Summary
When Stan regains consciousness, he looks up to see a white ceiling. He panics but can’t move or speak. Meanwhile, Charmaine resumes her job as Chief Medications Administrator. She is proud to have her name tag back, but worries she might have lost her edge over the past two months. Before her first procedure of the day, she goes to her cell and finds Sandi cuffed and wearing a bag over her head. Sandi says they must have put her there by mistake, explaining that she was caught trying to escape through the trash chute. She’d enjoyed getting plastic surgery and doing yoga instructor videos, but things went downhill when Veronica disappeared after refusing to euthanize people. Resigned to her fate, Sandi tells her to call a guard and tell them about their mistake, telling Charmaine she has no choice.
Stan wets himself while waiting, only to discover he is wearing a diaper. Guards take Sandi away from Charmaine’s cell. Charmaine feels like a fraud as she prepares for work, putting on makeup and testing her angelic smile. Upon checking in for her shift, Charmaine is told that Management has misgivings about her professional dedication and she must undergo a loyalty test. The higher-up woman implies that Charmaine will be eliminated if she doesn’t follow through. Charmaine sees that, unlike usual, the Procedure slip has no name. The woman disappears before answering why. In the room, she is shocked to discover Stan. He can’t speak, so she assumes he killed for her—possibly Max. She sobs as she reassures him nothing bad will happen. She reasons that if she doesn’t, someone else will “relocate” Stan; and she’ll be punished. She kisses his paralyzed mouth, then injects a vein in his neck. Just then, an electrocution-like jolt makes her spasm and pass out on the floor.
Stan wakes up feeling hungover in a giant bin full of blue teddy bears. Above are warehouse rafters. He considers the remorse Charmaine is feeling. He imagines treating her like a slave for what she’s done to him—if they reunite. If she doesn’t put rat poison in his coffee and try to kill him again, that is. Then he realizes he’ll never be back in Consilience. He sleeps in the teddy bears and waits for Jocelyn to tell him what’s next.
Charmaine wakes up in her house, crying because Stan is dead. She doesn’t remember putting on her civilian clothes. Aurora from HR is there. She makes tea for Charmaine and says she must have had a temporary episode of amnesia. Aurora apologizes and says she shouldn’t have been put through such an ordeal. She says it was touching to see Charmaine falter with her emotions while she did it. Forcefully, Charmaine asks her to leave. Aurora says there will be a funeral in two days, with the official story being that he died in an electrical accident at the chicken facility. She also says a car is coming tonight to bring Charmaine for a concussion CAT scan.
Jocelyn wakes Stan and informs him that he is in a shipping warehouse. His new name is Waldo because he’s inheriting the identity code of a man who died in a real accident. He’s on the Possibilibots team—sex robots. They are in the packing center. His coworkers never knew Waldo, who was placed in another department. He is to work there and wait until someone approaches with the password Tiptoe Through the Tulips. She sends him off with a Waldo name tag.
Back at her house, Charmaine finds a DVD in the player: it shows her and Max having sex. Unsure what to do with it, she hides it. When the doorbell rings, Jocelyn is there to take her to her CAT scan. Charmaine recognizes her from the Reception—she made her kill Stan. Jocelyn claims ignorance, telling Charmaine she is confused. Jocelyn explains that Stan was killed because of faulty wiring. Charmaine assumes she is supposed to comply with the story, so she does. In the car, she finds Max behind the wheel. He insists his name is Phil, a driver for Surveillance, declining to acknowledge their tryst. Jocelyn plays along. Charmaine tries to not cry, knowing no one is on her side and her fate might be like Sandi’s or Veronica’s.
Stan eats chicken wings and drinks weak beer with his colleagues, reminding himself of his feeble new name. His colleagues discuss how the sex robots—replacements for women—are better when the models breathe or have heartbeats. They joke about how real women have no turn-off button. They say they’ve all test-run the robots, but it’s not officially allowed. Stan says he is game, eliciting approval from the men. Charmaine returns from her CAT scan with three kinds of pills to help her relax. She went along with the game because she considered it safer. Aurora insists she needs someone with her and so stays over, despite Charmaine’s wishes. Aurora wakes her at noon for brunch. After eating, Charmaine learns Aurora is taking her shopping for funeral clothing because she owns no black garments.
After lunch, a man named Budge leads Stan on a tour of the facility. Stan learns that the place is an extension built onto the back of the prison; that’s why Stan has never seen shipping trucks in Consilience. The truckers aren’t allowed inside, of course. Budge explains that customers custom order their Possibilibots, looking either for celebrities, crushes, or sometimes family members, like an older aunt. The scene cuts to Charmaine feeling that she looks good in black. The bell rings and Aurora is on the other side of the door. She explains that a very special guest wanted to be with Charmaine in her grief—to make a tribute to her and Stan. She is disappointed and confused when Ed appears in a car.
Returning to Stan’s storyline, Stan learns that they also make male robots, but there’s less demand for them. Back in Holland, where the bots are designed, sex workers have gotten angry and protested their business being lost to robots. At “Customization Plus,” Stan discovers a replica of Charmaine. A shiver runs up his spine. Casually, Stan asks who ordered it. They say it’s “going right to the top,” and the customer wanted it “extra lifelike.” Budge says, “Yeah, we really have to tiptoe through the tulips on this one,” adding that it’s a line from an old song. Stan can’t believe that Budge is his contact. He needs a drink.
Analysis
In the seventh chapter, Atwood builds on the theme of manipulation. Because no one at Stan’s low level in the community is allowed to leave, Jocelyn’s idea to use him to leak scandalous information about Positron requires the staging of his death. For the ordering of his murder to appear justified in the eyes of Ed and other higher-ups at Positron, Jocelyn has made sure there is surveillance footage of her reenacting the affair with Stan. This way, when she orders him to be killed, it will look as though she is merely doing away with a lowly participant she has exploited.
Jocelyn insists that her bizarre plan also requires the participation of Charmaine, who must believe she is really killing Stan in order to “sell” the spectacle to anyone watching. Jocelyn orchestrates the situation, coercing Charmaine by implying that if she doesn’t prove her loyalty to the project by killing her husband, she herself will be euthanized. In the procedure room, Charmaine finds that her devotion to Stan doesn’t override her own desire to continue living, and she injects him with what she believes is poison. In an instance of dramatic irony, the reader knows she is merely knocking him out.
The theme of manipulation continues with the events that Charmaine is put through following her forced (would-be) killing of Stan. Before she has an opportunity to see whether the poison has worked on him, Charmaine blacks out and wakes up to discover that she is being compelled to go along with an alternate story about how her husband died. Not only has Charmaine been made to kill her husband; she is being made to act like a grieving widow for the benefit of others.
On her way to the CAT scan she needs for the supposed concussion she got during the procedure, Charmaine learns that the conspiracy even involves Phil—“Max”—who pretends not to know her despite their months-long affair. Although she knows she is being lied to and manipulated, Charmaine figures that it is best to play along with the people who wield power over her; she knows better than anyone that those who refuse are killed.
The themes of greed and exploitation return when Stan assumes his new identity as Waldo, a new worker in the Possibilibots sector of the Positron/Consilience empire. On his tour of the facility, Stan learns that the company sells sex robots built in the image of whomever the customer desires, with no regard for the subject’s privacy. The lack of ethics also means the company is happy to sell lifelike child robots to pedophiles, even if providing such a product risks encouraging behavior that puts real children in harm’s way. In an instance of situational irony, Stan sees that someone has ordered a robot designed in his wife’s image—a hint that someone powerful at Positron has turned Charmaine into a fetish object.
