Free The Glitch in Sleep by John Hulme

of eight to open that up, and mine’s only seven.”
    “Here, let me try.” Fixers have a clearance level of nine-plus (out of a possible eleven), and when Becker typed in his pass code, information began to scroll.
    According to her dossier, Jennifer Kaley was being picked on at school for basically no good reason. There were snapshots of her walking down the halls, being shunned by the other kids. Sitting by herself in the cafeteria. And one really painful clip of her being jeered and mocked when she was just trying to walk home after school, with her head down and her tiedyed backpack hanging from her side.
    “Well, did she get it?” asked Becker.
    “Get what?”
    “The Dream. Did she get it before the Glitch struck?”
    The Watchman surfed and surfed but found only a solitary beep.
    “Negative. And there’s no way to get it to her unless she falls asleep.”
    The same hundred pairs of eyes turned to Becker once again, and as he looked at the girl in the window, he finally started to understand what Fixer Blaque had been talking about. Right now, she was forcing a smile so her mom wouldn’t worry as much even while wondering how she was going to make it through the next day. Why Becker was drawn to her, he couldn’t really say—there were probably bigger Cases in The World that day—but for him, Jennifer Kaley was the Mission Inside the Mission. And that’s all he needed to know.
    “Let’s Fix.”

    9 . Toolmaster 3000s are bigger on the inside than on the out.
    10 . Every employee in The Seems gets two weeks of paid vacation, and The World is a perennial hot spot.
    11 . A gated community overlooking the Sunset Strip.
    12 . For full description of all differences (anatomical and otherwise) between Seemsians and Humans, please see: The Same, but Different, by Sitriol B. Flook (copyright XVCGIIYT, Seemsbury Press).
    14 . W.T.: World Time.
    15 . Staff members at the IFR.

4
    The Slumber Party
    Though miniscule in size, Glitches are a Fixer’s worst nightmare. They typically pop up in one device, and if left unchecked, can spread across an entire department, eventually resulting in wholesale collapse. Glitches were thought to have been eliminated during “Operation Clean Sweep.” It may be impossible to rid the system of what many believe to be the natural outgrowth of any complex machine.
    Degree of Difficulty: 10.0
    — The Compendium of Malfunction & Repair, p. 108
    Office of the Foreman, Department of Sleep, The Seems
    “No. No. Not that one.” The Sleep Foreman shuffled desperately through a dusty file cabinet in his office. “Ah—here we go!”
    On his drafting desk, the devoted employee unrolled the faded blueprints of the famed Department of Sleep. The factory itself was massive and composed of a series of “Bedrooms,” each responsible for producing one individual component of Sleep. Yet the layout seemed to defy any known law of physics.
    “The guy who designed this place was a freak. His whole concept was that the department should look and feel like a pillow fort.”
    If that was so, he’d certainly succeeded. There were hallways constructed entirely of blankets and pillows, doorways made of upturned mattresses, and soft, custom-made Night Lights, which cast a soporific atmosphere throughout. In addition, a handful of secret Bedrooms seemed to have no entrance or exit at all.
    “Show me the progression of the Glitch,” requested Becker.
    “The initial Blip was in one of the Rest Areas,” reported the Foreman. “But by the time we got there, it had already hit here . . . and here.”
    “Whoa, that’s fast,” Simly marveled.
    Unlike Foibles, which tend to pop up in a single machine, unraveling its inner workings but usually staying put, Glitches move from machine to machine, trashing everything in their wake. Becker knew the only way to stop one is to track it down and Fix it, before it does damage beyond repair.
    “The last alert was in the Snooze.” The Foreman pointed to the