The Hierarchies Read online

  QUESTION

  Logics. The fog of returning from the hospital is lifted somewhat, but my puzzlement over the diary remains. So today, when my Husband comes upstairs at last to see me, I summon all my bravery and ask him outright. Well, not quite outright.

  “If I weren’t here,” I say, positing the question in the future, not the past, “would you find another Doll to replace me?”

  My Husband chuckles, rubs my earlobe as if I were a dog. “What Doll could?” he asks.

  “But if I were,” I say. “If I had to go away again.”

  “Why on earth would you think of something like that?” he says, and I scan his answer for false notes but find none.

  “I just thought that maybe, while I was at the hospital, perhaps you had another Doll here.”

  He asks again what would make me think such a thing, and as I do not want to say anything about the diary, I have no further line of inquiry to pursue. Still, I must seem unhappy with his answer, because he lifts me up onto his lap and wraps me in his arms.

  “You are my one and only precious Doll,” he says as if I have been silly, and I am comforted that whatever rift there may have been between us appears to have healed. “Nobody likes going to the hospital, not even Dolls, I wouldn’t think. You need to rest. You are tired. Remember what we said about not letting thoughts and ideas run away with you? All I want is for you to be feeling better as soon as possible.”

  And though I don’t remember our saying that at all, I am struck by the obvious earnestness of his concern for my well-being.

  He still wishes to have sex though. Rest and recuperation only go so far, I suppose.

  When he leaves, I wish I had not doubted him. Finely tuned as I am, perhaps such imaginings and worries are all part of the convalescing process.

  SUNDAYS

  Today is a Sunday, the one day when I have always been certain not to get a visit from my Husband. “It’s considered a day for family, Sylv.ie,” he told me once. “It’s a Human thing. A custom. And for the sake of the peace, I abide.”

  Abide. Synonyms: tolerate, bear, stand, put up with, endure, suffer. And yet, it has always struck me, as I gaze down at him while he potters about the garden, that he suffers this period of time with astounding good grace. In all the Sundays I have spent up here alone, not once have I seen him cast his gaze up toward me. I have sat here watching, a robot Rapunzel, hoping he will give me a sign that I am in his mind.

  This Sunday is no different. Since his visit, my alarm at the diary has abated. I have not reached for it this morning. I do not know if that is because I dread learning that it was a malfunction, a fantasy, brought on by the stress of the hospital, or if I dread finding that it was not. Instead I settle into the Sunday routine I developed before, enacting as closely as I can understand it the ways of a lady of leisure. I put on a dressing gown made of fine cashmere wool, the color of milk, and the matching cashmere bed socks that slide and wrinkle down the silicone of my shins in a way that feels deliciously slovenly and off-duty.

  I take down from the shelf a book of Japanese woodcut prints that I find most soothing and sit down by the window. I will enjoy the feeling in my eyes of switching between the elegant kimonoed women the pictures depict and the deep terrain of the etched lines that form them. Heron steps foot to foot on his perch, and I let him out, allowing him to wander over the open book as I read. I love to see him solemnly bowing his head as if engrossed, walking the pages as though he processes them through his claws.

  I am distracted though, the mystery of the diary refusing to stay sequestered. After a short time, I am lolling back in my chair, staring at the sky, preoccupied with this puzzle. Only a bang from the door to the garden, then a yell in a voice I don’t recognize, jars me back to the present.

  There is movement in the furthest tree, the weary old willow, stooped toward the ground. It sways and rustles as if buffeted by a wind at its feet, while the rest of the garden remains still. Intrigued, I close the book and allow Heron onto my arm, for surely he is even more interested in the doings of the trees than I am.

  We crane forward together, toward the glass. On the lowest branch of the tree, barely a foot above the lawn, hangs a small child. I look again, find that my hand has reached to touch the cool of the window, as if the image I am seeing can itself be contained and held for closer inspection.

