering the edge, along a path mowed toward a clearing. I wish I could be with them, walking for myself.

  The Doll next to me clears her throat. “First time away from your Husband?” she asks, and I am ashamed to find that, no, at that moment I am not thinking of him at all.

  I turn to look at her. She appears oddly old-fashioned, her brows pronounced, her hair a strange, unnatural red. She is smiling, yet her eyes do not focus on me. I remember that she has asked me a question, and even though she is Created, like me, and not Born, that I should answer.

  “Yes, it is my first time.” Her question has agitated my systems. Would the event of last night anger my Husband? Or please him? The hospital man was a Born after all, to be obeyed by me. She shows no inclination to speak further, and so the two of us face outward again, toward the long expanse of lawn.

  In the silence I try to process her accent, place it to a specific factory or designer. Each has their own range that a Husband can select from. My voice is called “Neutralite” and is meant to be soothing and geographically unplaceable—a favorite among the international elite, I believe. Her voice is different and less expressive. It gives her a detached quality that is disconcerting. I wait awhile in the hope that she will speak again.