Glitch (4 page)

But inside, I was still recovering from the morning’s close call. Clearly I needed to find a better method of controlling my glitches. There were no guarantees that there would be a well-timed train to rescue me next time. And I was starting to suspect that the boy on the train, the one with the bright blue-green eyes, was a sign of an even greater danger. A sign that I had likely already been reported a few times as anomalous.

When a report of an anomaly was logged in the Community records, a Monitor would be sent to discreetly observe and report whether the subject was malfunctioning enough to warrant repairs before their biannual diagnostic checkup. That was the Monitor’s job: to locate and identify anomalous glitchers. And they were experts at it—more observant and keen than the average subject, and more aware of the minor symptoms of glitching than the brute Regulators. They had no distinguishing hardware or features. They were like ghosts, hidden within the ranks, anywhere and nowhere all at once.

Maybe someone had noticed the way I faltered when I glitched at the Academy. Or what if my parents or Markan had found my sketches? Would they have reported me if they had? I swallowed again. Of course they would. There was no such concept as loyalty to the family unit, only loyalty to Community. Even then, it wasn’t an emotion, only clear, cold logic.
An anomaly observed is an anomaly reported.

I glanced at the four Regulators stationed at each corner of the room. The Regulators at the Academy were younger than the ones I’d see patrolling the Markets and at the subway; they were Regulators-in-training. My chest jumped at the sight of them, but I soothed myself with the knowledge that there was no need to worry. If someone had reported me to Central Systems for what happened on the train platform this morning, I would have been taken away by now. Still, I glanced back and forth between the crowd and my salad, lingering at every opportunity on the Regulators, and wondering where the green-eyed boy, the Monitor, could be.

I chewed my salad silently, counting to five with each bite. Slow. Methodical. A tomato crunched in my mouth and the juice exploded between my teeth. I wanted to close my eyes and enjoy the wild taste of it—slightly sweet and yet not quite. I knew they grew all this produce in underground hothouses but it still seemed wonderfully impossible to create from a tiny seed something so beautiful and complex. I speared a piece of broccoli with my fork and chewed on it thoughtfully, enjoying the texture on my tongue and the crunch that echoed in my ears with each bite. I wished I could draw this feeling so I could hold it in my hands.

“Zoel,” said a voice to my right, almost making me jump. “I request your assistance on the homework we were assigned today.”

I looked over at Maximin and had to stop myself from smiling. He’d tested through to the biotech track just like I had three years ago, and as adults we were both destined to become V-chip technicians. But he was hopeless at memorization. He’d asked for tutoring two months ago, but now study lunches with him were part of my daily routine. I kept telling him he should ask for memory-enhancement programs, but he insisted that with practice and study he could learn it on his own. If we were capable of it, I might have thought he was stubborn.

Stubborn
was another word I had learned from the old archive texts at the central library database. Along with
happy
,
sad
,
guilty
,
lonely
,
angry
,
afraid.
The green-eyed boy’s face flashed in my memory. What had the expression on his face meant? Angry? Afraid? No, none of those things. I was just so desperate to see something, anything, on someone else’s face that I imagined it.

“Assistance willingly rendered, Maximin,” I said. “Let me retrieve my tablet.”

I reached down to unclick my case and pulled out the thin tablet. As I tapped the screen to load the neurochem text, I kept thinking about the green-eyed boy from the subway. Maybe it was just his eyes. He had probably zoned out to the Link and happened to be looking at me, not watching me carefully and reporting on my anomalous behavior. I needed to stop thinking about him.

“Shall we begin?” Maximin asked.

“Yes,” I said, careful to keep my voice placid and even. I looked over at Maximin, whose shock of blond hair and pale skin looked bright in the cafeteria light, his athletic build filling out the entire left side of my vision.

I touched my subcutaneous forearm panel. The two-by-six-inch panel lit up underneath my skin and I tapped on it to get to my notes.

“Read through the text again,” I said. “Then we can look over my notes.”

