Glitch (7 page)

I’d lived my entire life going from room to room, tunnel to tunnel. Sure there were bigger spaces, like the subway platform rooms or the cafeteria, but it was nothing compared to this. I could always reach out a hand to find a wall, ceiling, or another subject. Here I reached out and I touched nothing. We ran close to the outside walls of the buildings, then Adrien took us down a narrow space, finally something similar to the tunnels I was used to.

Until I looked up. I stopped cold, letting go of Adrien’s hand.

Sky.

My breath started coming in strained gasps. What had I done? The sky was right above me. It was beautiful and horrible all at the same time. It was just like in my nightmares, making me dizzy like I could fly one second and then feeling like it was pressing down and compressing my lungs the next. Or was that just the toxic chemicals I was surely breathing in? I put a hand to my chest, wheezing heavily. I barely noticed Adrien calling my name.

“Zoe. Zoe! What’s wrong?”

“Can’t breathe!” I collapsed against the cool, reassuring wall of a building. Underground. I needed to get back underground. I gripped my throat, clawing for air.

Adrien knelt down beside me, putting his hands on my shoulders and leaning his forehead into mine. “Zoe, you’re hyperventilating. But we can’t stop here. Try to calm down and take deep breaths. Come on, I’ve seen you do this before, whenever your heart monitor is about to go off. You’re a pro at this. Just breathe and calm down. We’re almost to the transport.”

He breathed slowly with me, our eyes locked. Slowly, my lungs stopped burning. I allowed him to pull me to my feet and I stumbled forward. I kept trying to breathe but the air was so warm and moist. It felt
wrong.
I could just imagine the invisible poisonous particles I was breathing in and how they would worm their way through my internal organs.

I tried to keep my eyes focused on the dirty concrete under my feet. I counted my footfalls, letting my stride fall into step with Adrien’s. I breathed in on every third step and out again on every sixth. Left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left.

“You’re doing great, Zoe. Almost there. Keep it up. I see the transport.”

I looked up and saw him pull open the door of a sleek white transport vehicle. I’d seen these on the Link News before, but of course never in real life. And usually they were entered in sealed tunnels or manned by people in biosuits. Adrien pushed me onto the hard gray seat and shut the door behind me. He ran around the front of the vehicle and got in the other seat beside me. I felt a little less tense about toxic exposure once we were inside the vehicle. It appeared well sealed. I hoped it had a good air-filtration system. Adrien tapped on a key panel beside the wheel; then he looked over at me.

“Ready?”

I managed a small nod, feeling anything but ready.

“Oh, your seat belt,” he said, reaching across me for something. I didn’t know what he was doing. His chest was close to me right as I breathed in and he smelled so … good. Not good-food-smell good, but good in a different way. I swallowed as tingles drifted down my body. He pulled the belt across me and clicked it in. Then he was settled back in his seat and we were in motion.

I watched in stunned fascination, trying to take in everything at once. I’d ridden the subway my whole life but it was nothing like this. The motion of this vehicle with its rapid acceleration and deceleration made me queasy—and that was without considering all the wild things I saw out the windows.

The Surface world was full of geometric shapes, square and rectangular buildings, some with triangle roofs reaching up into the sky. I averted my eyes from the sky. Looking at it made me feel nauseated from anxiety, so instead I focused on the straight streets and the buildings at eye level. Everything was concrete, gray as my underground world, except for the occasional shock of green—weeds coming up through the concrete, trees and overgrown brush on the sides of the road. Overall, though, it was clean. The paved street we drove on was smooth. The buildings looked well kept. Operational, just like Adrien had said.

Still, it was all eerily deserted. In my sublevel world, people were always crowded together—orderly, but crowded. The only place of solitude was in our tiny efficient housing units, and even there, I could only be truly alone in the few square feet of my personal quarters. I simply couldn’t fathom the space and emptiness of the Surface. The tall buildings looked like monstrous uneven teeth jutting up. It was a nightmarescape, cruel and uninviting.