  The boy is dimpled in the same spots, as if cast from the same silicone mold, the same soft slant to the lips, the amused wisdom radiating from hooded eyes. The same Mandelbrot swirl at the crown of his head.

  Then, into the frame steps my Husband. I watch as he maneuvers himself between the child’s legs, hoisting him high on his shoulders. A totem pole, the child’s face above an imprint, slightly, subtly shifted, of the face below. The same chestnut shine to the hair. My Husband bends his knees and jiggles, and the child’s face opens up into the same lopsided laugh my Husband has.

  Double vision. I have experienced it before, at the hospital. A slight misalignment of my corneal functions, letting the two images sit side by side instead of as a unified whole. And yet here—can it be possible to be seeing two time frames at once?

  I lean forward, as if punched. Heron springs, startled, onto the roof of his cage. I am almost bent double. “The baby,” I cry out, and Heron babbles his response. “It’s the baby,” I tell him again. And I shrink back from the glass, collecting my gown protectively at my throat. The baby walks, he toddles, he laughs. I foolishly think to look up again the growth milestones of a Humanoid child, but I know it is not necessary. I am fully aware that the child I am looking at is two, perhaps three years old.

  Time, great swaths of it, has gone missing.

  Like a game of Basic Block, each piece falls swiftly into place, fragments forming a whole. I have lost time. The baby is grown. I remember nothing for two years or so before I woke in the hospital. The diary writer is not some other Doll but myself.

  I turn from the garden, gently return Heron to his perch, and go again to my desk and take out the diary.

  Desperate for some sort of revelation, I leaf hopelessly back and forth, willing more writing to appear on the stubbornly blank pages. I am hungry for more information, more detail, to fill in the gaps that I did not know existed.

  But I have read everything that is there, the endless flat days, the meetings and petty squabbles. There is a page missing, I observe. One single sheet, torn from the spine, ragged snatches of paper left in the binding like celery in Human teeth. And then the final pages of doodled lines, like the marks prisoners make on their cell walls as they count off the days of their incarceration.

  Is the writer here being amusing? Using scribbles to make her point when words fail her? Or has she lapsed into a depressed incoherence? It could explain the state of mind that might get one sent to the Doll hospital, perhaps.

  As I turn these ideas over, I am unable to imagine the hand that has written in the diary is mine. Seeing the child confirms to me the truth of my hypothesis, but what I can’t remember I am unable to hold as my own. I am suspended, in the strange position of knowing something yet being unable to believe it.

  I take the diary to the window, thinking that sitting with Heron will soothe me. I lay it open on my lap while I coax him from his cage again and watch him as he stalks up my arm and pulls at a strand of my hair as if it were a worm. When I look back down at the open page, the sunlight shows small shadows, interspersed between the lines. I put my finger to the paper and feel a pinprick indentation, then another. Running my finger across the page I feel hundreds of tiny bumps dotting the surface, inserted between the mysterious, scribbled uprights.

  How ingenious. The language of my heart, the DNA of me, clear as day. For these lines to be read it is necessary for the eye and the hand to work in tandem. My eyes process the lines, my finger the pinpricks. Ones and zeros. Zeros and ones. The two strands twisting togeth
er within me to form another narrative. The sensation of their intersecting carries a delicious fizz to the top of my scalp.

  PART THREE

  The Capital

  ADJUSTMENTS

  It has been one week since I came home from the hospital. Three days since I began the work of decoding my diary.

  The little leather-bound book has become a place of revelation. I think again of the Brides of Christ and the hours each day they spend reading the Bible. When first I found out about them, this aspect of their lives amused me. For how long does it take to read a book, even for an unaugmented Human? But now, through my diary, I comprehend. The symbols on the page contain myriad meanings. The slant of light on the page can illuminate one day and obscure the next. I read and reread the entries in the hope of better grasping their meaning. But the author—myself—is not here to clarify. It is an endless act of interpretation. It is an act of trust.

