Glitch: A Short Story (Kindle Single) (3 page)

“C’mon,”
Greenie tells Peter. “We’ll save him. We can look at this in a week. With some
sleep.”

My hand
falls to Max’s new legs. The gleaming paint there has never seen battle. And
now his programming wants to keep it that way. I wonder how many times we’ve
been on this precipice only to delete what we can’t understand. And then
thinking we can just copy it back, and find that it’s been lost. I wonder if
this is why downloading the human consciousness has been such a dead end. Like
there’s some bit of complexity there that can’t survive duplication. Hinson and
Greenie start to push Peter out of the way.

“Get away
from Max,” Greenie says. “I’m powering him up. Watch your feet.”

He’s worried
about the pincers and the buzz saw falling off. Has to power up Max to get a
dump. I hesitate before leaving Max’s side. I quickly fumble with the cord. I
have this luxury, stepping away. Turning my back on a fight.

“I’ll get
the power,” I say. And Peter shoots me a look of disappointment. It’s three
against one, and I can see the air go out of him. He starts to say something,
to plead with me, but I give him a look, the kind only a wife can give to her
husband, one that stops him in his tracks, immobilizes him.

“Powering
up,” I say out loud, a lab habit coming back. A habit from back when we turned
on machines and weren’t sure what they would do, if they would fall or stand on
their own, if they would find their balance or topple to one side. I pull Peter
toward me, out of the center of the trailer, and I slap the red power switch
with nothing more than hope and a hunch.

The next
three seconds stretch out like years. I remember holding Sarah for the first
time, marveling at this ability we have to create life where before there was
none. This moment feels just as significant. A powerful tremor runs through the
trailer, a slap of steel and a blur of motion. The pincers and buzz saw remain
in place, but every other part of Max is on the move. A thunderclap, followed
by another, long strides taking him past us, a flutter of wind in my hair, the
four of us frozen as Max bolts from the trailer and out of sight, doing the
opposite of what he was built for, choosing an action arrived at on his own.