Occasionally we passed other vehicles on the road, but the glass of each car was so darkly tinted I couldn’t see the people inside. Adrien’s knuckles whitened on the wheel every time one went by. I finally stopped looking out the windows and focused on him. I couldn’t tell how long we’d been driving in silence—twenty, maybe thirty minutes? His face was taut, almost blank. For a second, he looked like he was connected to the Link, but then I noticed him chewing his bottom lip.

He was tense. He’d seemed so confident ever since he’d burst into the official’s room, it was strange seeing him looking anxious.

Maybe I shouldn’t have come. Maybe he didn’t really know what he was doing. How much did I even know about him?

“Are you in acceptable condition?” I finally asked, my voice sounding overly loud in the small space of the car.

“What?” He looked over at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry, I’m just on edge. I don’t like being out in the open like this.”

“I don’t like it, either,” I said. “There’s so much space.” I dared a glance upward out the window, then pulled back quickly. “It’s too big.”

He laughed. “No, I love
that
kind of openness. I’ve felt so claustrophobic the past few weeks. I hate being underground and not being able to see the sun. It’s so godlam’d cold down there too. I don’t know how you guys do it.”

“But you said—”

“I just don’t like driving on roads I know are monitored. Makes me feel exposed. I think we made a clean escape and this vehicle looks regulation from the outside, it should pass their satellite cams without a problem. The Rez.” He looked at me and smiled. “Sorry, I should be explaining more as I go. Rez is short for Resistance. Anyway, we just usually avoid the cities, you know, so it feels kind of cracked to just be cruising down these streets out in the open.” He glanced over at me. “But it’s nothing to worry about. I’ve run ops in the city before.”

I stared at him openmouthed for a second, then shook my head. “You do realize that nothing you are saying makes any sense.”

He laughed again. His laugh was completely different from how the official’s had been. It sounded nice. In spite of all the feelings and new sensations swirling around right now, the sound of it made me feel warm inside.

“I’ve never met anyone like you.…” I paused, trying to find the word. “Someone else who’s…”

He reached over and squeezed my hand, his eyes still facing forward. “You aren’t the only one, Zoe. You’re not alone anymore.”

He removed his hand and put it back on the wheel, but his touch left behind a lingering warmth. I ran my finger over that part of my hand in wonder.

“Can you talk and navigate at the same time?” I asked. “Because I would like to hear some of those answers you promised earlier.”

“Soon,” he said. “We’re almost at the checkpoint. Besides…” He glanced over at me. “My mom can explain it all better than I can.”

“Your mother! You mean, she’s not…”

“Nope, not a Link drone.”

I was stunned. I hadn’t even imagined the possibility of parents who were free of the Link. I looked out the window, upset and confused about what I was feeling. This was an emotion I didn’t have a name for. My eyes stung and when I reached up under my glasses to rub them, my fingers came away wet. Everything was happening too fast. I couldn’t sort out one confusing thing before another came up.

“What about your father?” I asked. I knew there were more pressing questions, but I was still stunned by the thought of parents who weren’t Linked. After adulthood and the final V-chip installation, subjects never glitched. They only worked at their Community jobs all day and night until their bodies become unproductive and they were deactivated. Glitching parents were an impossibility.

“He died when I was small,” Adrien said. “It’s just been Mom and me for as long as I can remember. She’s kind of a hard-ass.”

He glanced over and must have seen my confusion at the term. “She’s really protective of me. My dad died doing work for the Rez, so she shuntin’ hated it when I started working for them a few years ago.” He gave a short laugh.

“Why do you do it, then?”

“We’ve been on the run our whole lives. I don’t know anything different.”

He looked over at me, his eyes intense. “I have to crackin’ believe the world can be different. That we could be safe and …
free.
”

I nodded slowly.
Free.
The concept was foreign, but … yes, it felt so right. It felt like the perfect word to encapsulate exactly what I’d been longing for.

Suddenly, he sat up straighter.

“What?” I asked.

“We’re at the city gate.”

I looked up and saw a huge gray concrete wall ahead of us. The road led straight into a tunnel through the wall, but as we slowed down to a stop, I saw armed Guards in front of the huge sliding steel gate.