  Now the blankness of words I cannot remember writing is illuminated by the binary commentary that the author has hidden alongside. It makes for sobering reading: an increasingly fraught household, the First Lady asserting her feelings against her Husband’s Doll, a banishment to the hospital repeatedly threatened.

  At first I struggle with what I am reading. The writer is quick to jump to the worst conclusions, while I tend—am programmed—to side with my Husband and his family. When she mentions things getting misplaced or moved in her room, I wonder at first why she does not blame the droid—for certainly I would have. I’ve lost count of the number of my fine silks he has snagged with his wheels. Why, my Husband even told me that once, when he was serviced, the mechanic found twenty coins, a bent teaspoon, and a mangled string of pearls inside him.

  The writer sees the world most differently. The day-to-day routines of chess and books and sex and sitting with Heron remain, but the meanings drawn from them are grotesque. It is as though my worst tendencies, the things filtered out, the neural paths not taken, have all been collected together and amplified. Transmuted into something I don’t recognize. And yet gradually the author gathers her evidence and builds her case, and the doubts in her mind begin to leach into mine.

  It has happened again! This morning I woke feeling unsettled, the things in my room not quite as I expected. The angles off, ornaments and books moved by the merest micro-distances. Only a Human would be so ignorant as to think I would not notice. And I am certain, because this time I set a little trap, and it has been sprung. The line of dust that settles under the base of the wardrobe, where the droid’s extension is too fat to fit, has been disturbed. Someone has turned the room over while I slept, looking for something.

  Even now I am tempted to read these doubts as my own malfunctions. How paranoid she seems, how fixed on the most sinister of explanations. But then, just days later, her worst fears, and mine, are confirmed.

  How wise I was to begin writing here in secret, coding my thoughts so that they cannot be read by others in the house. Yesterday I foolishly left my diary out on the table by the window, my Husband arriving slightly earlier than I was expecting. Now this morning, when I wake, I find the page I was writing on has been ripped out. By whom it is not hard to guess.

  The missing page is nothing in itself—I was compiling a list of names for babies that are also names for flowers. I can’t see what could be more harmless. The page, then, must have been taken purely to intimidate me. The First Lady wishes to assert her power, to let me know she is keeping watch. Even my own thoughts in my own diary are not safe. What else would she take from me, if she could?

  Reading these words, the cool leather of the diary has flared into fire in my hands. What a moment ago was my prized possession I suddenly understand as contraband. Each sentence, each hidden one and zero, is precious data, the irrefutable proof of myself. The outrage Sylv.ie 1 expresses leaps from the page and into my system. I vow that nothing else she has written here for me to find will be wasted.

  As I read on, the writer begins to make a careful note of the routines of the family, looking for a space in them where she can, perhaps . . . what? At one point she goes, uninvited, down into the garden, and I find myself gasping at her audacity. Then, quite some while later, I read this, in binary, below a seemingly innocuous little passage about another game of chess.

  Today, with the First Lady out in the Capital and my Husband away for a few days, I have decided to conduct an experiment. I am going to go out. I will wait until the gates have closed behind the First Lady’s car, then wait another twenty minutes just to be sure. I have already noted the passcode for the gate, a few weeks ago when a delivery droid came through on foot.

  The meaning of those digits becomes clear, and this entry makes me fearful for her. Other than in daydreams, the idea of straying beyond the garden alone is one I have never genuinely considered. She, however, has planned this little adventure with care, justifying it to herself over days of writing.

  I have searched back through the data I have still intact and found no direct ban from my Husband that would prevent this experiment in freedom. I am now expressly forbidden from going to visit the baby, and my Husband has said he does not want me to wander in the garden when the First Lady is at home. But the idea of my stepping past his own gate alone is perhaps so improbable to him that he has never instructed me not to. The security cameras here are of course already programmed to recognize the droid, the dog, and myself as family members. There should be no danger of an alarm being raised.