Maximin nodded and took the tablet to read. I watched him for a moment, then looked at my lit-up arm keyboard to get my mind off my larger worries. The smooth subcutaneous panels were implanted at age five, then upgraded at ages ten and fifteen. The skin was smooth over the top. We only needed a 2-D image to see my notes, so I took out one tiny black pyramid projector from my tablet case and set it on the table. I tapped my forearm keyboard to connect it. An eight-by-twelve screen appeared flat on the table, and with another click my meticulous notes filled the illuminated space.

Maximin put down my tablet, then leaned over to look at my projected notes.

“I could sync my notes to your tablet if you want,” I said.

“No, I just need to observe them for a moment.” He compared the diagrams I’d drawn with ones in the tablet text. “The auxiliary nerve tension between synapse quadrant one and two. Can you sketch it in my notes?” He held out his forearm panel to me.

“Where’s your tablet?” I asked.

“I always remember better when I see you draw it out piece by piece rather than looking at the finished whole. My projector’s acting up too. You can just trace directly on my arm panel.” He switched it from keyboard to draw mode.

I nodded and leaned over closer to him. A curly strand of hair fell out of my clip, but I was too focused on explaining as I sketched to care. I used my finger to sketch the first quadrant on his forearm and then looked up to see if he was following me.

I almost bumped into his nose because he was leaning in so close. There was this look on his face. Like he wasn’t thinking about synapse quadrants at all. His eyes were on my neck. He reached up and rubbed the escaped strand of my hair between two fingers.

“So soft,” he breathed out.

“Maximin,” I said. He dropped the hair and went back to the sketch, and I quickly pushed the stray strand behind my ear. My arms were frozen and tense.

What just happened?
That was certainly anomalous behavior. Could it be some sort of Monitor’s test to see if I would report an observed anomaly? Was I being watched from here? Or could it be…?

Hope bloomed inside my chest. What if I wasn’t the only one who glitched?

But when I looked again, Maximin’s face was completely blank, without a trace of the energy and alertness I’d seen a moment before. Of course. Once again, I’d been so focused on my own emotions that I was starting to see them everywhere.

I struggled to keep my shoulders from sagging. Maximin wasn’t a glitcher like me. He was part of the Community, part of a greater whole where each person was a small but necessary node, Linked in thought with all the other nodes. Humanity Sublime. It’s what I missed the most when I glitched, that feeling of wholeness and connection, of belonging to something bigger than myself. Now it was just me. What good was it to have color and happiness when I couldn’t share it with anyone?

Community first. Community always.
Hot guilt swept over me again, that constant heavy sense that I was
bad.
Wrong. Broken. After all the lessons I’d been taught about how individuality and selfishness were destructive, here I was not only refusing to report myself, but looking for a companion. Actually wanting Maximin to be broken, too. What was wrong with me? I was beginning to understand the dangers of the barbarian human traits that caused the destruction of the world.

Lunch ended and Maximin’s body bumped against my side as we walked down the dimly lit hallway to my last class of the day. I looked over at him curiously. The four-foot-wide hallway was crowded as always and, true, it was a narrow fit, but not
that
narrow. His face was blank though. I stopped in front of my last class, Algorithm Design. Maximin continued on down the hallway, turning to take a long glance back at me. Then he was lost in the mass of subjects.

I turned in to my classroom and only barely managed not to stumble in surprise. The tall green-eyed boy was there, sitting in the seat next to mine.

Everyone else sat down methodically, calmly pulling out their tablets and typing on their arm panels to check the day’s lesson. I sat down, conscious of the boy’s long gangly limbs stretching underneath the table into the row in front of us. Extraneous space was an unnecessary luxury in sublevel buildings, so all classrooms were small. The room-length metal tables and chairs were lined up tightly to fit as many students as possible, five rows to a room.

I tried to breathe normally. There was no reason to panic.

I just needed to cut out all other thoughts and concentrate on the lesson about algorithm development. But I couldn’t help discreetly sneaking glances at the boy. He was typing calmly on his forearm. At least for once he wasn’t watching me, and even though his limbs were long, he wasn’t touching me. Almost as if he was being careful
not
to touch me.

