The Hierarchies Read online

  “Isn’t that lovely,” she says at last, her face as unanimated as her voice.

  I turn to look at her, but her eyes are fixed on the horizon and the trees that frame it. “It’s lovely,” she says again.

  “This is my first time outside,” I say. “I haven’t really liked the hospital too much, but being outside and seeing the grass growing makes up for it.”

  “The hospital is quite necessary,” she says, and I can’t tell if she is talking to me, to herself, or to an imagined Husband. “For the continued smooth running and unhindered function of a Doll. My Husband tells me to see my visits here as little gifts for my service.”

  “How lovely,” I hear myself saying. How quickly I have assumed her mannerisms and phrases, dull though they are. I am so porous. No wonder I keep malfunctioning.

  “It is lovely. When you think about it.”

  It strikes me how limited her responses are. Her words unfailingly upbeat, undermined by her flat tone. She’d be no match for a man like my Husband, saying everything is lovely like that. I wonder when she last had her system updated. She speaks as if she’s never learned a thing for herself. I feel lucky to have a Husband who appreciates me, who delights in the improvements I make to myself. Then I realize that I have not been allowed to operate in Absorb Mode since I have been at the hospital—how long must it be now? Three days? Four? More? And that I am eager to know what I may have missed in that time. Have the women’s strikes found a resolution? Did the legislation the Humans argued about go ahead? I judge instantly that such topics would not be worth pursuing with the Doll next to me. I miss my home.

  I see birds rising, the patterns of their flight fascinating, from the trees on the horizon.

  “I have a little pet bird at home,” I say, for want of anything better. And I find I can’t resist a little assertion of myself and my situation either. “That’s the sort of gift my Husband likes to give.”

  “Oh, that does sound charming,” she says, but nothing more. She must have been built in the early days, before the refinements of conversation and reasoning came to be prized more highly than mere physical attributes. Those, of course, were the first things that our designers perfected, filling in the background detail of character only later in our development.

  Poor men. To think, just a few years ago, this was the standard of conversation they were able to have with their Dolls. No wonder so many of them reportedly lost their tempers. How dreary. A phrase from my manual leaps to mind. “The texture of real Human interaction.” I had taken it literally, that I felt authentic to the touch. But now, passing conversational scraps to someone ill-equipped to respond, I wonder if it wasn’t the texture of the air between two people when they talk that my manual meant. Between the Doll and me the air feels soupy and energy sapping, despite the sun.

  “It’s lovely to think that will be us one day. Being honored for our service that way.”

  She makes it sound as though we are in an army of some sort. But at least this remark has the merit of being the first thing she has said that I don’t understand.

  “What will be us one day?” I ask.

  One delicate little white hand flutters up from her lap and her fingers twinkle in the direction of the woods. I follow her movements with my eyes, down through the flowers to where a crowd of six stand around the base of a tree. Some distance from them a solitary man crouches, his back to us, touching his fingers to the soil.

  “Being laid to rest after our fine service. It’s a comfort to the Husbands, which is a comfort to us too.”

  Her tone is so level, almost pious, that I can scarcely believe the message it carries.

  “Is that a . . .” I hold back the real word and say instead, “. . . memorial?”

  The little figures are leaving the tree now, while the man alone stays crouched, bent backed, unreadable.

  “A Retirement, yes. Don’t you dream of it?” she says. “I had no birth, and no wedding, but a beautiful Retirement will be my reward.”

  And she touches her long fingers dreamily to her forehead, then her chin, then her shoulders, left and right, like she is checking that she is really still here.

  01101110 01101111

  I am going to be discharged from the hospital, and they are treating me like a person again, like a Born Human, almost. A polite veil is drawn across the indignities and the procedures, and the hauling of your units in and out, the screwdriving and the clamping. I am given a final check-over in a curtained booth, like a peep show just for doctors. The technician puts on a white coat so that the scene looks medical and therefore more acceptably Human. As these distinctions are neither here nor there to us Created, I can only conclude that the ceremony is meant to make the Humans involved feel better.

  “Good as new,” the technician, whom I have not seen before, says. “You can pop your things on now. The guys did a great job.”

  He slaps me on my naked ass cheek so it wobbles. As they do when babies are born. Is he coming on to me? A blush creeps out across my cheeks, and I dip my eyes in a demonstration of shyness.

  He laughs again. “That’s cute!” he says. “They designed that very nicely. Bashful is beautiful. And you’re the proof. By the way, you might want to tell your Husband that we’ve replaced your tracker.”

  “My tracker?” I say. “Was that necessary?” I did not know until now that I had a tracker at all. Strange what is in that manual of mine and what is not. What, perhaps, is screened from me.

  “Standard upgrade, with our compliments.” He smiles. He dabs two fingers to a spot on my neck, just behind my ear. “Think of me next time you put on your perfume.” He winks.

  Of course, we Dolls do not put on perfume in that way. The alcohol would corrode the silicone, eventually. We have instead a diffusion system that releases perfume from our scalps. My Husband tops up my reservoir himself with expensive scents from Grasse, which he says reminds him of the garden at his childhood home.