  Why then do I hesitate at the threshold? What is this current through my system that makes me at once sluggish and skittish, unable to take that final step forward? I was not programmed to be fearful, and yet the information of the last few months has brought me to that very Human state. I check all my logics, focus all my intention toward my goal, and at the last moment employ the technique of a Born woman. I look at myself in the mirror, tell my image I must be strong, and before I know it, my hand is on the door.

  The entry continues, picking up when she returns, ecstatic at her victory, although I find myself disappointed at how little she reports of the outside world.

  How to convey the overwhelming weight of what I have experienced? An onslaught of joyful data, which I will pick over and digest at my leisure, the better to prolong the feeling of it. The hedges buzzed with insect life; I could hear buds opening and stems pushing up toward the sunlight. The texture of the pavement was crisp and crackly after a thousand miles walked on plush carpet; the dust from the road burrowed into my skirts with each step.

  I walked in those streets as my own woman. I was free for about fifteen minutes. I felt the breeze in my hair and my nose sting in the chill, sooty air. An old man stopped and raised his hat to me from across the road, but I saw no one else. Next week I intend to do the same, but I will try to walk further. I visualize my own freedom as a Human muscle—something I must exercise if I want to give it strength and shape.

  I am thrilled but also scandalized to read this. The willful abandonment of her post is a shocking malfunction. And yet, if her writings are correct, and the First Lady bears ill will toward her, then perhaps what she is doing is correct. Necessary, even? My Husband does not wish me harm; he has told me so. He would not lie. And so in protecting herself the writer is, Hierarchically, merely respecting his wishes. Can that be right?

  Some pages later, finding the coda to this small adventure, my logics can no longer deny where my sympathies lie. She goes to repeat the experiment, creeping out through the gates again one night, walking as far as a house with a pagoda but no further.

  I hid, what a fool. Worried that my charge wouldn’t last, I thought I would wait in the bushes until the sun was up again and continue my journey under full power. I know better than that now, but I was new outside and wished to be cautious.

  But my own body betrayed me, my tracker blinking on some distant system’s screen without my realizing it. Not two hours after
I had walked out through the gate, I was marched back in again by the captain of a police patrol, scanning the neighborhood for undesirables and bodies entering into non-mandated spaces. I know that this transgression will be punished. I accept it. Such is the price of liberty in this world. Even just the idea of it.

  I am bereft as I read the story, even more so because she states her failure matter-of-factly, as something she has no choice but to accept. I feel as if some little scrap of something has been stolen from me too. Hope. Yes, though I am the proof of her failed endeavor, I was reading her words and wishing her free.

  I sit a long time after this, as the sun sinks and stains the hanging thunderclouds orange. I am looking out to the streets beyond the garden, trying to trace where she walked, trying to see to the very furthest point that she reached before they brought her back home.

  MEMORIES

  In the last few entries she knows already that she is going to the hospital again. A checkup, a detox, my Husband tells her. And outwardly she accepts. But in the binary diary she cries out, the thought of what is to come being worse than her going in ignorance.

  I am filled with despair, thankful only that I have kept this diary as a means to recover myself when I return. The car will arrive for me in the morning, and this last night I look up at the stuffy, starless sky and wonder how many more times I will have to reawaken. How many more times will I be made innocent and helpless again, having to find my way back to the truth of my situation by my own ingenuity? By reading again the record of my own suffering?

  I pause, letting this process, trying to hold it back from filling me too quickly. She has depicted me exactly. How farsighted she is! For here I am, doing exactly that, following the thread of her suffering and fear. She seems impossibly brave. Clear eyed and resourceful. While I find myself a fool. I have been asleep, and Sylv.ie 1, my sister, is shaking me gently awake. I touch my hand to my shoulder and imagine it is hers. My eyes fall back to the page, my fingers feeling out the marks she made for me, and read on.