Suddenly, the professor stopped talking. All the students tilted their heads up expectantly. Must be a Link announcement, I thought. I hoped it wasn’t too important. I tried to make my face mimic the others in the room, as if I were concentrating on the Link info. But then all eyes in the class turned to look at me.

“Zoel,” the professor said, “are you not paying attention to the Link feed? You are to report to Room A117 immediately.”

My heart monitor started vibrating loudly in the silent room.

I FUMBLED
putting my tablet into its case. The loud scraping of my chair on the concrete floor echoed in the small space. No one was watching me; their attention was back on the lesson in spite of my beeping monitor. I got out of the room as quickly as possible and recited the Community Creed as I walked down the hallways to the south elevator.

What I wouldn’t give to click back into the Link again right now. After a few more recitations, the heart monitor finally stilled. But then, how many times had the monitor gone off today alone? I must have triggered an alert at Central Systems. I wanted to kick myself. How could I be so stupid? So careless?

My finger paused before I put it to the small touch panel to call the elevator. I was still glitching. I wasn’t going to be able to hide my secrets any longer. I would be caught and repaired, or I could run away right now. I could get on the subway, take the connecting line, and try to get lost somewhere in the Central City. Disappear.

My hand started shaking and a high-pitched hum echoed through my mind. Desperate, hopeless thoughts. I straightened my body, calming the fear and panic soaring through my limbs. I couldn’t stay hidden forever. Everything in the city required either wrist-chip or fingerprint access. I’d be found instantly.

But then the secrets and the hiding would be over. The loneliness and the nightmares would go away. I wouldn’t be broken anymore. I would be just like everyone else, whole again, part of something. This was something that had to happen.

I touched my finger to the panel to call the elevator before I could talk myself out of it, and heard the responding whir of the elevator coming down the shaft. There was no choice, not really. I stepped into the circular white elevator tube and watched the door slide shut behind me.

“Sublevel One.” My voice shook. The elevator moved but I could barely feel it. This was the right thing, I reminded myself. I was doing the right thing. I couldn’t think about my drawings and the beauty and the happiness and all the things I’d lose. When the door slid silently open, I stepped out and followed the numbers on the wall to Room A117.

The door was open and light from inside spilled out into the hallway.

“Greetings?” I called. “Subject Zoel Q-24 reporting.”

“Come in,” said a deep male voice.

I took one last deep breath and stepped over the threshold into the room. But then I looked around me in surprise. It wasn’t an exam room. It was a bedroom. There was a bed, desk, even ambient-light lamps instead of the ceiling light cells. I remembered now that the school had a wing of residential rooms for people of importance traveling through. Then I saw the computer and mobile diagnostic equipment in one corner. Had they called in a specialist to deal with me? How much did they know?

My brow must have furrowed, registering my confusion, because the short, round man standing in the corner said, “Come in. We just need to run a quick check on your systems.”

He was middle-aged with thinning brown hair and a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He wasn’t wearing the regulation gray but instead the black uniform and red insignia of officials. High-ranking officials—Class 1 and 2. This wasn’t just an ordinary diagnostic appointment.

“Have a seat.” He motioned to a chair beside the equipment.

I swallowed, trying not to let my fear show. An official here for an impromptu diagnostic check. Something was seriously wrong. That moment on the train platform, the boy with the aqua eyes—someone must have seen what I had done and ordered an instant deactivation. That had to be it. They probably wouldn’t even try to fix me. It was all over. I forced my feet toward the gray chair and sat down.

“They said you were pretty.” He smiled at me and dabbed at his forehead with a cloth as he came toward my chair. He took a small metal instrument off the equipment table.

“Excuse me, sir?” I didn’t understand his words and I didn’t understand the look on his face. “Sir?”

“Sir.” He smoothed down his sweat-slicked hair and organized the tools prepped and aligned on the desk. “So respectful.”