I was hopeless at understanding and controlling all of these new emotions. I’d looked them up in the history text archive and was working slowly to build a catalog. Most of the history texts described how each dangerous emotion had led to the nuclear destruction of the Surface, the Old World. So far, some of the emotions hadn’t seemed as terrible as the texts described. Except maybe fear.
Fear was the first feeling I recognized, and eventually I could differentiate fear and not-fear, good feelings from bad ones. I also started dreaming. Almost every night I dreamt of that boy who kept glitching—his screams, the look on his face, the way his body crumpled to the ground; he haunted my nights. Sometimes in the dreams, he was screaming my name. He never came back to the Academy. He was deactivated. It wasn’t meant to be scary, or a punishment. Subjects weren’t supposed to be able to feel fear or guilt. It was just a fact. When something was too broken to fix, or too defective to contribute to the Community, deactivation was the only logical solution.
My six-month hardware checkup was coming up in two weeks and they would run diagnostics on all my hardware and check my memory chip. All of my training and practice was leading up to that moment, and I needed to be able to control myself and not glitch during a diagnostic exam. Part of me knew they would most likely discover my malfunctions anyway. It was only a matter of time before they scanned my memory chip and found the evidence of my glitching, the drawings, and the … other thing, the secret that was far too big, far too terrible, to hide.
“Greetings,” said the man behind the Bread Dispensary counter. I looked up, realizing I’d reached the front of the line.
“Greetings,” I said. “Bimonthly allotment.”
He nodded, pulling a box from the top of the stack behind him. He gestured at the small instrument at the side of the window. I lifted my hand and waved my wrist in front of it, hearing the small beep that meant I’d registered and the allotment would be subtracted from my family’s account in Central Records. I slid the three boxes over the counter and stacked them neatly in my cart.
I moved away, careful to keep my face blank. Later, when I glitched again, I would remember the paper they wrapped around the bread. It was perfect for drawing. Three boxes of bread meant twelve pages. It was too risky drawing on my digi-tablet—every mark I made would be stored in memory. But the paper could be hidden. Paper could be secret. Like the stack tucked away in my mattress.
I pulled my cart behind me and headed over to the next line, the Protein Dispensary. I gazed at the rich dark brown of the protein patties. Color. The first time I’d glitched was at the Academy when I noticed another student’s bright orange-red hair. I’d frozen in place as the shocking color first broke through the interminable gray, bobbing brightly through the crowd of gray heads marching down the corridor. It had only lasted for a moment, thirty seconds at most, but it stirred something in me. Something new.
Then the glitches started happening more often and lasting longer. I’d notice the deep green of a spinach leaf, the smooth browns and creams of people’s differing skin tones, hair, eyes … I inadvertently glanced backward in the direction I’d last seen the green-eyed boy, but he was gone. That was a completely new color to add to my short list.
Emotions were the next thing that came with the glitches, and they still made no sense to me. Like how, after an especially bad nightmare, I’d walk through the darkened housing unit and slide my brother’s door open gently and watch him sleep, his face relaxed, his arm slung over his head. Watching him made this stinging sensation come from behind my eyes and my chest would tighten until I could barely breathe. It wasn’t happiness and it wasn’t sadness. I still didn’t know what to call it. It made me feel like I needed to make sure he was safe.
But safe from what? The Community was the safest place that ever existed. The only danger in this world was me. The guilt of glitching was like a shadow, following me everywhere.
I stepped forward in line as the subject ahead of me moved. The barbaric Old World was once full of people like me. There was a whole race of humanity full of all the emotions and desires that I felt, people who almost destroyed the Earth with greed and anger and hate and indifference. They warred until the clouds rained toxic ash, the chemicals making people’s eyes boil in their sockets and their skin peel off like cooked potato skins. So much toxic material that we could never go back to the surface. Our history texts showed detailed pictures of the process, a detailed reminder of the horrors of the Old World.