Adrien laughed once, nervous. “Now we’ll see if Mom was able to contact the Rez in time. Otherwise, this is going to be one short godlam’d trip.”

“SORRY,” ADRIEN SAID
, looking over at me. My terror must have been clear on my face.

“I’m sure she got the message to her guys. They always come through, okay? Nothing to worry about. I’m going to open the window now so just keep your glasses on and stay still while I talk to them.”

I reached up a trembling hand to make sure my shades were still on straight. I closed my eyes but popped them open again when I heard a light
ping
,
ping
,
ping
on the windshield. Rain. My chest seized as I thought of the rainstorm that terrorized me when I was first glitching. What if Adrien was wrong about it not being toxic? There were too many things to be completely terrified about right now for me to even see straight. I didn’t realize I was gripping my seat so tightly that my knuckles were white until Adrien reached over to squeeze my hand.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s gonna be fine. Don’t worry. The Rez does stuff like this all the time.”

He let go of my hand and pushed a button that retracted the window.

A man in a gray uniform approached. The Guards weren’t full Regulators but I could see some bionic modifications, like the metal eyepiece that covered the upper left portion of his face as he scrutinized us. He was wearing thick outer gear and a helmet but not a biosuit or even a respirator.

I looked away as he leaned over. My heart jumped with every drop of rain. It suddenly seemed impossible we wouldn’t get caught and deactivated. In the rhythm of the drops I seemed to hear the word repeating in my head like a ticking gear “
deactivate
,
deactivate.
”

“What is your business?” the Guard asked, leaning into the window.

“Alpha Six Gamma Fifteen Approach and Release,” Adrien said, enunciating each word precisely.

The Guard suddenly stood up straight, his face completely blank. He made a motion with his arm and the gate opened smoothly. Adrien pushed the button to raise the window. We drove slowly through the gate, entering the tunnel.

“What did you do to him?” I whispered after we passed. “Why did he let us through?”

“Auditory trigger to a sleeper subroutine the Resistance implanted. I wasn’t sure if they’d get my message in time to hack today’s Guard, but it looks like they came through.”

“But won’t he realize something’s wrong? Or one of the other Guards when they see him?”

“Nope, it’s a stopgap memory installation. It’ll self-erase in two minutes and it’ll erase the video taken from his eyepiece recorder stored on his memory chip, too. All he’ll know is he doesn’t remember those two minutes very clearly.”

I shivered. It sounded a little too much like what the official had done to me. I glanced over at Adrien.

“But how could they, what did you call it,
hack
them? Did they use some kind of hardware?”

He was concentrating on the road as we entered the tunnel. “No, the Rez has a way to do wireless memory hacks. It’s one of our big one-ups lately. Central Systems thinks they’ve killed all outside wireless access to the Link network, but we’ve developed tech that can get around it, at least for Regulators and Guards.”

“Why only Regulators and Guards?”

The light from outside only penetrated about twenty feet into the tunnel and then it was darkness. Adrien switched on the vehicle’s lights.

“They already have subroutines installed in their architecture for memory erasure. Because of some of the terrible things they make Regulators do—it was affecting them emotionally.”

“Emotionally?”

“Yeah. The V-chip can only strip away so much humanity. Some things are just, you know,” he shook his head, “so shuntin’ horrifying, that the emotions are too intense for the V-chip to stamp them out entirely. It was triggering glitches, and trust me, you don’t want to see a glitching Regulator. So they have a remote memory-erasure feature to delete memories right after they happen. And that’s how we can get in with the hacks.”

I nodded in the darkness and didn’t ask any more questions. I didn’t want to think about what kinds of things Regulators did that would be horrific enough to cause the kind of glitching Adrien was talking about.

The tunnel we drove through was longer than I’d expected, not that I’d exactly been able to gauge the distance well as we approached. I was so nervous, every second felt like an eternity. After we’d gone about three hundred feet into the black tunnel, the only light coming from the car’s headlights, Adrien slowed to a stop.

“What are you doing?” I asked, glancing back nervously for Guards. “Is something wrong?”