Glitch (3 page)

I envisioned the way the lie would fall so easily from my lips. I was getting better and better at it. It had been such a strange thing at first, to say the opposite of what was true. To defy and disobey clear orders in the Community Code, even by my silence.
An anomaly observed is an anomaly reported.

I swallowed hard, looking around me in the unusual silence, the Link absent from my mind. Everything was so much sharper without the Link fogging me—sights, sounds, smells. It was exhilarating and shocking and terrifying. I knew my emotions had grown too strong. They were dangerous to the Community. They were dangerous to me.

But still, I wanted color. I wanted to soar with happiness even if it meant dealing with the weight of fear and guilt, too. I wanted to live. And that meant that I couldn’t give the glitching up. At least not yet. Just a little bit longer, I’d told myself each day in the beginning. Maybe I’d report myself tomorrow. But then each tomorrow had become another
not today
, and now after two months, I still hadn’t reported myself. As much as I might not like it, lies and secrets were my way of life now.

I WAS FULLY LINKED
the next morning as I walked down the corridors of my housing-unit grid. My wrist lifted and waved in front of the sensor to open the front gate. After a blip of recognition, the door slid sideways into the wall with a slight hiss as sealed air was released. Air quality was carefully regulated everywhere in our underground city, in all of the buildings that were dug down deep into the earth and all the tunnels connecting them.

I stepped two even paces into the small portal room. One door sealed behind me and the next opened to the tunnel system. My hand secured the strap of my school-tablet case over my shoulder. Three rising tones noted the coming Link News—but I didn’t freeze in place. Instead, the now-familiar rush of sensation swept over me. No more Link readout on the periphery of my vision. No more voices in my head.

I was glitching.

I smiled, breathed a sigh of relief, and stretched my neck. Even though I knew it meant I’d have to be extra careful until the Link clicked back in, I was glad to have my head to myself again. I felt a tinge of unease at the sudden frequency of my glitches, but I couldn’t worry about it right now. I never knew how long a glitch would last or how far apart the glitches would be, and I didn’t want to waste the glitch time with constant fear and worry.

I stepped into the narrow whitewashed concrete tunnel and looked around. I was alone, so I let myself linger and look. The walls around me were concrete and aluminum, but I could suddenly see the slight differences in the colors and textures. I breathed in the dry smell of old paint and dust. I listened to the noise of my shoes and slight swish of my pants, echoing down the three-foot-wide tunnel. I looked left and right, but still there was no one else coming, so I trailed my fingertips along the rough walls of the tunnel, lingering on the cool aluminum of each housing-complex door as I passed.

I stayed for another moment, but eventually I dropped my arms and squared my shoulders, posture-perfect, and passed through a small archway into the much wider subway access tunnel. Our housing grid was on Sublevel 2, almost level with the subway hub. Gray-suited subjects entered from other similar tributary tunnels and fell silently into line walking down the low-ceilinged tunnel.

The
clack
of black-heeled shoes echoed off the concrete floor and walls of the tunnel, reminding me of the storm I’d seen almost two months ago. A pipe had burst and flooded the lower levels at my school and they’d moved us into one of the few Sublevel 0 rooms. We were at the top level just below the Surface in a room with low ceilings. Sheets of toxic rain crashed against the building. The Surface had only been an abstract idea before, but suddenly it felt far too real.

Then came the thunder. It was my first experience of terror—it was so much worse than fear. I’d backed away from the sound and massaged my seizing chest. My heart monitor went off for the first time in public. I’d forced myself to calm down fast enough to avoid an immediate diagnostic, but only by hiding from the sound of the rain. I’d never wondered about the Surface again. It must be a terrifying place.

I tried to dismiss the memory of the storm by losing myself in the back-and-forth robotic pace of walking. I studied the back of the heads in front of me, trying to memorize every texture and color. It kept me busy for the half-mile of walking. I only realized we’d arrived at the subway when the people in front of me slowed down.