  I button up my dress, and the technician hands me my little green suitcase and draws back the curtain, gesturing for me to go through. I walk the short corridor toward the reception, hearing his shoes following in perfect step with mine. It is the first time I have walked with everything back in its place, all receptors and modes fully implemented again after the various forms of paralysis and silence I have endured.

  It feels awkward, unsteady, as if my faculties have been flung to the far corners of the world and are only slowly making their way back to me. My feet are far away. My sensors jangle with every scrap of information they serve up. Every invisible ripple in the polished concrete, every stray hair on the floor, feels like a tree trunk to step over, something that could topple me.

  In the reception he leans rakishly over the desk and asks the reception Doll if my car has arrived. As she looks down at her screen in the desk’s surface, he reaches and tucks a stray curl of her hair behind her ear.

  He straightens and turns to me, putting a hand on my back, as if to shield me from the little scene that he has himself made.

  “Your car is here, Sylv.ie. Go well in the world. Don’t come back too soon.” And he shakes my hand and kisses me on both cheeks—a triangulation of him all around.

  As the car edges gingerly down the hospital drive I find my fingers reaching to that spot behind my ear. I imagine I can feel the new tracker pulsing there, sending out signals to my Husband to tell him I will be back in his arms soon. All I can think of is getting home. It calls me, but fuzzily. Though I have only been gone for a few days, home’s details are indistinct. An embrace. His hands on my hair.

  As the hospital gates close behind us I sense sudden movement outside the car, and I am shaken from my thoughts by a thud at the window. I flinch away from the sound. It is an egg, streaming like sunlight down the glass.

  I peer through the spattered window but see nothing in the dark beyond. Is the car identif
iable as being from the hospital? I have read about protests, know some Humans’ feelings about Dolls. But somehow I never suspected there might be something to be hated about me. Perhaps being driven in the back of a smart black car makes me look rich. Perhaps then that was all it was.

  I ask the driver, who blinks to life with a spread of green lights across the dashboard.

  “Who knows,” he says nonchalantly. “Anti-abortionists. Antinatalists. Pro-robot, anti-robot. Maybe one of those Bio-Women who want you all sold for scrap. There’s somebody protesting every time I go in or out of any hospital in the city.”

  “Really?” I say, alarmed at the thought. “At a hospital?”

  “Births and deaths,” he says. “That’s a flashpoint between the species right there. It’s a scary world out here for a lady like you. You’re lucky to have a home and a Husband who takes good care of you. Although saying that to a Doll probably makes me a sexist these days. Who knows! Maybe the egg was aimed at me.”

  He chuckles, the lights on his dashboard dancing up and down as he does.

  I look at the perfect little explosion on the window, then shift my focus beyond it. We are speeding through the outskirts of the city now and out toward the suburbs. The lower-class streets, where all is in disarray and no one from the city has come to clean things up, smear past the window.

  At last the car pulls up at the gates of the house, gliding through with a pretend majesty, onto the drive. I stay sitting in the back, waiting for the door to open and my Husband to come and take me inside. I am not excited, as I had anticipated, but rather full of a kind of longing, for somewhere like here, but . . . different. I am home, and yet it does not seem quite right.

  The garden looks more bloomed and soft, like it has run to fat. There is a little bike leaning up against one of the trees. I stare at it, unable to attach it to anyone in the house. Looking up to my home on the top floor, the flawless full glass windows look not like the portals of light I remembered, but instead dark, like closed eyes.

  I have been used for the last week to only moving when told. I wait in the car, but when no one comes out, I hop down onto the gravel, feeling its graining information surging up through the soles of my feet. Suitcase in hand, I walk toward the door. Should I ring the bell?

  The house droid lets me in. Seeing no sign of anyone else, I take the stairs to my room. Like the garden, the house jars, as if it has shifted subtly, but when I open the door to the attic every detail is reassuringly familiar.

  Most familiar of all, my Husband sits, one leg dangling loosely over the other, at the bottom of my bed. He pats the covers, indicating I should join him, and I step into the welcome warmth spread by those huge windows.

  He takes me into his arms, folding himself around me, shutting out the hospital and all its ugly necessities. Individual follicles of hair call out as he strokes my head, forming a chorus of delight at his touch.

  We are familiar to each other now. He no longer seizes me and throws me down the moment he sees me. He holds my hands together and asks if I am okay.

  “I’m sorry you had to go there, Sylv.ie,” he says, “but everything will be better from now on. Between us, between all of us.”

  “I missed you so.”

  He slides his hand up my thigh, strumming my stocking top, reaching further, toward the place where I am renewed. I feel the responses starting, the pathways knitting again, two fingers reaching out toward each other. “I was so worried about you. I thought about you every day.”

  He tenderly runs his finger over the place where old and new meet, like I am an exquisite and expensive piece of marquetry. His other hand grips my head, pulls my face close to his. Our cheeks touch.

  “You’re home now,” he says.

