Read Online Glitch by Heather Anastasiu - Free Book Online Page B

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