Those who had foreseen had begun the tunneling down, the orderly planning of humanity’s future. Only a small percentage survived. We were a logical, orderly race—the descendants of survivors who had seen the worst of human emotion and destruction. We had learned the lessons of the past and finally scrubbed out the animal in man. We protected ourselves, blotted out the things that made us dangerous, and rebuilt. The First Chancellor called us Humanity Sublime. We lived by order and logic alone. We lived in Community.
And here I was, a traitor tucked secretly within the safe walls of the Community. A single person cultivating the same emotions that destroyed the Surface forever. I was like a ticking bomb, and it was just a matter of time before the evilness of human emotion took control. How much would I destroy before they caught and stopped me? I should go report myself.
Right now.
Right this instant.
I looked around. The Regulators were only ten paces away, rotating slowly and efficiently as they patrolled the crowds in their thick metal boots. Just a few words and I’d be free of all the secrets and lies.
It would be easy. It was the right thing to do. I’d be free from these weighty secrets. I could become a functioning member of the Community again.
My hands dropped from the cart handle. My legs took a few steps toward the closest Regulator, mechanically, almost as if they had been waiting for this moment to finally arrive.
But, wait. I couldn’t.
There was a reason I didn’t want to. A very important reason. I blinked several times until I remembered. There was the thing—the one thing they couldn’t find out about, or else they would destroy me, deactivate me.
But the Community always comes first.…
I was an anomaly, a danger to the Community. I needed to be repaired. I turned again toward the Regulators, waiting to catch their attention and report myself. There was a murmur of dissent in the back of my mind, but it was too quiet compared to the strong clear stream of information flowing through the Link.
A Regulator had reached the end of a dispensary line and was turning slowly back to head in my direction. In a few paces, his head would sweep in my direction. I would calmly catch his attention and report myself for diagnostics. Just a few paces more.
But suddenly the quiet voice inside my mind was screaming. And then, like being underwater and then breaking to the surface, I was suddenly glitching.
The retina display flickered and disappeared from view, and the sound echoing through my mind stopped, midstream, and I was left in silence. I could breathe again. I felt myself expand in the same moment, color and sound and sense flooding back in, overwhelming me with a rush of smells and sounds.
Beside me, I heard a loud crash.
I turned in surprise and saw that two full carts nearby had toppled over sideways, knocking into an aisle of stacked boxes. A stack tipped over, the boxes breaking open and spilling rice all over a nearby subject’s shoes. He looked down for a moment before moving out of the way dispassionately.
No one else registered surprise. They weren’t capable of it. But I was, and I felt every inch of surprise and dread and terror. Emotions flooded in. It was all too fast and I couldn’t tell if I was masking one emotion before the next rose up.
One thing was sure—I was malfunctioning way too much for such a public place. Someone was bound to notice and report me. I had to get out of here. Now. I didn’t care that I hadn’t gotten all of our allotments. I felt too frantic to stay crowded in this flood of
gray-suited bodies, watching them placidly kneel down to clean up the spill while I was choking inside. I tightened my grip on my cart to hide the tremor of fear in my hands.
The Regulator had made his way over to investigate the spill. He scanned the crowd, but most of the subjects had already moved away, stepping around the spilled rice and moving on to the next line. I cautiously followed suit, tugging my cart out of line and heading toward the subway. It was only then that I realized that I had glitched right as the carts were knocked over.
Electromagnetic carts malfunctioned all the time. Not all the time but surely they did sometimes. I mean, there was no reason to think the spill had anything to do with me.
The sleek black subway train arrived at the platform just as I pulled my cart close. I stepped on, glad for the distraction, and moved to an empty space along the far wall. The communication panel under the skin of my forearm lit up as I touched it, and I quickly messaged my parents that I wasn’t feeling well and hadn’t been able to pick up all the allotments. I knew it meant I would have to undergo a health screening when I got home, but I would explain that I’d simply forgotten to take my daily vitamins with me. I took my daily vitamins out of my pocket and tossed them discreetly into a waste dispenser.
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.
Chapter 2
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.