Glitch: A Short Story (Kindle Single)

Glitch

by Hugh Howey

The hotel
coffee maker is giving me a hard time in a friendly voice. Keeps telling me the
filter door isn’t shut, but damned if it isn’t. I tell the machine to shut up
as I pull the plastic basket back out. Down on my knees, I peer into the
housing and see splashed grounds crusting over a sensor. I curse the engineer
who thought this was a problem in need of a solution. I’m using one of the
paper filters to clean the sensor when there’s an angry slap on the hotel room
door.

If Peter and
I have a secret knock, this would be it. A steady, loud pounding on barred
doors amid muffled shouting. I check the clock by the bed. It’s six in the
morning. He’s lucky I’m already up, or I’d have to murder him.

I tell him
to cool his jets while I search for a robe. Peter has seen me naked countless
times, but that was years ago. If he still has thoughts about me, I’d like for
them to be flab-free thoughts. Mostly to heighten his regrets and private
frustrations. It’s not that we stand a chance of ever getting back together; we
know each other too well for that. Building champion Gladiators is what we’re
good at. Raising a flesh and blood family was a goddamn mess.

I get the
robe knotted and open the door. Peter gives it a shove, and the security latch
catches like a gunshot. “Jesus,” I tell him. “Chill out.”

“We’ve got a
glitch,” he tells me through the cracked door. He’s out of breath like he’s
been running. I unlatch the lock and get the door open, and Peter shakes his
head at me for having used the lock—like I should be as secure sleeping
alone in a Detroit hotel as he is. I flash back to those deep sighs he used to give
me when I’d call him on my way out of the lab at night so I didn’t have to walk
to the car alone. Back before I had Max to escort me.

“What
glitch?” I ask. I go back to the argument I was having with the coffee maker
before the banging on the door interrupted me. Peter paces. His shirt is
stained with sweat, and he smells of strawberry
vape
and oil. He obviously hasn’t slept. Max had a brutal bout yesterday—we
knew it would be a challenge—but the finals aren’t for another two days.
We could build a new Max from spares in that amount of time. I’m more worried
about all the repressed shit I could hit Peter with if I don’t get caffeine in
me, pronto. The coffee maker finally starts hissing and sputtering while Peter
urges me to get dressed, tells me we can get coffee on the way.

“I just woke
up,” I tell him. He paces while the coffee drips. He doesn’t normally get this
agitated except right before a bout. I wonder what kind of glitch could have
him so worked up. “Software or hardware?” I ask. I pray he’ll say hardware. I’m
more in the mood to bust my knuckles, not my brain.

“Software,”
Peter says. “We think. We’re pretty sure. We need you to look at it.”

The cup is
filling, and the smell of coffee masks the smell of my ex-husband. “You
think?
Jesus, Pete, why don’t you go get a few hours’ sleep? I’ll get some
breakfast and head over to the trailer. Is Hinson there?”

“Hell no. We
told the professor everything was fine and sent him home. Me and Greenie have
been up all night trying to sort this out. We were going to come get you hours
ago—”

I shoot
Peter a look.

“Exactly. I
told Greenie about The Wrath and said we had to wait at least until the sun
came up.” He smiles at me. “But seriously, Sam, this is some wild shit.”

I pull the
half-f styrofoam cup out from under the basket. Coffee continues to drip to
the hotplate, where it hisses like a snake. The Wrath is what Peter named my
mood before eight in the morning. Our marriage might’ve survived if we’d only
had to do afternoons.

“Wait
outside, and I’ll get dressed,” I tell him. A sip of shitty coffee. The little
coffee maker warns me about pulling the cup out before the light turns green. I
give the machine the finger while Peter closes the door behind him. The smell
of his sweat lingers in the air around me for a moment, and then it’s gone. An
image of our old garage barges into my brain, unannounced. Peter and I are
celebrating Max’s first untethered bipedal walk. I swear to God, it’s as joyous
a day as when our Sarah stumbled across the carpet for the first time. Must be
the smell of sweat and solder bringing that memory back. Just a glitch. We get
them too.