I looked around the wide platform and the high concrete ceiling arching above the track. The openness of the subway tunnels always made me uncomfortable—the air always seemed a little thinner here, and I wondered just how closely the air quality was regulated in such a large chamber. The walls and ceiling arched over our heads about thirty feet up.

People stood like statues as they waited for the train to take them to school or work—all except for one blond little girl who tugged on her mother’s hand. My eyes flickered uneasily to the Regulators standing near the back columns. The girl hopped around with exaggerated motions, giggling whenever her feet hit the concrete. Her actions looked completely out of sync with her tiny starched gray suit. The sound of her feet and laugh echoed throughout the tunnel. I tried to memorize her features to draw later. She was so beautiful, so
alive.
Watching her made me feel light inside.

The learning texts referred to the Old World emotions as childish. Glitching happened from time to time with children because the V-chip hardware couldn’t always keep up with their rapid development. It was difficult to accomplish complete control. Too much V-chip control and the brain wouldn’t develop into adulthood correctly. Simply downloading information had turned subjects into vegetables—they’d been forced to deactivate them. The human neurons needed to stay active or the brain deteriorated. That was why we still had to go to the Academy until we were ready for labor at eighteen. Then we got our final, adult V-chip, the chip that would control us and protect us from glitches for the rest of our adult lives.

The rumble of the train in the distance made everyone stand up straighter, more alert. I glanced at the clock on the wall and tried to move unobtrusively toward the front of the crowd. I’d be late to school if I didn’t catch this train. I couldn’t risk any anomalous behavior, anything to bring more attention to me. I accidentally bumped a man in the shoulder and he looked at me with too much interest. I slowed and made my face blank—nothing anomalous here, just a normal subject waiting for a train. He paused, hesitating, then looked away.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the little blond girl still bouncing around as the train neared. Her mother motioned with her hand for the girl to come. When she didn’t respond, the woman called her name.

I couldn’t hear the mother’s voice over the roar of the approaching train, and apparently, the girl couldn’t either. She kept dancing. She was very close to the edge of the platform. Too close. I risked another glance at the nearby Regulators, but they hadn’t moved. They weren’t programmed to prevent accidents, and glitching children did not pose immediate grounds for removal. I looked back at the girl, a frantic feeling growing in my chest. She twirled closer to the ledge, arms out and eyes closed.

The train came around the corner. The mother reached out and almost managed to grasp the girl’s little jacket. But the girl hopped just out of reach and landed with one foot off the platform.

She toppled backward toward the tracks below, no fear on her face, still that clueless little smile.

“No!” I screamed, reaching my hand out involuntarily. Her mother reacted as well, but too slowly. The train noise was deafening, drowning out my scream.

And that’s when I did it—the thing I swore I’d never do again, the secret I kept trying so desperately to deny existed. I mean, it simply wasn’t possible. It was illogical. But I did it now, without thinking or acknowledging that I fully expected it to work.

I reached out to the girl with my mind. I searched out the shape of her in the milliseconds as she fell. I felt the unique high-pitched ringing sound in my ears and concentrated on the lines and planes of her face, the geometrical cut of her suit, the tiny curves of her feet. I surrounded every part of her with the invisible force of my will. And then
I yanked.

The girl’s momentum changed in midfall and she vaulted back onto the platform a mere second before the train flew past, brakes screeching as it slowed. Her mother caught her and calmly smoothed down the wrinkles of the girl’s coat as if nothing had just happened.

Relief poured over me. I did it. I saved her. She was safe.

But there were eyes on me now. Several subjects were looking directly at me, and as the train came to a complete stop, the loud beeping of my heart monitor rang out in the silence. I looked down at the ground, trying to still the fear tearing through me. I shuffled into line as if nothing was wrong, as if my heartbeat wasn’t still beeping with an inordinately loud noise over the quiet subjects’ orderly movements to board the train. I focused on my training. Slow, measured breaths, repeat the Community Creed, concentrate on the still lines of my face.

A few people tapped on their subcutaneous forearm panels. They must be reporting me. Reporting my anomalous behavior: the screaming and what had surely been a look of panic on my face as I’d reached uselessly for the girl. I looked around me, searching for any Regulators heading my way.

