Free Glitch by Curtis Hox

determined to let her husband speak. She, above all things, wanted to avoid a metaphysical argument right now. Picham would love that and would start in about how the world would be so much better if we were limited to simple analog tools like hammers and nails. She’d once heard him say, “If it thinks, and it ain’t grown, born, or hatched like furry critters have been for the last sixty millions years, I say it’s a problem.”
    “The bottom line is that we’re in a struggle for our survival,” Skippard said. “Your entity may help you sometimes, but it may also resist you.”
    Simone looked to Yancey. “Like what happened today?”
    “You explained about the Lords of Order and Reason and all that nonsense,” Skippard said.
    “Yes.”
    “Hey,” Simone said. “Don’t bad-mouth them.”
    “I thought you’d be over that by now,” Skippard said.
    “Dear,” Yancey said, “your father and Rigon think our entities are software programs that they can delete when they want. I think they’re intelligences, alien, yes, not supernatural like you do.” Yancey raised a silencing finger. “But I think we can use them as allies.” She exhaled a controlled breath, too tired for all this, but unwilling to show it. “Somehow entities get bound to us. I have no idea how, so don’t ask. It’s a struggle to maintain control of them. But you must maintain control. You have achieved the katas of summoning. You opened yourself to them and allowed them in. Your father and I mastered this and learned to do amazing things. But it’s dangerous.”
    She saw her daughter perk up to full attention. Simone had pried so many times they all had lost count. Learning new phrases and steps to the mysterious mantras and katas were always just a question away and something Yancey was tired of dodging.
    “Simone, the psy-katas you’ve learned ...”
    “Yes ... my katas ... what about them?”
    “They invite the entities to you. There’s another sequence that ... well, you have to see for yourself, dear.” She turned to Pic. “Do you want to watch this witchery, as you call it?”
    He looked up from his whittling. “Ah, hell no. I hate it when you guys mess with this stuff.” He stood on old man’s legs.
    “You should visit a clinic, Pic,” she said. “We have the money.”
    He waved it away. “When it gets bad enough I will.”
    Skippard smiled. “He’s a tough, old bastard for his age—”
    Picham rounded on him. “Don’t you dare.”
    Yancey smiled. At one hundred and twenty-two years old he was spry, dapper, and still attractive. He looked, maybe, a man of sixty. “Still, Pic, don’t let senescence get you. If you buy some treatment, you’ll have another twenty or thirty good years before more treatment. The ceiling keeps going up.”
    “And the cost.”
    He opened the slat door on loud hinges, went inside the cabin, and let the door slam with a definitive bang .
    Yancey eased herself out of the rocker. “So, dear, the entities always come to us, but sometimes it’s good to go to them. This is tricky ... just remember to come back. I know you’ll do the right thing, dear. When they offer you heaven, turn it down.”
    * * *
    Simone danced in the darkness in the clearing before Uncle Pic’s cabin. She moved just above the tips of grass wet with dew. She imagined they tickled her feet when she dipped too low and triggered tiny flickers. She mumbled her mantras and moved the way her mother had taught her, using the patterns to right her mind. Circles within circles within circles …
    She had been limited to the easier sequences, the complete psy-katas of full summoning always beyond her reach because they required her to abandon the lords of the lower katas. But she had accepted she didn’t need the lords, and that admission had allowed her entities to emerge in full, but they weren’t happy with her, not at all.
    Her mother stood within the soft illumination of the lanterns. “Repeat after me, dear, ...