••••

The
Gladiator Nationals are being held in Detroit for the first time in their nine-year
history—a nod to the revitalization of the local industry. Ironic,
really. A town that fought the hell out of automation has become one of the
largest builders of robots in the world. Robots building robots. But the
factory floors still need trainers, designers, and programmers. High-tech jobs
coming to rescue a low-wage and idle workforce. They say downtown is booming
again, but the place looks like absolute squalor to me. I guess you had to be
here for the really bad times to appreciate this.

Our trailer
is parked on the stadium infield. A security bot on tank treads—built by
one of our competitors—scans Peter’s ID and waves us through. We head for
the two semis with Max’s gold-and-blue-
jowled
image
painted across the sides. It looks like the robot is smiling—a bit of
artistic license. It gets the parents honking at us on the freeway and the kids
pumping their fists out the windows.

Reaching the
finals two years ago secured the DARPA contract that paid for the second
trailer. We build war machines that entertain the masses, and then the tech
flows down to factories like those here in Detroit—where servants are
assembled for the wealthy, healthcare bots for the infirmed, and mail-order sex
bots that go mostly to Russia. A lust for violence, in some roundabout way,
funds other lusts. All I know is that with one more trip to the finals, the
debt Peter saddled me with is history. I concentrate on this as we cross the
oil-splattered arena. The infield is deathly quiet, the stands empty. Assholes
everywhere getting decent sleep.

“—which
was the last thing we tried,” Peter says. He’s been running over their
diagnostics since we left the hotel.

“What you’re
describing sounds like a processor issue,” I say. “Maybe a short. Not
software.”

“It’s not
hardware,” he says. “We don’t think.”

Greenie is
standing on the ramp of trailer 1, puffing on a
vape
.
His eyes are wild. “Morning, Greenie,” I tell him. I hand him a cup of coffee
from the drive-through, and he doesn’t thank me, doesn’t say anything, just
flips the plastic lid off the cup with his thumb and takes a loud sip. He’s
back to staring into the distance as I follow Peter into the trailer.

“You kids
need to catch some winks,” I tell Peter. “Seriously.”

The trailer
is a wreck, even by post-bout standards. The overhead hood is running, a
network of fans sucking the air out of the trailer and keeping it cool. Max is
in his power harness at the far end, his cameras tracking our approach.
“Morning, Max,” I tell him.

“Good
morning, Samantha.”

Max lifts an
arm to wave. Neither of his hands are installed; his arms terminate in the
universal connectors Peter and I designed together a lifetime ago. His pincers
and his buzz saw sit on the workbench beside him. Peter has explained the
sequence I should expect, and my brain is whirring to make sense of it.

“How’re you
feeling, Max?”

“Operational,”
he says. I look over the monitors and see his charge level and error readouts.
Looks like the boys fixed his servos from the semifinal bout and got his armor
welded back together. The replacement shoulder looks good, and a brand new set
of legs has been bolted on, the gleaming paint on Max’s lower half a contrast
to his charred torso. I notice the boys haven’t gotten around to plugging the
legs in yet. Too busy with this supposed glitch.

As I look over
Max, his wounds and welds provide a play-by-play of his last brutal fight—one
of the most violent I’ve ever seen. The Berkeley team that lost will be
starting from scratch. By the end of the bout, Max had to drag himself across
the arena with the one arm he had left before pummeling his incapacitated
opponent into metal shavings. When the victory gun sounded, we had to do a
remote kill to shut him down. The way he was twitching, someone would’ve gotten
hurt trying to get close enough to shout over the screeches of grinding and
twisting metal. The slick of oil from that bout took two hours to mop up before
the next one could start.

“You look
good,” I tell Max, which is my way of complimenting Peter’s repair work without
complimenting Peter directly. Greenie joins us as I lift Max’s pincer from the
workbench. “Let me give you a hand,” I tell Max, an old joke between us.

I swear his
arm twitches as I say this. I lift the pincer attachment toward the stub of his
forearm, but before I can get it attached, Max’s arm slides gently out of the
way.

“See?” Peter
says.

