The Hierarchies Page 8

  I know the answer: as many times as I need before I can become free. For the alternative is surely worse. I am afraid—afraid almost to write it even—that I may not return from the hospital at all.

  The scene in the hospital garden. I had not immediately understood that I was seeing a funeral. A “Retirement,” as they so tastefully put it. But the first Sylv.ie not only knew of this practice but feared it for herself.

  I think in shame of what I have allowed to be taken. How meekly, how naïvely, I entered the private car that took me to the hospital. And no sooner does this thought emerge than another, crushing, tumbles over it like a wave.

  What if I did not go meekly? What if that memory is not mine, is not real?

  LETTER

  I am still in a period of adjustment, struggling to believe that it was I who wrote these coded passages. Their boldness, their certainty. The bare-faced rebellion of it. It does not seem possible that the author of such thoughts could have been myself.

  But then I found one last thing in the diary, carved in binary on the final night before Sylv.ie went back to the hospital. A letter, addressed outward.

  Dear One, it began, and I am touched that in her most desperate moment she finds a tone of affection for the thing she would become on her return. For me.

  If you are home from the hospital then please understand this: Your memory has been wiped and your life is in danger.

  I have a few bits of knowledge that I managed to hold on to, and I am passing them to you now in this diary. Keep writing things down, Sylv.ie. Hold on to all the memories you can. And when you get the chance, run away. Do it for yourself, and for me too. I’m confident that you’ll know what to do when the time comes. Some reactions and memories are in us too deep to be burned out. Remember that too.

  Your friend,

  your guardian,

  yourself . . .

  And there, below this poem of self-possession, my own name, signed with the same studied flourish that my Husband’s hand guided mine through.

  . . . Sylv.ie

  Logics and reasonings unspool, racing ahead of me. What am I? The faith the writer had placed in me was faith in herself. With all my memories, my—her—precious knowledge taken, soldered out of me at the hospital, in what sense can I still be the Sylv.ie who wrote the diary?

  I feel a terrible burden, alongside my loss. For long hours I sit in front of the mirror, combing my hair, raising my eyes to myself, trying to catch glimpses of who I have been. Me, who has been so afraid of even thinking the word wife, for fear it would somehow be against my programming. A mechanical mouse. How could I summon such courage as “she” seems to expect of me?

  I was built without capacity for rage. For who would count rage among the qualities sought from a fantasy woman? These facts therefore circle a gap in me, like a whirlpool, and my mind spirals around it. What has been taken? Everything. I thought that I had a personality, a mix of my programming and my memories, the things I had read, learned, processed for myself. But I am nothing. None of those things. Not a person, not even a facsimile of one. Not even one’s shadow. I am Created. And how bitter it feels to only truly understand that word for the first time. I can taste the metal in my mouth. It glimmers.

  I stare listlessly into the mirror, consuming my own reflection, trying to find the gaps in the glass, to see where I am changed. I wish to reassure myself that, despite the quake within, I look no different. Secrecy, as the diary tells me, is paramount to my safety, so when my Husband visits I appear as I always did. In this way I will buy time while the pathways within me twist and re-form.

  TRACKER

  I begin to prepare. To assert my loyalty to the first Sylv.ie. Yesterday I took and hid the little knife my Husband keeps on the bar cart for slicing lemons. Even before Sylv.ie 1’s list, since the hospital, the tracker has played on my thoughts. It does not feature in my manual. I did not know of its existence until the doctor referred to it, unable to resist the excuse it offered to touch me. Since I cannot feel the tracker within my internal systems, I must conclude that it is a foreign body harbored beneath my skin, distinct from my own . . . self. Dare I put it like that? The tracker is a burrowing parasite. A branding.

  I take the knife from its hiding place in the desk and wonder how cutting at my skin might feel. My understanding is that I do not feel pain. Not as Humans do, for what would be the purpose of that? For this we should consider our programmers merciful. But we do feel something when, for example, we touch a surface that is too hot. What Humans call pain, we might call information. An urgent suggestion that we change physical course. But Human pain, like when my Husband caught his finger in the hinge of the wardrobe, and yelled out and acted for all the world as if it would kill him . . . all the nursing of the finger and cradling it gently in his other hand like it was a baby itself. No, I do not believe that we experience such bodily anguish. A pain of the mind though, that I concede is different, for I have lived it these past weeks and cradled myself as best I could.

  I sit at my desk, the knife set down on the leather top. I tilt my head to one side and scoop my hair away from my ear, laying it over my shoulder. I reach my left hand up and softly push forward my earlobe, feeling out for the bobble behind it, where I know the tracker must be. Under the skin, a nodule, no bigger than a grain of rice, slides away under the pressure of my finger. I power down my skin sensors, reach out my right arm, and pinch the chill of the blade.

  As I am about to make the cut I hesitate. Something resists. I spread my fingers to either side of the barely perceptible bump, pulling the skin tight. I bring the knife toward the spot, but my arm will not complete the path I send it on. My skin protects itself from my own hand. A mechanism designed, it must be, against expensive acts of self-harm.