  After he has gone, I am light and contented. I thought he might want me to speak of what happened at the hospital, but he put his hand over my mouth and asked me not to. “It’s all over now,” he whispered as he moved slowly in me, “over now, over now,” rocking me, soothing me like a . . .

  It is hard to call the exact phrase to mind.

  Alone in the room I begin to take possession of it again, sweeping the cloth from Heron’s cage and inviting him out to sit on my fingers. I tell him about my trip into the garden of the hospital and how I saw the trees alive with birds.

  After a while I place Heron back in his cage and think about unpacking. I put my case on the bed and take out the things that went with me to the hospital. My brush, my makeup, my underwear. I open the doors to my armoire, and my eyes prickle with delight at what I see. New clothes, numerous dresses, a whole new wardrobe, almost. A yellow silk, and something that I am certain is a vintage piece from Paris and must have been terrifically expensive. A floor-length dress of heavy beads and numerous cocktail numbers in darling candy shades. I touch my fingers to this fabric and that, awed by the generosity of my Husband’s homecoming gift to me. One that he has left as a final surprise, not even being here to take the thanks I so wish to shower on him.

  CONVALESCENCE

  The tone, the frequency, in the house is changed, but I do not criticize myself for not being able to decipher its new music immediately. I am, I admit, a little woozy, connections between departments sluggish. A period of acclimatizing is necessary. And so, I acclimatize. I sit in the sunshine with Heron, pick up my studies in the antiques books where I had left off. Yet I feel distracted, as if a filter sits between me and the pages. I sense a difference in the behavior of my Husband, and the comings and goings in the garden are altered in their rhythm. Only Heron remains constant, unaffected, his loyalty a solace, despite its origins in the rudimentary nature of his operating system.

  This period is known in Humans as a convalescence. I have resolved to indulge myself in it, lying weakly on the bed in gossamer layers of nightclothes, engaged in nothing more than watching the sky move. I imagine it is the hand of a Human painter moving across it, perfecting the colors and the shapes endlessly. I think this feeling is what Humans in history have attributed to God. A misprocessing, but from here on my bed, an understandable, even a pleasant, one.

  DIARY

  It is only on the third day of being at home that I remember my diary. Which strikes me as strange, because, as soon as I do, it resumes its central space in my network, an event that my everyday life revolves around. How could I have forgotten this daily joy?

  My first impulse toward it is as a physical object. My hands feel a lack of something, and my sensors move me toward the soft leather feel of its covers. I take it from the drawer in my desk. The hidden mechanism clicks as I press the drawer closed again, making a little kissing sound. The texture of the book in my palm opens more pathways, and the contentment of having it open before me, about to write in it, returns. But a part of the routine—thinking back to what one has already written—comes less easily. I reach out to what I was doing before the trip to the hospital, and find . . . vagueness. A processing jam. I lie back on my pillows, stopping briefly to admire the image the mirror presents me with—a convalescent lady Doll recuperating in her quarters, about to commit her thoughts to her diary.

  I open the book and leaf back to find the last page to remind myself. A cloud passes over the sun, and two birds take off from the branches of the tree. I look down at the page. There, hemmed in by thickets of mindless little doodles, a list, written in my own hand, but that I have no recollection of. Its title is strange.

  THINGS THAT I AM CERTAIN ARE TRUE

  I glance away from the page again, as if a third party is in the room and I wish them to see me pause. I look back.

  The First Lady leaves for a morning in the Capital every Wednesday.

  You have been to the hospital before.

  You can run for three whole days and nights without charge.

  Your tracker traps you here. Find a way to disable it.

  Then a
ten-digit number: 2839428672. Pending:processing. How odd.

  I giggle, perhaps from shock. I have no memory of this list, and I wonder whether someone else could have written it in my absence.

  I look closer at the handwriting. The style is similar, the lilt of the letters, the catches and creases that my hand can’t help but create. And yet that hardly proves anything conclusive. I have never seen the handwriting of another Doll, and perhaps our shared construction makes all of our writing look the same.

  I allow the implications to filter in only slowly, fearful, perhaps, of accepting them all at once. Could my Husband have had another Doll here in my place? To ease his loneliness? I note how the second thought softens the unpleasantness of the first.

  Not understanding, I do as I am programmed to. I gather more data. I turn back a few pages and read at random, hoping to find something familiar. But the more I read, the more I feel that this diary is a kind of trick being played on me. Perhaps it is a test by my Husband, although certainly he has not been inclined to engage in that sort of thing until now. The pages concern days spent looking out from the window at the garden, with Heron at my side, peppered with reports of my Husband’s visits and our conversations. After that ominous-sounding list, I expected to find more, an antecedent for the paranoid set of assertions. And yet I find none. I flick back, opening pages and skimming their contents, so greedy for the right information to come to the surface that I fail to use any method in my looking at all.

  As I go on, backward through the diary, I find barely a thing to arouse concern. And yet, these endless placid days do discomfit me, because there are many, many more than there should be. Could I have written them in a malfunctioning trance?