Then I saw one. In the crowd of moving gray bodies, he was standing perfectly still, eyes locked on me. He was watching me with a look that wasn’t completely uninterested. He started to move in my direction. There was nowhere to run, but I couldn’t help trying. I hurriedly stepped on the train and moved as far away from the door as I could without attracting more attention. I tried to glance back at the Regulator, but in the flood of people entering the train, I couldn’t find him again.

I worked to appear calm and disinterested, blending in with the crowd. The Regulator had no reason to capture me. My heart monitor beeped only briefly, and no one would make the connection between my yelling and the girl flying back up onto the platform. Surely they wouldn’t. I barely believed it myself. Logically, it was impossible. That’s why I’d denied it, even though it had happened a few times now—like my hairbrush that flew across the room into my hand when I’d merely thought about it; the glass cup falling off the kitchen table that I’d unconsciously caught with my mind before it shattered on the floor; the shopping cart at the Market.

The doors sealed closed and the air-filtration system hummed as the train started smoothly forward. I stole a glance around, trying to look blank and completely disinterested. If the Regulator was on this train, there would be no escape.

No sign of the Regulator. Everyone’s faces seemed to have settled back into indifference as they all stood evenly spaced apart, holding the floor-to-ceiling poles studded throughout the train car. The incident with the girl was completely forgotten. I was safe.

I took a deep breath to soothe my jarred nerves. But then amid the empty faces in the crowded space, my eyes latched on to a pair of bright blue-green eyes. I realized with a jolt that it was the same boy from the day before in the Market Corridor. And he was looking right at me.

He was tall and thin, with hair so dark it looked black and those eyes that stared at me with an intensity that seemed to sizzle through my skin. What had he seen? Why did he keep looking when the others’ faces had gone empty?

I stood still, clutching a pole for balance and staring at the rounded corner of the dark subway window. I hoped my eyes looked glazed over, because inside, my emotions were roiling.

Could he possibly know about the … thing I could do? Would he report it? And what would happen if he did? Would they deactivate me so they could dissect my brain to understand how it worked? Or simply deactivate me and dispose of my defective hardware? There were just too many questions I couldn’t answer.

I clenched my eyes shut to stop the dizzying tumble of fears, then realized that might appear anomalous. I went back to staring at the window’s edge, jittery with nervous tension for the rest of the ride to the Academy. I wanted to get off this train and forget about what had happened on the platform and the boy with the piercing eyes. As the train slowed at the station, though, I saw the boy move toward the doors. My eyes widened in spite of myself. Was he following me?

I tried to think back, to remember if I’d seen him around at the Academy or on the train before now. I didn’t know. I spent so much time making sure I acted normally, I was sometimes oblivious to the subjects around me. I stepped off the train and entered the flow of kids my age heading toward the Academy entrance tunnel. Then, with a flood of relief, I felt the familiar tingling sensation at the corners of my mind, marking the return of the Link connection. I embraced it, letting my fear drift away into nothingness.

*

It was lunchtime when I glitched again. I blinked a few times, then stared down at my plate until I was adjusted. I’d let myself go numb all morning while I was Linked, not even trying to fight that last inch of complete control. But now that I was all to myself again, the fear I’d successfully subdued all morning came rushing right back.

I was sitting alone in the Academy cafeteria, one of the largest open spaces in our sector. It was a wide, low-ceilinged room with columns placed every fifteen feet throughout for support. It was bare, utilitarian, and gray, like everything else. There was light chatter in the dim cafeteria, students discussing classwork mostly.

Several luminescent 3-D projection cubes were set up on some tables with varying figures rotating inside them as students worked on assignments. One group of students was studying the internal mechanics of bionic data nanodes. Another group examined the image of a rotating human head. As I watched, one student clicked on the translucent skull. The model zoomed in to reveal lobes of the brain. Another click revealed the complex bustles of nerves, tissue, and thin Link hardware threaded all throughout. Training and studying all day for the time we’d reach adulthood, receive our final V-chip, and join the Community workforce alongside our parents. Everything was normal.