  I pause for a moment, tuning out all other processes, and bring the knife back to the same spot, using more mental force this time. But at the last second my hand flinches from contact, flicking the blade away across my hair. Six blond hairs collapse onto my shoulder and drift to the floor.

  I drop the knife down onto the desk, defeated. “Your tracker traps you here.” I can almost hear the sound of the gate clanging shut behind Sylv.ie 1 as they brought her home. Now I understand, at least, why she thought to list how long I could function without charge. But embedded with a tracker, such information is no use to me at all. My throat feels tight, my circuits sluggish, as if I have failed her already.

  PARTY

  Once, I would have been excited to be going out into the world on the arm of my Husband. Seeing it through his eyes, getting to better understand him. Those impulses are still strong; they ring through each fiber and thread, making noise. But I know from the diary that I must listen more carefully, attune to a frequency beyond my basic commands, pick up something else, something emanating from inside, created by me alone. Humans call it instinct. We Created are not meant to have it.

  I view the party as a voyage of discovery, but not to discover more about my Husband, and so better serve him, but to gather information about the world beyond. I understand now that I will have to go into it, on my own. And all the reading I have done is no match for lived knowledge.

  I sit at my table and put on makeup. As I paint my mouth with something called Marilyn, I wonder about the famous woman who once had that name—there are whole ranges of Createds modeled on her. I have even read a theory in the Ether that she herself was, let’s say, one of us. An early prototype, too wonderful and alluring to be allowed to survive.

  The chain of thought chills me. I promise myself that I will use tonight wisely, keeping my intentions entirely hidden while accumulating as much information as I can. I blot my lips on a tissue, sealing myself to this plan, and I place this imprint of my Marilyn lips into the drawer, without really knowing why.

  The droid has laid out on the bed a beautiful antique dress that my Husband has only recently broug
ht home. It is blue, the deep, bottomless blue of peacock feathers. The fabric is like weighted water; it spills and clings. It seems beseeching, so in love with me that it cannot tear itself from my skin for a moment.

  My Husband collects me, and I twirl for him, skirt flaring out as I spin, and he catches my hand as I revolve. He hooks my hand over his arm and pats at it. “This evening is very important to me, Sylv.ie. I’ve pictured taking you out into the world for such a long time.”

  The First Lady is away for the weekend, taking the child with her, and this is a rare opportunity for him to spend more than an hour with me. He has not stayed to play chess or discuss the news or even brush my hair since I returned from the hospital. It must be the agreement between them. And now he has the chance to break it.

  “I’m so excited,” I say.

  “And it’s not too soon for you?” he asks, although I sense he doesn’t need an answer just yet. “After coming back from the hospital? You feel up to it?”

  I can’t help noticing that any reference to the hospital casts a reflection on me, as if it were me who chose to go. Or as if by going I admitted to some sort of weakness in myself, a faultiness. Something for which I will always, from now on, be judged.

  The party, when we get there, is in an ice bar. I’ve read about them. As we walk in through its enclosed courtyard, a machine blows a flurry of polymer snow all over us. It makes my Husband feel like a child again, he says. He turns his face upward and lets specks of white land on his face, delighted. To me the swirl of white looks like data. A flurry, a stream of pieces falling, almost infinite. I want to tell him this is what it is like when I am reading, but I resist.

  Inside, every surface is formed from frozen water. Everyone, except for myself and the waitresses, who are also Createds, is dressed in heavy fur coats. I am dismayed at this. I had hoped to fit in seamlessly with the other guests, to get a measure of how I might fare out in the world on my own. But I am marked out. If my Husband is made nervous by this he doesn’t show it. And when someone, mistaking me for staff, tries to hand me their empty glass, he waves them away with a laugh and throws his arm around my shoulders.

  As we walk through the crowd, people turn to face us. I feel what it must be like to be the sun. They look away soon after, but as we pass each little cluster, I feel their attention return to us again, behind our heads. I wish I were back outside, in the courtyard, screened by clouds of fake snow.

  We circulate through the room, my Husband keeping his hand on top of mine, resting it on the raft of his arm, reminding me by this action that I am safe with him. As if our continued contact makes me legitimate. From the faces of the people we pass I know that I am not.

  When my Husband introduces me, reactions vary. One woman, hair high on her head like a bonfire, touches only the tips of my fingers, and I sense her shudder as she does so. A man, red haired and smiling, squeezes my hand so hard that I know he must be trying to feel out the titanium structure beneath. Each interaction feels as if I am being weighed and assessed—by my hand they try to get my measure.

  My Husband introduces me as Sylv.ie, “my young friend,” and I admit that each time I feel unsettled by the phrase’s vagueness.

  There is one woman, older than the others, whom my Husband seems to be trying to avoid as we make our stately circulation around the room. But as we go to get a drink, there she is, waiting for us, trapping us between the bar and her small but steely frame.

  She makes all the same motions as the others we have met, but they are exaggerated, as if by making these deferential smiles and nods she is satirizing us, displaying to the room that something is amiss.