I barely
hear him. My pulse is pounding—something between surprise and anger. It’s
a shameful feeling, one I recognize from being a mom. It’s the sudden lack of
compliance from a person who normally does what they’re told. It’s a rejection
of my authority.

“Max, don’t
move,” I say.

The arm
freezes. I lift the pincers toward the attachment again, and his arm jitters
away from me.

“Shut him
down,” I tell Peter.

Greenie is
closer, so he hits the red shutoff, but not before Max starts to say something.
Before the words can even form, his cameras iris shut and his arms sag to his
side.

“This next
bit will really piss you off,” Peter says. He grabs the buzz saw and attaches
it to Max’s left arm while I click the pincers onto the right. I reach for the
power.

“Might want
to stand back first,” Greenie warns.

I take a
step back before hitting the power. Max whirs to life and does just what Peter
described in the car: He detaches both his arms. The attachments slam to the
ground, the pincer attachment rolling toward my feet.

Before I can
ask Max what the hell he’s doing, before I can get to the monitors to see what
lines of code—what routines—just ran, he does something even
crazier than jettisoning his attachments.

“I’m sorry,”
he says. The fucker knows he’s doing something wrong.

••••

“It’s not
the safety overrides,” I say.

“Nope.”
Greenie has his head in his hands. We’ve been going over possibilities for two
hours. Two hours for me—the boys have been at this for nearly twelve. I
cycle through the code Max has been running, and none of it makes sense. He’s
got tactical routines and defense modules engaging amid all the clutter of his
parallel processors, but he’s
hardset
into
maintenance mode. Those routines shouldn’t be firing at all. And I can see why
Peter warned me not to put any live-fire attachments on. The last thing we need
is Max shooting up a four-million-dollar trailer.

“I’ve got it,”
I say. It’s at least the twentieth time I’ve said this. The boys shoot me down
every time. “It’s a hack. The SoCal team knows they’re getting stomped in two
days. They did this.”

“If they
did, they’re smarter than me,” Greenie says. “And they aren’t smarter than me.”

“We looked
for any foreign code,” Peter says. “Every diagnostic tool and virus check comes
back clean.”

I look up at
Max, who’s watching us as we try to figure out what’s wrong with him. I project
too much into the guy, read into his body language whatever I’m feeling or
whatever I expect him to feel. Right now, I imagine him as being sad. Like he
knows he’s disappointing me. But to someone else—a stranger—he
probably looks like a menacing hulk of a destroyer. Eight feet tall, angled
steel, pistons for joints, pockmarked armor. We see what we expect to see, I
guess.

“Max, why
won’t you keep your hands on?” I ask him. Between the three of us, we’ve asked
him variations of this a hundred times.

“I don’t
want them there,” he says. It’s as useful as a kid saying they want chocolate
because they like chocolate. Circular reasoning in the tightest of loops.

“But why
don’t you want them?” I ask, exasperated.

“I just
don’t want them there,” he says.

“Maybe he
wants them up his ass,” Greenie suggests. He fumbles for his
vape
, has switched to peppermint. I honestly don’t know how
the boys are still functioning. We aren’t in our twenties or thirties anymore.
All-nighters take their toll.

“I think we
should shut him down and go over everything mechanical one more time,” I say,
utterly defeated. “Worst-case scenario, we do a wipe and a reinstall tomorrow
before the finals.”

Max’s
primary camera swivels toward me. At least, I think it does. Peter shoots
Greenie a look, and Greenie lifts his head and shifts uncomfortably on his
stool.

“What aren’t
you telling me?” I ask.

Peter looks
terrified. Max is watching us.

“You didn’t
get a dump yesterday, did you?” I have to turn away from Peter and pace the
length of the trailer. There’s a rumble outside as our upcoming opponent is put
through his paces in the arena. Boy, would the SoCal guys love to know what a
colossal fuck-up we have going on in here. “So we lost all the data from
yesterday’s bout?” I try to calm down. Maintain perspective. Keep a clear head.
“We’ve got a good dump from the semis,” I say. “We can go back to that build.”