The Marquis de Sade learns to code: "Hi Ho Cherry-O" by Becky Hagenston

When I first finished reading Becky Hagenston's economically told "Hi Ho Cherry-O," I found it fun and interesting, but also difficult to put the pieces of it together into a satisfying "what's it all about" kind of way like I tend to strive for. Even after a second reading, it felt to me like there were a couple of contending readings all at play in the story, competing with one another for primacy, like the noisy children playing twentieth century board games that form part of the backbone of the narrative. Is it a story about alienation, featuring a robotic Bartleby the Scrivener who decides he's prefer not to do the work he's asked to do? Is it a story about how the future may come apart as interactions switch from in-person to virtual, in which board games of the past are a symbol of the good-old days? Or is the commercialization and false happiness of those board games itself the genesis of where it all went wrong? 

The only way I've been able to tease out which of these competing readings is what the story is really about is to do something fairly artless. Rather than preserve the original order of the narrative, if I rearrange the parts, keeping everything there but moving the pieces around in order to form a more obvious but less interesting story, it becomes a little harder for the main theme to hide. 

Our unnamed, first-person narrator lives in a futuristic world in which many people have become so fond of virtual life, some of them have abandoned the physical world altogether. (Karen Carlson talks here about whether we should call this future world a dystopia.) Those who do abandon their physical selves live in a "Home for the Disembodied." The narrator's husband, who is also unnamed, works as a counselor in one of these homes, meaning his commute to work consists of slipping into the virtual reality station in the couple's bedroom. Inside virtual reality, he has another family, where he is married to an actress and they have triplets. He still lives in both the physical and the virtual world, but there are hints he might be slipping permanently into the virtual one. 

The narrator is working on her dissertation, presumably for an advanced academic degree. Against the advice of her dissertation director, she is studying 20th century board games. The director suspects the narrator's interest in the subject stems from her lost childhood. The narrator's parents lived in a Home for the Disembodied, which meant the narrator had to grow up in an orphanage. Although the narrator was able to have some interaction with her parents by going into virtual reality to see them, her parents ultimately deleted themselves even from the virtual world when the world scared them too much.

The director doesn't use these words, but the narrator suspects the director's concern is that this project will do nothing more than force everyone to "be reminded of what we can't get back." This seems to apply to both the narrator, trying to "get back" her lost childhood, but also to society, trying to get back, possibly, to a more corporeal and "real" existence.  

Bartleby the Robot

The narrator has a couple of methods she employs for her research. One is interviewing folks in nursing homes, during which she sometimes will perform brain scans to find traces of memories of playing games. The other is to search through data, although there seems to have been some sort of ecological disaster or series of disasters that destroyed a lot of the old data. To help with her data searches, the university has assigned her Wendell the service robot, who is, significantly, the only character in the story given a name. Wendell is supposedly programmed to make the narrator's life easier, but he seems less than thrilled with his work. Or, perhaps, he is more thrilled by masochistic impulses. He (I'll use the masculine pronoun for no other reason than his name is Wendell) continually asks the narrator to perform painful and humiliating acts on his body. (Or at least they would be painful if Wendell weren't a robot.) These acts crescendo from light to heavy in the story, from, "Tie me up and leave me in the closet for an hour" to, "Cut me with a knife that will leave a mark" to, "Tell me you hate me because I'm stupid. Tell me I should drown myself in a toxic lake."

The narrator's research must be going well, because nothing is more 20th century than a sassy robot who seems to suddenly come to life.

At first, the narrator refuses, mostly because she's a polite, caring person. She's so polite, in fact, she doesn't press her husband too much about the sex he sometimes has with his virtual-world wife, even though the narrator and her husband have not had sex in the real world for a long time. But the more Wendell insists she harm him, the more she realizes it's scratching an itch she didn't know she had. When she chokes Wendell, she keeps going after the robot says she can stop. When she insults him, she says more awful things than he asked her to say.

Not a malfunction

One is tempted to read Wendell as malfunctioning much like Bartleby the Scrivener did when he could no longer handle a redundant job. One could read this whole story as a commentary on how society used to do things like play board games together face-to-face, and now the whole world is virtual, and it's alienating and dehumanizing, so dehumanizing that even the robots who are built for the boredom can't take it. But there are reasons to doubt this reading. For one, the narrator finds that, contrary to the commercials she finds that the children playing the games are "very, very happy children," and also "very white and dimpled (who) mostly wear stripes," the memory scans tell a different story. They recall fights over the games and the correct rules. (Who hasn't had an argument over which house rules to Monopoly are the right ones?) The pre-virtual and pre-ecological disaster past wasn't idyllic. What we've lost isn't a better way of living, it's just a realer way of living. 

Twice the narrator questions the functioning of the robot. Once, she asks Wendell, "Who programmed you?" The robot responds, "I'm programmed to work for you." Another time, the narrator asks the university if she can replace Wendell, and the university is shocked by the request. "The robot was programmed to make your life easier," they say. It's possible to read these as absurd replies that are clearly contradicted by reality, but what if we read them as true? What if Wendell is behaving the way he is because what the narrator really needs is to learn to slash and scream a bit, to get rid of her polite manner, which is itself a form of virtual reality thrown over her truer, more carnal self.

This seems to be supported by the narrator's epiphany. We know it's an epiphany because she all but tells us it is, right after throwing Wendell in the closet for the last time: "Something is happening, a feeling like when my parents taught me math problems and finally, finally, I could solve them." Immediately after this, she tries to have sex with her husband in the real world. When he refuses, she says it's "fine," but then she starts thinking of more horrible things she can do to Wendell. 

I believe the weight of evidence leads to this story being mostly about how the narrator has decided to choose a corporeal existence over a false, less frightening virtual one. She has said in conversations with her husband that she doesn't want to raise kids in a Home for the Disembodied, she wants them "here, in the flesh," but her husband says it's "too dangerous." After giving it another try at the end to coax her husband back out of his virtual life, she takes an internal turn toward a the life of the flesh. True, at that point, it's only planned--she thinks of more awful things she will do to Wendell--but it's nonetheless decisive. Wendell's programming has figured out that this is what it takes to give the narrator what she needs. Through sado-masochism, Wendell has managed to baptize her into the life of the body she always knew she wanted. It may not be a return to some halcyon, Edenic past. Humanity went into virtual retreat because the real world was scary. But for her, it's like she's discovered the rules to the game after only looking at the box for years. The last two words of the story, "I've won," say a lot about how the story is programmed.