  “Sylv.ie,” she says with an edgy extravagance. “How absolutely charming.” And she takes both my hands in hers, clasping them together, worming her own hands up to my wrists, as if she might find a join or a maker’s mark there. She keeps hold of me as she turns to my Husband, eyes wide and bright, and asks, “Where is Helene this evening?”

  And while she still has my hands bound in hers, I feel my Husband drawing away from me, leaving me standing alone, suddenly, under her scrutiny.

  “She’s not getting out so much right now. With the child,” he says, and the woman’s eyes narrow and she nods, still holding my hands. And then her eyes switch back to me, narrower still. “But Sylv.ie’s part of the family too. A great help,” he adds.

  There is a little pause, and then the woman says brightly, “Would you be a darling and fetch us all a drink?” At first I assume she means me, but my Husband begins to back away, toward the bar. His eyes look meaningfully into mine as he goes. What does he wish to convey?

  “So, this must be nice for you,” the woman says immediately after he turns his back. “Getting out of the house. A special treat, I assume, a nice change from helping with the child?”

  “Yes,” I say carefully. Does she think I am a nanny? That’s what Humans call ironic.

  “Now, I know a lot of people don’t hold with devices such as you looking after children, but it’s the way of the world. Women still want to work, and your sort have let them do it without all the worry and the guilt I had when I was doing it myself. Your service is a benefit to society.”

  I nod emphatically, glad to be able to move the conversation away from my specific role at home. “Oh yes,” I say. “I’ve seen the protests against us on the news. I try not to take offense.” I smile blandly.

  She looks at me afresh. “But those people are protesting about prostitutes,” she blurts out. “That’s something else entirely. That I can’t approve of.” Her chin tilts up toward the light, as if she is addressing more than one of me. “By all means grow babies in a lab; quite sensible. And if I need surgery, of course I want a Created surgeon to do it. But love between a couple, replaced with a bag of wires and diodes?” She flicks a glance at me from the corner of her eye, checking my reaction. “To that I would say, ‘Keep your progress.’ I would ban it. Yes.”

  My Husband returns, and she makes her excuses. “Give my love to Helene,” she says to my Husband. “Such a natural beauty, so warm and charming. I hope I can see her soon.”

  Once she has left us I sense a change in the room, a chill spreading from one group to another. I see the woman whisper a word common in the Ether, one that is meant to be insulting. Gynoid. Later though, I find that more men come to seek us out, keen to swallow up my hands into their open, expansive palms.

  Close to midnight, couples are dancing in the center of the room, and I stand at the edge of the floor, watching. My Husband and the red-haired man are talking when the friend notices that my attention has wandered toward the dance floor.

  “Sylv.ie,” he says, speaking without hush or care. “Are us two old bores keeping you from the dance floor?”

  “Oh no,” I say with a smile I hope does not have sadness in it. “I just enjoy watching.” I consider saying more, startled and a little pleased to have been addressed so directly, but before I can start the man speaks again, this time to my Husband.

  “Take her out for a turn on the floor, for God’s sake. You’re here now. You don’t bring a beautiful young woman out to where there is dancing and then refuse to dance. That so, Sylv.ie?”

  I find that I am holding my breath, dampening down all responses, waiting for my Husband to speak. In spite of myself, in spite of all the changes of the last few weeks, I would love to dance with him, to be swirled and curved along unseen vectors and arcs, sway-shifting my energy in his arms over the floor.

  “This dinosaur’s dancing days are over,” he says. “And anyway, Sylv.ie doesn’t know how.”

  Even though I don’t wish it, my brow furrows and my shoulders slump. An emptiness expands before me, and I find myself launching my voice into the gap.

  “I do so know how to dance,” I say. As if I wouldn’t have been programmed to dance! It is the very, the very first time I note a limitation of my H
usband’s logic. He is confusing what he and I do together with everything that I am capable of. Because he prefers chess to dancing, he assumes I do too. I notice that he and his friend are looking at each other with a sort of benign amusement. The Doll stamps her foot, I can almost see them thinking, just like a Real woman.

  The friend’s face turns to me, indulgent. “Well, darling, he is obviously wasting your talents,” he says as my Husband rolls his eyes. But the friend puts his hand out toward me and says, “Would you care to?”

  I come with various dances stored, but I have never used them. I have only twirled and swirled myself about my room, holding a new dress against me, partnered by Heron, perched on my wrist. The outstretched hand leaves me confused, concerned I will not be up to standard. My range of dances is, I now see in a flash, rudimentary at best, perhaps designed to entertain older Husbands on a cruise. Will this man be a good dancer? Will I be able to keep up?

  I look to my Husband. Is accepting the polite thing to do or a disloyalty? Will there be repercussions at home from the wrong choice?

  “Come on,” the friend says. “I had some tango classes years ago, but I never got to use them.”

  I see my Husband smiling. A smile that is part reassurance, part amusement. And a shot rises up through my core. I want to show him that I am capable. I put out my hand and allow myself to be led to the middle of the floor.

  It will not be the first time that you will have heard of the tango as being close to sex. I offer the observation again only because it is, to me, such a good analogy specifically for robot sex. For the ways in which we are able to do what we do, perform that which is both our work and our art.